Welcome to the latest edition of The Digital Reader's periodic newsletter, where we share tech tips, news, and other info you can use to advance your author career.

The following tips are drawn from my #TechForAuthor micro-blog posts. This series was originally conceived as covering tech tips, but I have expanded it to include general advice/ You can find more in Instagram and Pinterest.

Do you want to stay one step ahead of the competition?

Make a practice of reading marketing, business, and technical articles written for other industries. The materiel might not always be useful, but this will often introduce you to novel ideas that haven't been discovered yet in book publishing.

Your Goodreads author profile should not be connected to your Amazon profile, or your social media accounts.

If the accounts are connected then not only will Amazon tell everyone on Goodreads what you read on the Kindle, they'll also mine your social media connections and delete reviews posted by anyone you "friended". (Okay, it's actually more complicated than that, but the general principle remains)

Here's how you can disconnect your Goodreads account from your Amazon account.

Non-fiction authors can boost their credibility by name-dropping publications where they've been cited as an expert or accepted as a guest writer.

For example, I have been mentioned or interviewed on at least five podcasts: The Creative Penn, Sell More Books Show, SF&F Marketing, Wordslinger, LeanPub's Backmatter. 

If you put off an important task more than three times, consider outsourcing to a virtual assistant.

The right VA can save you time by doing things like identifying beta readers or reviewers, finding guest bloggers, creating social media graphics, and researching blogs where you can contribute guest posts.

ISBNs are a contentious topic in indie publishing. There are a lot of authors who insist that there's no need to buy an ISBN because ebooks don't need them, and Createspace gave you one for free.

While it is true that in many cases that authors don't need an ISBN for their ebooks, buying an ISBN gives authors more control over their books and access to markets that require an ISBN (libraries, for example).

Thank you for reading the latest edition of my newsletter. Please do let me know if you found these tips useful, or if you have question, or if you need help with your site.