Sneak Peek: Spirit of Lost Angels

Spirit of Lost AngelsToday, we feature a sneak peek of Liza Perrat’s historical fiction novel, Spirit of Lost Angels.

Her mother executed for witchcraft, her father dead at the hand of a noble, Victoire Charpentier is forced to leave her rural village for domestic work in Paris. Suffering gruesome abuse under the ancien régime, Victoire joins the revolutionary force gripping France to overthrow the diabolical aristocracy.

Spirit of Lost Angels traces the journey of a bone angel talisman passed down through generations. The women of L’Auberge des Anges face tragedy and betrayal in a world where their gift can be their curse, in this story of courage, hope and love.

Spirit of Lost Angels is available from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and Smashwords.

Here is an excerpt from Spirit of Lost Angels: Continue reading “Sneak Peek: Spirit of Lost Angels”

Novel Ideas for Novel Contests

Judge and Author K.S. Brooks
Judge not, lest ye be rendered into incoherent babbling. And a really bad headache.

Novel Ideas for Novel Contests – or…what NOT to do when entering your manuscript in a novel-writing contest.

I’ve been a first-tier level judge for a prestigious novel-writing contest for about five years now. First-tier? Yeah, that means I’m important. Okay, maybe not. What it’s supposed to mean is that at least one someone else has already read through the entries and has sent me the very best of those. Now I get the final word. Or something like that. Sounds important, anyway. Continue reading “Novel Ideas for Novel Contests”

Flash Fiction Poll

The time has arrived for Indies Unlimited readers to begin voting in this week’s Flash Fiction Competition.

On behalf of the IU staff, we want to thank the entrants for doing such a great job with the writing prompt and the merciless constraints of the exercise.

You may review the entries here. Please spread the word and encourage your friends to vote by using the share buttons at the bottom of the post!

The poll will be open until 5:00 PM (Pacific Daylight Time) Thursday

Which author wrote the best entry for this week's flash fiction challenge?

  • Robert K. Blechman (43%, 19 Votes)
  • Wadeinpublishing (20%, 9 Votes)
  • Lynne Cantwell (16%, 7 Votes)
  • A C Flory (16%, 7 Votes)
  • RG Bud Phelps (2%, 1 Votes)
  • Amy Kaplan (2%, 1 Votes)
  • Robert H. Cherny (0%, 0 Votes)
  • Brian Beam (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 44

Loading ... Loading ...

Back to Branding

“What are you up to this week?” a pal enquired.

“Catching up on all the stuff I didn’t do last week,” I replied, compiling the list in my head. “Uploading clones of the website I’ve just had approved, putting up a blog post, editing a podcast and writing a load of advance pieces for Indies to send in before I leave.” I was preparing to take off on another book research jaunt and attempting to get ahead of myself.

Enough with the social media already.

“Cool, do they pay well?”

“We do this one for love,” is what I said. I should of course have said that we also do it for kudos, backlinks and kickass exposure but if I had, I wouldn’t have had the conversation that followed.

We spent a while ruminating on the point of free writing. I kept on using that word ‘branding’ and the eyebrow raisings began to look like the sort of facial exercises you see in ads for fabulous secret alternatives to cosmetic surgery. Now we’ve had a good few articles on the subject here at Indies and the consensus seems to be that, um, you should get your little self out there and make sure the interwebs know who you are and also that marketing is a time sink and everybody hates you for doing it anyway. They put it kinda better than that (here and here for example) but we mostly seem to conclude that the writing is your brand, if only you can get it out there. Continue reading “Back to Branding”