The Alliance of Independent Authors AskALLi team strives to bring you the best in content that we can. We're always making improvements to what we do. This year will be no different, and we wanted to share with you what's coming on the blog in 2023.
A few weeks ago we surveyed our members about changes and improvements they'd like us to make. Thank you so much to all who replied. We received lots of great ideas for further development and our team had some exciting creative chats. Over the coming months, we'll be introducing changes across a number of departments, including the campaigns and watchdog desks. What we want to tell you about today is the changes we'll be making to the blog.
New Blog Structure
We've been running our “Ultimate Guide” series on a Monday for some time now. Going forward, we want to segment these posts to provide useful information for each of our member types, appropriate to their member level.
Each week, whatever our topic, we'll be breaking down the information based around the following structure:
- Associate Member= Beginning self-publisher preparing a first book for publication.
- Author Member= Emerging self-publisher, producing and marketing their first books
- Authorpreneur Member = Established self-publisher, growing a successful author-publishing business
For example, if we were to run a post on email marketing, we might have:
- A section on how to build a mailing list for beginners
- A section on how to grow your mailing list for emerging self-publishers
- A section on how to increase open rates, methods of segmenting, tagging and analysing sales and conversions for the experienced self-publisher.
Of course, all of this information is relevant to everyone, and you might want to learn more about a particular topic or less about a particular topic depending on where you are and your appetite for information. But our goal is to try and make our in-depth guides more accessible—and more relevant—to all our members.
Seven Processes of Publishing
In addition, we're going to be starting this structure with a series of posts on the seven processes of publishing. So look out for the first one soon.
Member Milestones
Our membership is wonderful and we want to continue to celebrate all your achievements. Howard Lovy hosts our fortnightly Inspirational Indie Authors podcast, and now we're adding to this by creating a monthly blog slot to showcase your successes and milestones.
Once a month we'll bring you a round up of as many of our member successes as we can, broken down into each level of membership.
- Are you an associate completing your first draft, hiring your first edit, putting together your first reader magnet or attracting the very first members of your street team who are not friends or relatives?
- Perhaps you're an author member and you've hit your first three, four or maybe even five-figure month? Maybe you've done your first co-write, your first crowdfunder, your first advertising or influencer campaign, commissioned your first audiobook or translation? Licensed your first rights or won your first award?
- As an authorpreneur member, maybe you've hit six figures a year, or maybe even seven. Licensed a significant subsidiary right? Had an outstanding crowdfunding campaign or other kind of campaign?
Whatever your success or achievement, at whatever level you're at, we want to hear about it. You can tell us about your success using this form. Please ensure you quote your member number when telling us about your accomplishments.
ALLi Out and About Member Posts
You may have seen Michael La Ronn's recent article on the Jeddah International Book Fair. We're looking for members to contribute to this on running series.
Now that book fairs are open again and in-person events are up and running, we're interested in hearing from members who attend the big publishing events of the year. While we're predominantly interested in the bigger (and in-person) events, we know there might be some online events worthy of reporting too.
So no matter where you are in the world, if you attend something and have a ton of takeaways you'd like to share, we'd love to hear from you.
For each article, we'll ask:
- You to tell us about the event, when it was, where it was, a little about the event itself (and photos would be great if you take them).
- What your biggest takeaways were from the event
- And what you're going to do differently now that it's over
If you're interested in telling us about an event you've been to recently, drop Sacha a line on [email protected] to discuss.
ALLi Updates
One of the things members said was that they wanted to know more about what was going on at ALLi, as we run our various campaigns. So we'll be taking you behind the scenes more.
We also have team updates and information about our annual self-publishing advice conference, SelfPubCon, and numerous other important works going on inside the team.
We want to make sure we're bringing you the most up to date information and also keeping you in the loop with how we're working on your behalf. In these posts, we'll bring you updates on:
- Campaigns — new campaigns, new updates, and progress reports
- Publication releases, including our member magazine, The Indie Author, the quarterly updates to our approved Partner Directory, and new guidebooks and resources.
ALLi campaigns include:
- Opening up to indie authors campaign is a campaign to encourage and aid the publishing and literary industries to include self-publishing authors in their programs, events, festivals, prizes, listings and reviews.
- Ethical Self-Publishing campaign a code of standards for indie authors and self-publishing services, showing their support for the principle of putting readers first and acting with transparency and courtesy.
- SelfPub3 campaign is a campaign to raise the average income for authors and poets through creative business practice. The campaign also lobbies the literary and creative industries to provide more publishing and business skills education and advocates for a truly independent self-publishing sector.
- Self-Publishing For All campaign a campaign to encourage diversity, accessibility and freedom of expression by bringing self-publishing skills to as many authors as possible around the world and removing physical, mental and financial barriers to the process.
Creative Planning Updates
In theses posts, Orna Ross, ALLi director will look at the psychology of successful publishing. Why? Because it’s one thing knowing how to publish a book, but getting a successful publishing business up on its feet and keeping it there is quite another. So Orna will be looking at topics including:
- Resistance and block
- Creative practices and principles
- Debunking bad self-publishing advice
- Examining the latest creative research as it applies to publishing
Let us know if there's anything we've overlooked!
The goal of the Self-Publishing For All campaign is to promote variety, accessibility, and freedom of expression by making self-publishing knowledge available to as many authors as possible worldwide and removing obstacles related to physical, psychological, and financial constraints.
I think Ethical Self-Publishing campaign is necessary. I like it