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It’s Our Birthday…Make a Wish & Win!

March 5th, 2012 by Duolit

As we mentioned in our Blast from the Past post last week, we’ve now been blogging about self-publishing for two years! We’ve been through some ups (introducing the Indie Ninjas) and downs (blogging lapses *blush*) but the indie author community has stuck with us through it all and we are ridiculously grateful for your support.

So…it’s our birthday! How should we celebrate? Here’s what we have in mind:

  • A renewed focus on being ourselves. Like all bloggers, sometimes we struggle to find our voice and perspective and the writing can end up being kind of, well, dry. Both of us are making a new commitment to letting it all hang out and show you guys more of who we really are (we sure hope you’re ready)!
  • Taking more time to be there for you guys. Ever had a time when life gets a bit crazy and you tend to go on autopilot? Yeah, we’re guilty of that. From here on out, though, we’re committing to answering every single (non-spammy) email, comment, tweet or smoke signal sent our way. We seriously want to see you succeed, so if you have a question — don’t be shy!
  • More useful resources and tools. We’ve now made Self-Publishing Basic Training free for all newsletter subscribers and given Indie Ninjas exclusive FREE access to all of our eCourses, but you guys need (and deserve) more. The good news? We have a new tool/resource release slated for every single week in March and April.
  • Growing a community. None of us are in this writing gig alone, and we want to make that apparent with two posts a week focused on connecting our indie author friends and the self-publishing community as a whole. Discussion posts, link roundups, fun Q&As — we want to get you guys talking and networking. When we all work together, everyone achieves more (see what we did there? We made a T.E.A.M. acronym) — say it with us: awwwwww.

Win an Amazon Gift Card! 

That’s a good start and all, but we want to hear from you! What can we do this year to help make your book a success?

Super-easy 5-Question Survey

Fill out the super-simple 5-question survey below and you could win a $10 Amazon gift card! It’s simple: fill out the survey and leave your e-mail address to enter the contest. We’ll only use it to let you know if you’ve won! Don’t want to enter? Leave the e-mail address field blank — no hard feelings. Note: The survey will close after we reach 50 responses, so don’t delay if you want to enter!

Have a question or idea outside the confines of the survey? Let us know in the comments or shoot us an email!

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February’s Self-Publishing Writing Contest Winners!

February 27th, 2012 by Duolit

Back in January, we announced the first Self-Publishing Writing Contest, and the entries came flying in! We had seven in total, way more than the 4ish we were expecting. We just want to give a huge THANK YOU again to all the authors who participated:

The winners were:

  • First place: The Old Shell Game of Publishing by Allan Douglas, winning a $15 Amazon.com Gift Card, free access to yearly Indie Ninja perks (at least a $36 value) and one free eCourse of his choosing ($20 value).
  • Second place: Self-Publishing: Perils, Pitfalls, and Promise by Lisa Cohen, winning a $5 Amazon.com Gift Card, one month of free access to Indie Ninja perks and one free eCourse of her choosing ($20 value).
  • Third & fourth place: All other participants, winning one month of free access to Indie Ninja perks.

Congratulations to our winners (check your e-mail for prize deets)!

Note: TODAY is the deadline to submit your entry for March’s contest. We haven’t received any entries so far, and it would be a shame to shut the contest down after just a month! Regardless, we’ll need to receive FOUR entries by tomorrow morning (because that’s when we’ll check our email) to field a contest next month.  No contest for March — boo!

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Get Prompted in 2012!

January 23rd, 2012 by Shannon

So far it’s been an extra special month of big announcements and new features to make Duolit even more awesome in 2012 (I know, we didn’t think it was possible either!). We’ve got our first Reader Mailbag in the works (be sure to send in your questions!), a guest post contest (friendly reminder: the deadline to submit your post is this Friday, Jan. 27th!), plus a new thrice-weekly posting schedule, monthly giveaways for our awesome Indie Ninjas, and link-up posts for you to share your thoughts with other Duolit readers.

Well, prepare yourself, because as if all those things weren’t awesome enough, we’ve got one more new feature to announce this month…

photo by x1brett

Introducing: Duolit Indie Inspirations

Do you sometimes struggle to come up with topics for your blog? We know the feeling. You want to make weekly updates to your blog, but you can’t think of the perfect topic to write about. There are a few services out there that provide prompts, but we’ve decided it’s time to put together some Duolit inspirations to help all of us fill our blogs with quality content, insightful thoughts and helpful information.

We’ve got three steps to make this a reality.

Step One: Brainstorming

If we all put our heads together and throw out a few of our favorite blog topics in the comments of this post. We welcome ideas in all categories from silly things (what’s your favorite kind of sandwich?) to author-related things (what made you decide to become a writer?) to creative short story prompts (“she set the glass of lemonade on the table and made an announcement…”). Whatever you can conjure up, we want to hear it!

Step Two: Make a list

This Friday (January 27th) we will announce the four prompts we’ve selected for the month of February. If your prompt isn’t selected, no worries, we’re going to keep a collection of everyone’s suggestions. So if yours isn’t on this month’s list, it might be used next month! We will keep taking new prompt suggestions in a once-monthly blog and might even throw in a few of our own.

Step Three: Get to writing!

Throughout the month of February we hope you guys will use our prompts to write your own blogs. You can tackle all four prompts, or just choose one or two that appeal to you. Either way, we’ll have a link-up post for each topic so you guys can share your blogs. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Coming up next: 5 Easy Steps to Setting your Writing Goals

Join us back on the blog Wednesday for our monthly writing post outlining five easy steps to setting your 2012 writing goals (if you haven’t already!).

Later days,

- Shannon

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Help Your Fellow Indie Authors & Win an Amazon.com Gift Card!

January 11th, 2012 by Toni

In Monday’s jam-packed announcement post, we announced an exciting opportunity for all of our amazingly talented indie author friends: a Self-Publishing Writing Contest!

What is the Self-Publishing Writing Contest?

One of the great things about the self-publishing and indie author community as a whole is the range of backgrounds and experiences of the authors who make it up. The self-publishing writing contest is your chance to showcase your knowledge, experience or perspective on any topic of interest to indie authors — and win some cool prizes at the same time.

How does it work?

  1. Submit an original (written by you), unpublished (not previously published) 500-1000 word post on ANY self-publishing-related topic. This includes, but is not by any means limited to: writing, motivation, design, branding, publishing, marketing, promotion, social media, and personal stories/advice.
  2. Send us your post any time on or before January 27th. This is the drop-dead, cut-off date!
  3. We will choose at LEAST the four best posts (or, all that we receive up to that point) to run during the first two weeks of February. You’ll get full credit as well as promotion of your post through Twitter and Facebook.
  4. Voting will open the 3rd Monday of the month and remain open through the end of the month. Votes are limited to one vote per IP, so be sure to spread the word! (more…)
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Send in Your Self-Publishing Questions & What’s New in 2012

January 9th, 2012 by Toni

It’s a new year, and it’s the perfect time to jump start your writing career! What are you going to do this year to reach your publishing goals?

No matter where you are in the publishing process or what those goals are, we’ll be here to help you every step of the way.

I feel like the first post of the year has to be something special — so how about we unveil some of the new features, tools and resources planned this year?

The Reader Mailbag

At some point in the publishing process, we find ourselves stuck — it’s inevitable. Have a question in your head about writing, editing, design, publishing, marketing or any other indie author-y topic? We can guarantee you that, at some point, another author has had exactly the same question.

To help everyone out, we’re debuting a monthly feature called the Reader Mailbag. It’s simple: send in your self-publishing question and we’ll answer it on the blog on the first Monday of every month.

If you want us to use your name and link to your website, we certainly will, or if you’d rather remain anonymous we can accommodate that as well.

What are you waiting for? It only takes 30 seconds — send in your question now!

The Self-Publishing Writing Contest

You read that right: a contest! That means prizes galore, and we couldn’t be more excited. (more…)

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