If you haven’t pencilled our IndieReCon updates in your diary yet, turn off those cat videos and focus instead on what promises to be the Spring event for budding, blossoming and fully blooming indies. Those dates again are 15 – 17th April, when ALLi presents the IndieReCon 2015 conference.
Why is this a must on your calendar? Here’s our own ALLi director, Orna Ross.
“The indie author movement is the most important development in publishing today and IndieReCon and ALLi are right at its heart, providing the support and information authors need to decide what’s best for them – and do it.”
The event is totally free, and you can register at indierecon.org And it’s wholly online so no worries about breaking the bank or what to wear. You can tune in to virtual sessions, panel discussions and seminars on all you need to know about getting your book out there, hosted by the people who know. Over 30 bestselling indie authors and experts attending include:
- Ali Cross – writer and co-founder of IndieReCon, and Novel Ninjutsu
- S.R. Johannes – author and co-founder of IndieReCon
- Barbara Freethy – bestselling author
- Mark Coker – founder of Smashwords
- Bella Andre – bestselling author
Best-selling Bella is just one of our experts at the IndieReCon 2015 eventMark Coker – founder of Smashwords
- David Farland – award-winning author
- Joel Friedlander – author, award-winning book designer, and blogger
And many, many more. Here is the full list of speakers
This is a good time too to give a shout out to IndieReCon 2015 sponsors, which this year include Ingram Spark, Bublish, Books Go Social, and Bibliocrunch.
And in case you missed it earlier too, IndieReCon culminates on Friday 17th April with our reader-centred Indie Author Fringe Fest from The London Book Fair’s Books and Screen Week. This event is also live-streamed with the opportunity to mingle with the great and good of the book world, meeting favourite authors and discussing great reads. What’s not to love?
Indie Authors Making a Hit at the British Book Awards
As indie authors continue to transform the publishing market, the British Book Awards have now agreed to add a self-publishing category for 2015. This is down to our ALLi partner-member Andy Bromley of Ingram Spark, and the Open Up To Indie Authors campaign. All of the judges, without exception, agreed that having a self-published category is important and key in reflecting the changing market. Quite right too, and good work Andy. Here’s the list from last year to get you thinking and there’s nothing to stop author publishers entering other categories too
Write-On Amazon, Write On!
The social network Wattpad, which offers self-publishing authors a platform to put up their content for free now has 40 million active users per month. That’s right. 40 million. While you catch your breath, the latest news is that Amazon has now come up with a direct competitor, Write On.
This new platform allows anyone to share anything they’re working on, at any stage, whether it’s full works, chapters, outlines, vague character sketches or even just single snippets, and then poll the community for feedback. The online giant also recently launched Kindle Scout where authors can submit completed manuscripts to be vetted by the user community and then be potentially chosen, based on crowd response, for digital publication on Kindle. All part of the revolution in publishing and on which ALLi keeps you updated from the frontline.
AFJ. Carolina, I didn’t invent the name “Faerie” – it’s a really old word, from the 15th Century, and appears in a huge old book called The Faerie Queen which was written about the time of Queen Elizabeth the First. I always prefer to use “real” names than made-up ones – they just sound better to me.