I enrolled my fiction, Ten Twisted Tales, a collection of short stories with a twist, a la Roald Dahl and O.Henry, on KDP Select three months ago just to test it out.  KDP Select, if you’re new to the term, means you tie your ebook to Amazon for three months; it’s an exclusive contract which prevents you from selling your digital books on any digital media. You can of course sell your physical copies.

I chose KDP Select after reading that there were many authors for whom it made a lot of sense and money and turned them into Kindle millionaires while making them irresistibly attractive to supermodels and blessed them with telepathy and other super powers. For the rest, it delivered as much as a dishonest politician does for his country. It did the latter for me.

I followed the guidelines to the ‘t’, scheduled free giveaways, spaced them out, advertised the promo online through facebook and Adwords but didn’t do much in terms of downloads. All together, the downloads were about hundred and fifty. I was a bit surprised at first as some author accounts waxed lyrical about how the entire population of the hemisphere where the sun was shining while they (the authors, not the population) were asleep had downloaded gazillion copies, and how their ebooks raced up the ranking to the number one spot faster than Usain Bolt. I wasn’t disappointed as it was an experiment. And as experiments go, it was useful in the sense it taught me never to try it again. Like playing golf in a thunderstorm.

I’m back to selling it from my website, and other etailers. I’m currently promoting Ten Twisted Tales through Goodreads advertising. Fair amount of views but no click throughs (also known as close but no CTR).  Apparently it works better for giveaways, perhaps I’ll try that.

After signing up for Udemy, a fantastic site that makes learning anything from computer programming to creating your own website, easy, I was intrigued by some of the courses on self-publishing. Barring a couple of really good ones,  I discovered that a lot of them focus on becoming an overnight success as a self-published author.

Now, if you've been in the business of writing, whether it's advertising or journalism, for a reasonable amount of time, you'll know that there are no short cuts to making money or becoming a best seller on any platform, no matter what an odd success story tells you. And an odd success story is just that, an aberration.

But a few of the courses on the site held nothing back in goading aspiring authors to just start writing, mainly 'how-to' ebooks. Subject no bar, apparently. 'Do research, if you don't know the subject, that's what the internet is for', said a confident person in a course. I'm sure hundreds of hopefuls are right now searching for 'brain surgery in 3 easy steps' as we type/read, so they can make tons of cash. Advice is dispensed with reckless abandon and I'm quite sure it's taken with sincerity and optimism as well.

Maybe they were targeting aspiring millionaires who wanted overnight success at any cost so they can retire in the secret millionaire's club after their first book. Someone even suggested just writing anything and getting it out there; even if there were typos, it was ok, the person declared.

Which goes completely against established, successful authors such as King and Bradbury, who, if you read their books on writing (not 'how-to books' I might add), stress in no uncertain terms the importance of mastery over the language and  attention to detail. But these seem to be minor details to be glossed over in the age of get rich while you sleep. That's another favourite phrase these guys use, 'you know, you can make money while you sleep?'. Logic being, someone, somewhere is buying your ebook as you lie in your bed dreaming of your favourite cocktail with your favourite Hollywood heroine. But that has been happening for a long time. I don't think successful authors stay up all night, every night, wondering who is buying their books. Even the vampire book guys don't do that I suspect.

Point is, like with anything in life, you have to learn the trade, apply yourself, follow good role models in whichever field you fancy, and give 100% to just doing the job. You can resort to advertising, social media messaging, creating awareness through blogs etc, but you can't just write any drivel and expect to become a success. Even if you did, as truth is stranger than fiction and how-to books with typos, people are not going to wait with bated breath for your next ebook.

'Keep writing' is the advice great writers leave aspiring authors with, but if you are aspiring for overnight success, good luck with that.  

There is a person, or God forbid, a group of persons, that goes around turning phrases in a template-driven, ‘look how clever I am’ type of way to impress the common man and woman who are easily wowed by such attempted cleverness. By phrase turns such as, ‘Meditation is not about finding a quiet mind, a quiet mind finds itself in meditation’, or ‘life is not about learning from hard knocks  but knocking hard on doors of opportunity’  or like the one my cousin forwarded to me today, ‘dream is effortless sleep, aim is sleepless effort’. Really twisted attempts at turning a phrase, playing with words to convey nothing but a bloated sense of vaingloriousness.

Compare this pathetic convoluted attempt to something simple and elegant like, ‘Happiness is what you are, stress is what you want to be’.

That’s’ the difference between cleverness and intelligence.  Any piece that draws attention itself usually smacks of cleverness. Intelligence guides you, stands aside and lets you absorb the essence of what it’s communicating without attracting attention to how the message is phrased whereas cleverness stands in its gaudy offensive garb on the sidewalk of mediocrity soliciting attention like a streetwalker for a few words of praise from the citizens of Easily Impressed country.

Intelligence communicates the meaning of the message. Cleverness focuses on itself.

Communication is not about how clever you are; it’s about how best to get the message across and how much or little the other person knows.

In other words: Intelligence is more about wordless meaning, where as cleverness is about meaningless words, to coin a phrase.

I did  a lot of research before I built this site a while ago, and did some more research last few weeks as my wife wanted a site built. I chose Weebly then and I chose it again last week. Before we get to why I opted for Weebly, a bit more about the alternatives:
These are more than a handful of website builders, they are: Weebly, Wix, Jimdo, SquareSpace and Edicy. I tried all of them and deliberated a week deciding between Jimdo and Weebly before finally settling for Weebly.

All of them work on drag and drop method of building your site, and give you a choice of templates to decide the look and feel of your web site. Here are my observations:

Squarespace. Personally, I found SquareSpace a bit clunky to work with. You can’t immediately see what you are working on (‘no live preview’) as you have to work on the page and refresh for it to show what you’ve done. And the templates were limiting, at the time of writing they had a dozen or so. Also, they were a bit pricier compared to the rest. It's at 8USD a month, see http://www.squarespace.com/pricing/

Jimdo. I quite liked it.It was a close competitor to Weebly in my reckoning. But I found it a bit clunnky for some reason and not as easy as Weebly although Jimdo is optmised for e-commerce.It's 8USD a month.

Wix. It’s quite funky, and interesting site but when I discovered that you can’t change your template once you settled one, I gave it a wide berth. It's around 4USD a month. See http://www.wix.com/upgrade/website

Edicy. I really liked the simplicity and user friendliness of Edicy. Elegant, uncluttered and simple. But pricier, and doesn’t fully support e-commerce and the storage is 5GB. It's also at 8USD a month or 6 euros. See http://www.edicy.com/pricing

Weebly. I liked Weebly and still like it although it’s only been over a month since I signed up with them. It’s simple, easy to use, user friendly, has good customer support, a live chat that works on weekdays but I find their email support pretty good. Read more about why I chose Weebly in the chapter.
I like Weebly as I mentioned earlier because I find it simple to use. It’s truly drag and drop, with unlimited storage space and you can add up to 10 sites (of course these additional sites will be subdomains, as in yoursite.weebly.com). Weebly provides its own stat tracking system. The support is quite prompt, I see that they have a live chat desk but I haven’t tried yet. There are enough resources to reach out to in case you have a question or an issue. They also have a Facebook page where you can post your questions and someone is bound to answer your query.  Weebly's started plan is at about 4USD and a bit less if you are an existing customer.

The downside: There are bound to be as there are no perfect site builders. There are a couple with Weebly too. One is Weebly doesn’t give you an email address. I was using my personal id till I discovered Namecheap's promo which gave me a free email id at my domain for about 3USD a year with the first year free! I checked with them recently, and the price is now 9.88 USD a year, still not too bad.

After trying Weebly for free for a while, I decided to upgrade to Pro version. I pay about US$99 annually and I’m quite happy with them so far. Weebly has come up with a Business plan which includes e-commerce facilities. Bit pricey but they are giving a version of it free to existing customers. I use Gumroad to sell my ebooks, you can find the article here http://www.guruswriting.com/1/post/2013/10/how-to-add-gumroad-to-your-weebly-site.html
I also use Paypal checkout.
Their service is good but could be better. They tend to respond quicker if you post on their facebook page as their email replies take longer. Apparently they are a small set up. Otherwise, I find them very good.

There is nothing drastically wrong with the others, it was a matter of personal choice and how it resonated with me. Luckily, as mentioned earlier, they all have a free trial period so you can check them out and draw your own conclusions.

Sign up for Weebly Pro.

Once you sign up with Weebly at www.weebly.com, you will taken to the page to choose a theme. After you choose a theme, you’ll have to fill out your domain name (if at this point you don’t have a name and just want to test out the site, you can enter any name you want to, and it will be a subdomain of weebly, for example, www.yoursitename.weebly.com).

Point your domain to Weebly.

Once this step is done, you will have to go to Namecheap (or whichever domain registrar you chose) and point your domain name to Weebly otherwise your domain name won’t be recognised. The process is simple and is explained clearly in the knowledge base section of Namecheap (I’m sure othes have this section too). You can also do a Google search if you want. If you really can’t do it, then you can check with the live chat support team and they will help you, just give them the necessary details, at least that’s what I was told.

Choose a theme and start building!

That’s it! You’re all set to build your website, all by yourself, with no geek’s help, no frantic calls to people you know about FTP, uploading, coding or javascripting or CSS. There’s something exciting, something triumphant about building your own website from the  ground up, from the first page.

Weebly works in blocks. Blocks of text, images with text, images, header, footer, block quotes … you name it, you can drag and drop to build your website.

The interface gives you basic options you can build on. You add pages using the Pages tab, organise them according to your structure, choose a template using Design tab, drag and drop the necessary elements using the Build tab, and use Settings tab to edit users, add codes from search engines, password protect a page etc.

Here are a few tips that might help you.

Always have a plan as to what you want to show on your site.

Have a clear idea as to what you what you want to achieve with your site (eg, promote my ebooks, sell my products or services, raise awareness about my products etc).

Keep the number of tabs to four or five as anything extra will go under the ‘more’ tab and will not be available on first glance. Ideally, it should be Home, About me, Products, Services, Contact. And you can have sub-pages to feature relevant stories under the respective tabs which are created with Add Page button.

IMPORTANT: Once you settle on a template and start building your pages, make sure to select the ‘Save to this page’ option, otherwise whatever change you make on one page will override any change you may have made or any look you may have chosen for the other pages. This could be very annoying and frustrating especially if you have built a whole site, and decide to make some change on one page and discover that it has changed the whole site. If, after you’ve designed the site you are not happy with the look, you can always change it to something else.
Useful links to help you decide which one is better for you:
http://www.websitetooltester.com/en/
http://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/