Welcome to the SPF Weekly Write-Up, where each Wednesday we collect together the self-publishing news of the week so you don’t have to.

This week: the replay of Alex Newton’s SPFU webinar is online, and Donald Trump Jr. chooses to self-publish his next book.

Mastering Amazon Data to Sell More Books

In case you missed it: we recently had Alex Newton make a repeat appearance in the Self Publishing Formula University (not a real university) to update us all on how to use Amazon data to sell more books. How to identify trends and plan which subgenre to write in, and other useful information for the entrepreneurial author!

If you’re enrolled in SPFU (which you can access via Teachable with the rest of your SPF courses), you can watch the full replay now. And if you’ve yet to join SPFU, you can now do that – for FREE – here.

White House – Self Publishing

So, Donald Trump Jr. is self-publishing his next book. Why?

Forget about the politics for a moment (I know, it’s hard). His last book was published traditionally a mere nine months ago. It’s hardly as if the political climate would have made that book a bestseller and this new book a clunker. It seems to me as if DT Jr. knows something: with a platform as big as his own, he simply doesn’t need the traditional publishers anymore.

Complete autonomy to write whatever he likes without publisher oversight. Direct sales. Higher ebook and audiobook royalty rates. His fans will likely buy his book however he publishes it, so why settle for less?

Let’s hope the manuscript was better edited than the title on his cover jacket, though.

Read more here.

Tom Ashford

Tom Ashford is a professional copywriter, author of numerous dark fantasy and sci-fi novels, and the Head of Content at the Self Publishing Formula Blog. His books include the Blackwater trilogy and the Checking Out series.

He lives in London with his wife, in an apartment that doesn’t allow pets. Find out more about Tom here.