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ALLi Self-Publishing Advice Center

Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi)

The Alliance of Independent Authors' free advice arm, organised by publishing stage: editorial, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion and rights. Includes a watchdog service that rates and warns about self-publishing service providers, plus a weekly podcast and downloadable guides.

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More resources on Self-Publishing & Book Marketing

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The Creative Penn

Weekly podcast and blog by author-entrepreneur Joanna Penn, with interviews on writing craft, self-publishing, book marketing, audiobooks, and running an independent author business. Listeners learn how indie authors publish, distribute and sell their books and build lasting income from their writing.

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The Creative Penn Podcast

Joanna Penn's weekly interview show, running since 2009 with more than 880 episodes, covering self-publishing mechanics, book marketing, audiobooks, direct sales, rights licensing and author business decisions, usually with working authors and industry practitioners as guests.

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Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert

A practical treatment of author email lists: choosing a reader magnet, setting up automated welcome sequences, writing newsletters people actually open, cleaning inactive subscribers, and using the list to drive launch-week sales rather than passive announcements. The mailing list is the one marketing asset an indie author owns outright, and no free source treats it at this depth.

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Strangers To Superfans: A Marketing Guide to The Reader Journey

A framework for book marketing built around five stages of a reader's journey from first exposure to advocacy, diagnosing where conversion breaks down: cover and blurb, sample pages, series hooks, back-matter and mailing list capture. Book marketing is the half of this topic most infested with course funnels; this is the rare treatment that reasons about reader psychology and conversion structure instead of a channel-of-the-month.

BookPaid

Let's Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should (Fourth Edition)

Gaughran's end-to-end guide to publishing independently: hiring editors and cover designers, formatting, pricing, retailer choice, metadata, keywords and categories. The ebook is free at every major retailer; the fourth edition reflects current store mechanics.

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Amazon KDP Help Center

Amazon's own documentation for Kindle Direct Publishing: manuscript and cover file specifications for ebook, paperback and hardcover, ISBN handling, pricing and royalty tiers, KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited terms, category and keyword rules, and content guidelines. Third-party KDP tutorials go stale within months and are the single largest category of slop in this topic. Reading the operator docs directly removes an entire class of bad information.

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