ALLi director Orna Ross runs small-group, private monthly workshops for authors and poets for her Publishing for Profit patrons on Patreon (£25 per month + tax for this and other planning tools and resources).
Read below for further details about this month's workshop or register on Patreon. You will receive your access details and downloads the day before the workshop.
Workshop: Sell More Books This Holiday Season
Yes, it's that time of year again. The season when festivals and commercial pressure combine to ensure that more than 80% of books sold each year sell in these last few months.
Whether you call it the holiday season, the Q4 shopathon, or the big book Christmas bonanza, it makes sense for you to make the most of it. That's what we'll be planning out in this month's live zoom workshop.
First, we'll tap the experience of the hive mind to mine some good ideas, then we'll look into the specifics of your marketing, your readers, your genre and your niche. Workbook exercises will empower you to plan three initiatives to sell more books this season.
And if the thought of all that commercial activity around Black Friday, Christmas, and January sales gets your resistance rearing up, we will explore that too.
You'll do the planning work, there and then, and will have plenty of chances to have your questions answered in this live interactive workshop. You'll leave with your holiday marketing plan complete and a checklist of exactly what you need to do to have your best bookselling season ever.
The workshop takes place at 5pm UK time on Friday 30th September. Check this world clock to find your time–but don’t worry if you can’t make it live. There will be a replay.Click the button below to register as a patron on Patreon. This allows you to join the workshop, and access the other monthly benefits. You can unsubscribe after a single workshop or whenever you want. Or you can take an annual membership for a discount, if that suits you better.
Sell More Books This Holiday Season: Planning for Profit Workshop
Share
Latest advice, news, ratings, tools and trends.
UK Government Seeks Responses to AI Consultation; ‘Brain Rot’ is Word of the Year: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway
Is it just me, or have there been more “words of the year” than usual this year? Maybe I’ve just noticed them more. If so, that could be a result of “brain rot,” which is the word of the year for the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the gradual degeneration of cognitive powers in the face of social media pablum—which, of course, you will never find here! I was absolutely delighted to see that the shortlist contained one of the words I’ve used most this year: “Romantasy,” whose popularity the OED specifically attributed to the BookTok community.
How Romantasy Is Shaping Reader Trends and Why Google’s AI Moves Matter: The Self-Publishing News Podcast with Dan Holloway
On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway explores Oxford’s Word of the Year shortlist, highlighting trends like "romantasy" and "lore," which reflect shifting reader and writer habits. He also covers Tumblr’s new community feature for creators, TikTok’s legal battle over its U.S. ban, and Harvard’s AI training dataset project, which raises questions about Google Books’ involvement and public domain use.
Harvard and Google Release AI Training Dataset with Public Domain Books, Raising Copyright Questions: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway
Any process that improves by being trained on a set of materials will only ever get as good as the materials it’s trained on will allow. That’s as true of machine learning algorithms as it is of human beings. This week’s news that Harvard will release a dataset of 1 million volumes for AI training highlights efforts to address inequities caused by the need for high-quality training data.