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: BookBub display their best author profiles, Libbie Hawker gives an interview, and female readers keep fiction afloat (apparently).

Great BookBub Author Profile Examples

Here’s a nice and helpful one to start off with! The article is a couple of months old, but it was only posted into the SPF Facebook group a couple of days ago.

BookBub allows authors to create an author page, which readers can choose to follow (which can be handy for launches, pre-orders and promotions). Many writers hate penning their own bios, however. Lucky then, that the team over there have put together a collection of some of the best author bios to borrow from.

You can check them all out here.

Libbie Hawker Does an Interview

Not her first, I’m sure, but worth a read all the same.

Libbie Grant (her pen names are Libbie Hawker and Olivia Hawker), is fairly well-known within the indie author community (not least because of her great planning guide, Take Off Your Pants). If you want to read about her path as an author, including how she got her deal with Lake Union Publishing, this interview is worth a read.

Here’s a good quote from it: “There’s a myth among people who love books that great books are always published,” Grant said. “But that’s just not the case.”

You can read it here.

Women Are Keeping Fiction Afloat…

…apparently. This is according to a new article by the Guardian, in which they describe women as fiction’s life support system. And in fairness, if it’s true that they purchase 80% of books in the UK, US and Canadian markets, it’s not a wholly inaccurate description.

Of course, there’s plenty of other intriguing information in the article, including the behavioural habits of male readers vs female ones, and public perspective towards women readers.

Whether you agree with their observations is up to you, but you can read it 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.