Day: January 22, 2013

Rebekah Lyn Announces New Title

Author Rebekah Lyn is pleased to announce the release of her new novel, Winter’s End.

Musician Michelle Burton just had the best night of her life. Her band Tangled Web opened for Wonderland in downtown Orlando and the crowd loved them. Too excited to sleep she makes a fateful decision to go to work early. The best night of her life turns into the worst day of her life.

Nearby, at boutique Hotel Lago, Stephen Longbottom, acting concierge manager, is anxiously awaiting the arrival of the board of directors for Silken Pleasures, a multimillion dollar company based in New York and specializing in high end cosmetics, fragrances and lingerie. Their incessant demands before they even arrive are driving him to distraction. Meanwhile Lizzie Reynolds, his boss is on a romantic ski trip in Vermont leaving him to manage his first solo event.

Winter’s End was released on November 27, 2012 and is currently available from Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Above the Foxhole

It’s good to poke your head up above the foxhole every once in a while and take a look at what else is going on in the world.

As always, the goings-on run the gamut from the wonderful to the weird.

First up, our own Martin Crosbie gets a nice hat tip in this article on Kindlegate over at Digital Journal.

Are you familiar with the term “back-formation?” According to Mark Nichol, of Daily Writing Tips,  “A back-formation is a new word produced by excising an affix, such as producing the verb secrete from the noun secretion.”

Mark says that while many back-formations eventually take their place in the lexicon, there are some newer ones that writers would be wise to avoid, at least in formal writing.

Book-to-movie is the new hotness. Well, maybe not that new. So, what’s coming down the pike? Publisher’s Weekly gives us a list of the 10 most anticipated book adaptations of 2013.

Are words more than characters used to convey meaning? Here’s a piece on the meaning of writing from the National Writing Project.

Last but not least, it looks like the jello is still squishing out from between the fingers of Amazon’s iron grip when it comes to policing reviews. The New York Times sees “swarm”  reviews used as a strategic weapon to attack books.

 

Indie News Beat: Indie Superstar Hugh Howey and Wool

If you haven’t heard of the novel Wool by Hugh Howey, then it’s likely you will at some point in the near future. It has been hailed as science fiction’s answer to 50 Shades, although only in the way that a self-publishing author has broken out, rather than any similarity in content. Wool began as a short story of just 60 pages, first published in July 2011. By the end of that year, Howey had added a further four parts to bring the story up to the generally-accepted idea of novel length. Momentum kept building throughout last year, to the point where today Howey enjoys all the trappings of a successful, A-list fiction author (Ridley Scott has the film rights, Random House are handling the print editions in most territories, and the book’s Amazon page now boasts over 3,300 reviews).

So how did he do it? Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Indie Superstar Hugh Howey and Wool”

Amazon.com Book Descriptions

Judge and Author K.S. BrooksMy oh my. I’ve been banging my head against the wall quite a lot lately. I’ve found so many book descriptions on Amazon.com that are not doing justice to the authors’ books. Twenty words or less? More about the motivation to write it than about the story? Nothing more than a few reviews? An entire paragraph telling me how awesome the author is at flossing his/her teeth? Listen, there’s a right place for everything. And the right place for the book description…is the book description. Potential customers want to know what the book is ABOUT, otherwise, how will they be able to tell if they want to read it? (If you need help writing your book’s description, try this tutorial here.)

For authors who self-published their book, they can go into Createspace or Kindle and easily change the book’s description. But, once the print and Kindle versions are merged, this may not reflect the description they’d prefer. Also, if you aren’t the publisher of your book, and your requested changes have not been made, there is an alternative for you: your Amazon Author Central Page. Continue reading “Amazon.com Book Descriptions”