Going back through the archives of the blog, I found a wealth of information contained in interviews I’ve done over the last four years. Blogs are great, but who wants to trawl back through post after post, searching for content? Over the coming months I’m going to curate some of that content and bring you the highlights of the best and the brightest blogging from A Writer’s Journey to date. And we’re starting today with expert interviews …
Terry Tyler
I found two interviews with indie superstar Terry on the blog, the first from July 2012 about free promotions – and it’s amazing how much of this is still bang on and relevant today! Not so much has changed after all, which is surprising when we feel like we live in times where everything to do with publishing is changing constantly. There is tons of great advice in this interview about Twitter too, so do have a read.
The second interview is more recent, December 2014, and follows the publication of one of Terry’s many big hits, The House of York. This is a stonking good read, highly recommended, and as ever, Terry interviews really well, with lots of fascinating insights and down-to-earth advice.
Linda Gillard
Another regular, Linda has written a couple of guest posts for the blog, as well as allowing me to interview her, and she’s always so warm and enthusiastic, a real inspiration to other writers. In this interview, from May 2014, we talk about writing in different genres – whether it’s a good or a bad thing – and Linda offers up some great advice as usual.
Martina Munzittu
There are many indie authors publishing fiction, but fewer producing non-fiction titles to the high quality of my next interviewee, Martina Munzittu. With a wonderful idea for a specialised cookery book, Martina went to town and produced the most beautiful coffee-table style self-published book I’ve ever seen. You can read more about it in my interview with her from October 2014.
Kim Nash
In January 2014 I interviewed Kim Nash, who had just gone freelance as a personal assistant to help authors market their books. Here she talks about the best ways to reach readers, offering practical and specialist advice – for free!
Cover Designers Berni Stevens and Chris Howard
Last but not least in this compilation of interviews, I bring you two from January 2013 which were part of my ‘We’ve Got It Covered’ series. First of all we have Berni Stevens, cover designer to the stars and published author, giving you the benefit of her vast experience, and then the wonderful and talented Chris Howard, my very own cover designer, who is now so popular and prolific I’m worried he’s going to put his prices up! Chris and Berni offer go-to advice for anyone thinking about a cover for their self-published book. The rest of the We’ve Got It Covered series was a lot of fun too, and you can find all the posts on this by typing ‘We’ve Got It Covered’ in the search box above.
Coming next – a compilation of fascinating and eclectic guest posts!
Joanne Phillips 
July 1, 2016 at 12:20 pm
Jo! I totally cringed when I saw that you’d put my 2012 interview on – so I had to read it, fearing the worst, and it wasn’t as awful as I’d expected – phew!!! HA, those days of being in the Amazon top 100, and how the rankings mean so little – now, even if a book sells a couple every day it will only hover around the 15-20K mark, whereas back then if it sold 2 a day it’d be at around 2K. Of course, the only real way to do a free promo these days is BookBub, or other methods that mean paying for it, isn’t it? I don’t know, I don’t do them anymore. I certainly couldn’t be bothered to do everything I used to! Now I’ll go back and read the other ones…. (and THEN go back to the new book….).
Thanks for posting these again! xxx
July 2, 2016 at 1:58 pm
🙂 I thought the interview from 2012 was so interesting, because apart from the sheer volume of books available – which massively affects the rankings, as you said – not much has changed in terms of book promotion. It’s still a constant and rigorous effort to reach readers, and I think that those authors who do sell a few books a day are the ones who are doing really well! Yes, I think the only way to get a big impact with a free promotion is with a BookBub ad, in that the after-effect does tend to pay you back for your outlay, but the steady build is just as important. x