by Juliet Rich As you may know, this site is running on WordPress. I had installed a plugin that was new to me, All in One SEO, which is supposed to help your search engine ranking. It does a lot of stuff automatically, but also gives you fine-tuned control over things like keywords.
My site shows up in Google now if you search for “juliet rich” — not that a lot of people are doing that just yet! — however, it was showing for a description the first sentence of my most recent post. Well, that’s not terribly helpful! It talks about Amazon Prime, which is only tangentially relevant to the site as a whole.
So I just went into the All in One SEO settings and set a site description. It’s a variation on my ‘About’ text.
I hope that will show searchers something a little more succinct and relevant to them than the start-of-a-post ramblings that they’ll see now.
So those of you with sites, I have made the mistake and learned the lesson for you as well as myself.
by Juliet Rich I joined Amazon Prime through their student program. They did, and still do, offer a special student membership that’s free to start out. If you’re currently a student, I definitely recommend checking that out. My Prime membership is now a full Prime membership, and yet I’m still getting a discount because I’m a grad student.
Regular Amazon Prime membership does sound a bit pricey, and I know many people will waffle on “will I use it enough to justify it?” So here’s some things to keep in mind when you’re running up the tally of pros and cons in your head. (Note: When I say ‘free’ below, it means ‘no additional cost’, because you are paying for the membership.)
A hazard of Prime membership.
* Free 2-day shipping. In some places, it’s even faster than that. That means you can just drop one item in your cart, order it, then decide 10 minutes later that you wanted something else. New order! Amazon recently raised its free shipping threshold for non-Prime customers to $35. That means whenever you place an order, you’re scrambling for that extra book or two to push you up to $35. With Prime, you […]
by Juliet Rich WordPress can do really weird and obnoxious things with blank lines. It will add them when you don’t want them, and more often, strip them out when you do want them. No matter how many times and ways you tell it — blank line, blank line!! — as soon as you hit that ‘Preview’ button, they’re gone.
What theme you’re using and what plugins you have installed can also affect it. Switching from Visual to Text editor can screw it up. If you have a plugin that gives you more controls in TinyMCE (the visual editor), that may make things easier or harder!
Here’s what worked for me. It should work most of the time. So, try it out, and my fingers are crossed for you.
Just add the HTML code for a blank space to each line you want blank.
That will trick WordPress into giving you a non-blank line with a blank space. So it’s blank.
Never has nothingness been so frustrating!
by Juliet Rich Imagine if you will, the equivalent of a restaurant or a bookstore framing their first ever dollar they made. When I gave Amazon my bank account info and it triggered a payment to me (rather than waiting for the check threshold, which is 10x higher), it turned it into real money. Real money that’s mine. Did I mention? Money! This deposit is solely from my trivia book and still doesn’t cover what I paid for the, er, cover. (The cover was inexpensive, btw, and TOTALLY worth it.) The trivia book was my first book on Amazon and it’s very much a learning experience. I’m still using it to test things out. For example, the new Kindle Countdown Deals program.
I look forward to that Amazon kitteh giving me more money in the future. :D
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Amazon KDP Help – Getting Paid
by Juliet Rich I found it was easier to organize and visualize what I needed to do to publish an ebook if I made a checklist. It’s a good way of checking on my progress, and of ensuring that I don’t forget something.
One good thing about this checklist is that some of the steps don’t need to be done in order. I can work on them simultaneously with other steps, or I can jump around and tackle whichever one I’m in the mood for that day.
If you adopt this checklist for yourself, I encourage you to adapt it. Tweak it so it suits you.
dt {font-weight:bold;display: list-item; list-style-position: inside;padding: 0px; } dd {padding: 0px;line-height: 10px;}
- Come up with a good title
- My book What Should I Write About? can help you with that.
- Choose a pen name (optional)
- Amazon lets you use multiple pen names under one account.
- Commission a cover
- Or create a cover if you’re good at that.
- Write the book
- Yes, just that simple! ‘Write the book’ :)
- Format the book
- If you’re submitting to Smashwords and Kindle, you’ll have to do this twice.
- Pick categories
- Drill down as far as you can go. Choose […]
by Juliet Rich It’s pretty easy to leave a review on Amazon, but some people have never done it before. If you’re one of those people, here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it.
Before You Get Started
You will need an account with Amazon. It’s free to create one. You don’t need to tie it to a credit card.
I was surprised to see this question asked in the comments section of a blog. “I received this book as a gift, can I still review it on Amazon?” Absolutely you can. You don’t need to have bought the book on Amazon to leave a review of it there. Maybe you bought it elsewhere, maybe it was a gift, maybe you borrowed it from the library. It doesn’t matter. If you read it, you can certainly review it. And I encourage you to!
How to Leave a Review
Step 1
Find your way to the book you want to review. The fastest way is probably to type the title into the search bar.
If you scroll down the page to the customer reviews, you’ll see this:
Just click the button that says “Write a customer review”.
If instead, at the top […]
by Juliet Rich Are you having trouble getting your favicon to show up in WordPress using Atahualpa? Read on for my trials and tribulations! Or just use one of these two solutions:
Solution #1 – Just stick a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of your website, above the wp-content/ folder.
Solution #2 – Put your file called whateveryouwant.ico in wp-content/ata-images/ and then go to Appearance->Atahualpa Theme Options->Add a Favicon and tell it what name you want. (IGNORE what it says in there about where to put the file. It’s lying to you. Check out Atahualpa Theme Options->Image Locations to see why.)
Solution #1.5 and #2.5 – If you’ve done one of the above and it’s still not working, try clearing your cache, or restarting your browser. Be firm with it! Browsers are often quite reluctant to do it, even after you tell them to.
Keep reading for details on how I arrived at my solutions.
This site is currently running under the Atahualpa theme, Atahualpa 3.7.12 . I ran into trouble trying to get my own favicon to work. I had grabbed an .ico favicon from a website and colorized it to purple the way I wanted it. Turns out […]
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About I created this site to help others write, publish, and sell their ebooks. With a background in IT, library science, and writing, it all seems to fit perfectly in my wheelhouse. I share tips, tricks, pitfalls, failures, and successes. Come join me on the journey.
Buy My Books on Amazon
Kindle:$3.99 $2.99 USD
Print: $9.99 USD
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