I recently ran into a web designer who said in a glib tone, “WordPress sucks.” I tried to share my history with Joomla (ouch!) with him, but he was all “there’s a Frankenstein of code inside WordPress.” Yeah, and countless companies doing good web commerce and connection using it. I’m pretty well versed with a […]
Writing a book is a wonderful achievement. Getting it discovered is wonderful, too. It's probably a bigger challenge. The problem is that the finishing line for these efforts is very different. In the first, the writing, you complete the book. No more work is possible. The success lies in the eye of the buyer. Very […]
This week a mystery author asked me about my plans for publishing my forthcoming memoir, Stealing Home. My book is the story of a father and a son on a road trip to the perfect game. I choose to self-publish because midsize and larger publishers have a limited appetite for memoirs from writers without a […]
If you're headed to the Texas Book Festival this weekend, congratulations. You'll be going to end of the book galaxy that's 180 degrees offset from the world of ebooks, Amazon and its ilk, and that remote on your table that delivers streaming versions of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Mockingjay. The BookFest is thick […]
This is why there are blogs for authors. Sometimes a careless comment from an entitled, successful vendor-author just shades good authors. Somebody's got to call BS. (See how I used the verb "shade" there to go all current on the language? It means to diss, rag on, or denigrate. But I'm all woke about English. […]
Everybody has a book in them, right? Way down on at the bottom of some of your hopes and dreams, maybe. You're doing something to make yours: writing, rewriting, working with a coach, meeting with other writers in a group. The work is bubbling up, maybe nearing the surface. When it's at the surface of […]
Prizes are important to sales of a book. The kudos make a book stand out and help convince readers to give it a shot. It seems like an easy observation, so why aren't more indie books submitted for meaningful prizes? Cost is always an issue, especially for the indie author. After doing your work getting […]
Readers tend to choose what they already know when reaching for the next book. That's what BookBub, one of the leading advertising hubs for books, said in a report from a recent newsletter. The ad site's studies of book buyers showed that readers most often got their next book because they liked the author. At […]
You've been edited and proofread. You have your interior layout and cover done. Your designer has a PDF file ready for a printer someplace (Print on Demand through Amazon, or Lightning Source, maybe) and you have a ebook-ready file in MOBI (Amazon) and EPUB (everybody else) formats. It feels like you're publishing. Not yet. Your […]
"Help!" a budding novelist asks, hoping to get some advice on a novel. "I'm in a contest and my entry has to be summed up in just one sentence." Summary is a mighty task. Your book of 70,000 words must be reduced to maybe 35. You can do it, but it's going to demand several […]