Try naming a TV show. “I put Everybody Loves Raymond on the original script. What I loved about it was that it was like I Love Lucy, and I was trying to do an old-fashioned show — a traditional sitcom to break out from everything hip and edgy at the time. Plus, it had that specificity: Once […]

The indie editing series continues (starts here but the collective posts are here). — It’s helpful to literally print out a copyediting checklist and check off boxes as you complete steps, but it’s not necessary.  Personally, I recommend going through everything in this blog post first, using a checklist, then going back and doing next week’s checklist

Richard Lee Byers writes in Astrojive: In the “Conan” movie, the Cimmerian is out to avenge the murder of his father and the slaughter of his clan. In the “John Carter” film, the hero is a Confederate veteran who lost his wife and child in the war (right, just like the dude in Hell on

Some people suffer pain. Other people mock it. What’s the secret to never getting a bad review? This is a question authors get asked a lot. Hell, I’ve asked other authors the same question. “I don’t know. I don’t read reviews,” some say with a benevolent smile. Others shrug their shoulders and say, “There is

I went to a bookstore opening for Back to the Books on Saturday and talked to author Bill Hubiak, who was there signing.  We brushed on the subject of ebooks: he’s selling some, and had color business cards giving the web addresses of place where people can buy the book.  I asked him whether he

Purchase Exotics Book 1: The Floating Menagerie (print) https://t.co/18YOhXJO or (ebook) http://t.co/VKDdYJhM # Allow me to beg…plllleeeeeeease sign up and help me test this newsletter (and free ebook, hey): http://t.co/VG7XGzDY # Powered by Twitter Tools

Suw Charman-Anderson writes: But anyone taking an objective view of self-publishing can see that it shows every sign of reaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations. And that can mean only one thing: Soon it will take that inevitable, unavoidable tumbling slide down into the Trough of Disillusionment. Just because new tools make the technical aspects

I’ve been all over the spectrum when it comes to deciding whether I like Amazon or not, but I’m at the point, now, where I feel like that if people don’t want Amazon to out-compete them, they have to provide me with something better. The reason I don’t go to WalMart is that I don’t

The other posts in this discussion are about buying an ereader before you start selling ebooks (especially if you’re going to give some out for free) and calculating how much you invested in your ebook.  If you want to know where I’m getting the figures for how much your book costs, look at the second. Last time:

A while ago, I had one of those days when I was looking for a good kids’ book to review and hadn’t found anything that wasn’t like, “Oh, those wacky kids! How wacky!  Kids are wacky!  Wacky’s the biggest word I can use around kids, you know!  Because they’re not smart enough to understand anything