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Ksenia Anske

October 2, 2015

How do you find out about new writing?

by Ksenia Anske


Illustration by Daniel Stolle

Illustration by Daniel Stolle

Illustration by Daniel Stolle

Illustration by Daniel Stolle

For the longest time I had trouble finding out what was happening in the literary world. It seemed everyone knew about some new book or some new author or some new prize winner before me. Not that it bothered me much—I have such a long lists of classics to chew through that I didn't really care. But I'm now going through that list at a fair lick, reading about 100-110 books a year, and it's gotten to the point where: 

  1. I got tired of the oldish-sounding English and wanted to read something contemporary and not having to wade through the weirdly composed sentences and the archaic turns of phrases and having to put up with occasional misogyny and some puritanism here and there and constant references to religion or God.
  2. I got sick of reading mostly white males as literature seems to stand on the bones of white males and I've had about enough of that—I still love you, white males, my partner Royce including, but I wanted more women voices and black voices and gay voices and all kinds of voices.
  3. I have found authors whose voices I loved and I wanted to read more of their recent writing.
  4. I felt a new hunger, a hunger for more than just novels. I wanted to expand, to read poetry and essays and non-fiction.
  5. I was plain jealous of hearing all these news about new books from other people and I wanted to be at the source of the news too, to be the first to find out about this new book or that new book and to form my own opinion about it before reading someone else's opinion about it.
  6. I was feeling increasingly sad because I still haven't found a good source for news on great new indie books and I'm still upset that I don't know where and how to find them. 
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TAGS: reading, indie, indie writers, indie books, self-publishing, discoverability


July 28, 2015

Let's continue our conversation about book pricing

by Ksenia Anske


Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

I have written quite a few posts recently on pricing your indie books, all of which are stepping stones on the path of me learning it while watching the turbulent changes in the publishing industry and going through bankruptcy and running out of my ghostwriting money and being a novice to indie publishing. The only experience I can rely on is running my startup for 5 years, and the basics that I learned from reading books and articles on how to stay profitable and how to acquire customers and how to do basic accounting and more of the same.

Ryan, this post is for you because in the comment on my last pricing post you asked me to expand on this. I'll dump here what I remember as some basic principles (and which I still use as guidelines) and you tell me if it was helpful, okay?

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TAGS: pricing, indie books, money, math, question, answer


June 28, 2015

Pricing your self-published books

by Ksenia Anske


Are you ready of a long tearful saga about pricing your self-published books? You better be. Go get your popcorn, I'll wait. 

All done? Good. Let's proceed. 

This will be the opening of a can of worms, talking about pricing. Not very appetizing but necessary to suffer through. I wrote a little bit about this here, and now I'll expand on it more as there are so many little variants that even if you want to set the price for your book at a specific number, say, $4.99, you might not be able to. This stuff is something we don't think about when going into a bookstore and picking up a book from a shelf, but publishers have been breaking their heads over for years, and we self-published authors are braving for the first time on our own and suffering through the torment that comes with it. 

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TAGS: self-publishing, pricing, indie books, comparison


July 2, 2014

Let's find and read great indie books

by Ksenia Anske


Photo by Noukka Signe

Photo by Noukka Signe

Photo by Noukka Signe

Photo by Noukka Signe

I’m going to start something crazy. I want to discover great indie books. I've been wanting to do this for a long long time now, and I've been frustrated at the lack of a mechanism to find them. So. The lesson I learned in life is, if I'm frustrated about something, if there is something missing in the world, instead of bitching about it on every corner, I need to roll up the sleeves and do it myself. Because somebody has to. Another lesson I learned is, people don't like starting things. They like shouting and being upset, but starting things is messy and uncomfortable and takes a lot of work and to hell with it, for sure somebody out there has already started it and I'm busy with my own life anyway and yada yada yada. Yeah, we heard all that. Also, perhaps I am completely blind. Perhaps right now you think me ignorant because I don't know about some wonderful place that talks about great indie books. In fact, I know of one. I'm guilty of struggling to find time to go read through all of it. I'm talking about KBoards. There are tons of indie authors there and if you're an indie and not on it yet, GET ON IT. They have various forum posts with writers suggesting great books to other writers. I will get to it. I WILL. It's just while I'm in the middle of writing, I hardly have the brain capacity to do anything else outside my writing.

Anyway.

Back to the topic.

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TAGS: indie authors, indie books, indie writers, indie, reading, great books, great authors