This week, I was lucky enough to sit down with Horror Expert and Poet Eric Myford. Eric has released two Encyclopedias of Horror and Suspense Films and five poetry collections. He’s a super impressive do-it-yourself dude.

Willy of E-Junkie: Eric, since you encyclopedia is for the horror/suspense film genre, what was your first horror/suspense film and what is your favorite?

Eric Myford: First horror movie I remember seeing was when I was about 3 and it was Q - The Winged Serpent. As for my favorite, always a tough call, but I would have to say "A Serbian Film". It is an amazing movie but it stands out because it's really the only movie out of 3000+ that actually had an effect on me. I thought about it for days afterward and some images are permanently burned into my mind. 

A good book should have effective content. Effective content should be: to the point but highly informative. How to make your content best? Below are the tips that help to create your content outstanding:

1. Do a good research

Once you choose to write on a particular subject, do a good research to gather as much information as possible. Try and get new information to the maximum extent possible. Copy all those information gathered into a Word file. Add up any other related information from self-experience, which is highly valid.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, 'How do we make people pay for music?' What if we started asking, 'How do we let people pay for music?' -- Amanda Palmer

Last year, musician, entrepreneur, and thought leader Amanda Palmer gave a groundbreaking TED Talk called The Art of Asking. In this talk, she urged artists and entrepreneurs of all creeds to change the way they approached their interactions. Instead of demanding, ask. Instead of fighting with gatekeepers, create. Instead of worrying, give.

We live in a world where anyone can learn how to publish music, how to put their artwork online, or how to print and distribute their novels and essays. However, there's still a huge stigma levied towards the "self-published," the people who have not been chosen and approved by a select few gatekeepers. There's also still the ultimate question that has faced artists since the dawn of humankind: how do we earn money from our art? How do we give of ourselves and earn enough to support ourselves as well?

I've been writing and self-publishing eBooks online since 2002. I uploaded my first one to Amazon in 2008. Since then, I've gone on to publish over 50 more on the site. Following are three pieces of advice for writers who want to enter the self-publishing waters in 2014 – the Amazon waters that is.

1. Write – a Lot! It's rare that you'll be an Amanda Hocking or John Locke and make a million or more dollars with just a few eBooks. Nine times out of 10, you're going to have to write and publish a lot of eBooks.

If you've ever wanted to build a thriving freelance career, now has never been a better time, particularly if you're a writer, editor, proofreader, etc. Why? Because the self-publishing industry has spawned a bucketload of freelance editorial job opportunities – with no slowdown in sight.

The Growth of Self-Publishing: Some Statistics

First, let's take a quick look at the growth of self-publishing, then some specific freelance job opportunities.

The Comic-Con International 2013 just got wrapped up this week at San Diego's Convention Center.

The country's longest running convention so far and currently in its 44th year, San Diego is a non-profit outfit that aims to create awareness and comic art appreciation by popularizing it among the global citizens. By hosting presentations, award shows and events of interactive nature, they are positively recognizing the contribution of comics as a medium to promote art and culture.

This year the Convention was a typical sell out with more than 125,000 comic book fans and professionals attending the events. The interesting theme around this year was the categorical recognisition of the changes in the publishing industry. While hand drawn comic strip books are still the rage, the industry is fast moving towards digitization as a move against piracy.

While a host of new startups joined the race to showcase their digital makeover, a handful of tech-driven enterprises stood out. In fact, a established industry veteran like Amazon too launched its own digital comic strip - Jet City Comics, that went into print earlier in the month.

The saying "Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one" can now be amended to "Freedom of distribution is limited to those with a working Internet connection". A big-name publisher is no longer a required middleman or the difference between failure and success as a writer.

Trying a Cutting-Edge Approach

A recent New York Times article discusses playwright David Mamet's plans to self-publish his next three pieces through services his publisher offers. Publishing houses have been quick to capitalize on the trend by offering self-publishing services, partially funneling the revenue from those opting to self-publish back into their own coffers, recouping what they would otherwise have lost.

I recently realized that I've been in the self-publishing game for over a decade. I wrote my first eBook sometime in 2002 (I've been erroneously saying 2004 for years). The reason this is important is, the longer you do something, hopefully you get better at predicting what makes you successful at it.

It wasn't until 2010 that I started to make some real money selling eBooks online. That year, I earned over half my annual income from eBooks I wrote and self-published. I still own/operate an SEO writing company, but if I never picked up another client, I could make a full-time living writing and self-publishing my own eBooks.

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Crafting your magnum opus? Weaving threads of fantasy and reality together to create a new world that'll transport readers into a realm of delight? Constructing a thoroughly accurate historical masterpiece that captures the past perfectly? Putting together a highly technical detective fiction plot with no room for plebeian errors?

Then at some point in your writing schedule, you'd best make time for accessing and navigating public records. You're supposed to write what you know, and nothing will supplement a lack of first-hand experience like research. Lots of research. So here's a breakdown of the kind of information you can look up online:

I’ve been writing and selling eBooks online since 2004. To date, I’ve written well over 50. One of the things I started doing in 2009/2012 (once I had around a dozen or so titles under my belt) was bundling them, which increased my sales. FYI, this is one advantage of producing a lot of titles – you exponentially expand the options in your eBook marketing arsenal.

What Is eBook Bundling?

In case you don’t know, bundling is selling two or more titles for “one low price.” Following are four tips for successfully bundling your eBooks – and selling more.

Self-publishing could also change the way teachers and students use textbooks. As e-readers and tablets become more commonplace in classrooms and on college campuses, the possibility for creating interactive, up-to-date textbooks is both exciting and daunting. Professors and instructors could create their own teaching materials and tailor texts for each new group of students they teach, and adapt their texts for varying abilities and learning styles. But the pros and cons of self-published texts could make it difficult to adopt on a large scale.

How self-publishing could change education…