Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies

Welcome to the Carnival of the Indies!

Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies is for the enjoyment of a new generation of bloggers and readers who are looking for information on the rapidly-growing field of self-publishing and the indie publishing life.

What Is a Blog Carnival?

But wait. What is this thing called a blog carnival? Blog carnivals started soon after blogging became popular. A blogger would call for other bloggers to send in their best blog posts in their niche and publish them on a regular basis.

There are some great blog carnivals today, and some in the writing and publishing field. But there has been no carnival specifically for people interested in self-publishing. Until now.

What Will Be in the Blog Carnival?

The carnival will be a regular monthly blog post here at TheBookDesigner. It will feature links to blog posts in the following subject areas:

Indie Author
Writing Tools & Tips
Book Design & Production
Marketing & Selling Your Books
EBooks and EBook Readers
Self-Publishing Success

It Sounds Great! How Do You Get Into the Carnival of the Indies?

It’s easy! Just use this link to go to our submission form.

Fill out the simple form to submit your blog post. It takes about a minute. Pick the category from the drop down list and, if you like, add a note to readers in the “Remarks” box.

That’s it. Once we have all submissions for the month we’ll go through them and pick two or three to star as Featured Blog Post of the Month.

I plan to include any articles with real value that don’t duplicate other blog posts the same month. In addition, keep in mind:

Your post should be relevant to self-publishers. For instance, posts on manuscript preparation could be useful, but posts on how to pursue a literary agent would not be on topic.
It should be original, and published within the last 90 days.
Please no landing pages, squeeze pages, sneeze pages, or other commercial sales pages. We want to focus on the best and most useful articles we can find.

Okay, But What’s In It For Me?

Blog Carnivals are great for readers and for bloggers:

Readers get hand-selected content guaranteed to be the best of the month from the best bloggers in the field.
Bloggers get to put their best work in front of a larger universe of readers, get a link back to their site, and get to display the awesome “Carnival of the Indies” participant badges on their blog.

So Is There a Deadline?

Submissions for The Carnival of the Indies are accepted until the 15th of each month for that month’s edition. The Carnival of the Indies is published on the last Sunday of the month. Your blog post should have been published within the last 90 days before submission.

Our inaugural issue is scheduled for October 31, 2010. Don’t miss it.

How Can I Stay Informed?

Easy! Bookmark this page to have easy access to the links here. We’ll also be posting links to each Carnival of the Indies as they are published.

Then follow us on Twitter to get updates and deadline reminders (we only use this account for notifications, so we won’t jam up your tweet stream, I promise!)

You can also get friendly email reminders so you never miss our submission deadline. Sign up here so you can join in the fun!

And to guarantee that you don’t miss an issue, make sure you’re subscribed to TheBookDesigner. See the links below.