Day: May 7, 2013

Trademark and Copyright Issues

Guest post
by Curtis Edmonds

The main character in my book, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, used to work at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. He has a smallish collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia. And, not to put too fine a point on it, he drinks a whale of a lot of Coca-Cola. The bubbly drink is mentioned by name multiple times in the manuscript.

Am I about to get sued?

I don’t think so, but it’s not impossible. It almost happened to author Patrick Wensink, who wrote a book called “Broken Piano for President.” The cover of that book was designed as a homage to the Jack Daniels whiskey label – enough so that lawyers at Brown-Forsman, the parent company of Jack Daniels, wrote him an extremely polite letter asking him to change the cover art. That particular situation worked out well for both parties—Jack Daniels got goodwill points for handling the situation in a gentlemanly way, and Wensink got a small-but-welcome bump in sales. But it could have turned out in a much more negative way. Continue reading “Trademark and Copyright Issues”

There is no recipe for a secret sauce. Maybe.

Have you ever been in the middle of telling a story, just about to reach the climax, and everybody turned away and you weren’t able to finish. That happened to me a couple of weeks ago, except I was conducting a workshop via Skype and the power, literally went out.

One of the very cool things that happens when you achieve a little bit of success from self-publishing is that people think you have something to say. They think you have the ingredients to the secret sauce. In fact, after I passed along some advice to a fellow author a few months back, that’s exactly what she told me. She said, “You just gave me the ingredients to the secret sauce.” It reminds me of the book/movie “Fight Club”. “The first rule of Fight Club is-there is no Fight Club. That’s incorrect of course, because there was a Fight Club. Well, the first rule of self-publishing is that there is no recipe for the secret sauce. Maybe. Continue reading “There is no recipe for a secret sauce. Maybe.”

Sneak Peek: Bad Book

Today we have a sneak peek from the bawdy spoof by authors K. S. Brooks, Stephen Hise, and JD Mader: Bad Book.

The name’s Case. Just Case, that’s all. He is a man among men and therefore no first name is needed.

Women want to smack him – men want to smack him, too, just harder. Join Case on his epic travels through multiple literary genres as he ruins horror, space-adventure, noir detective, spy-thriller, westerns, classics of literature, pop culture icons and more with his own unique panache.

Never before has a spoof conquered so much with so little.

Bad Book is available from Amazon, Amazon UK, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.

And now, an excerpt from Bad Book…

Continue reading “Sneak Peek: Bad Book”

Use Bitly to Track URL Traffic and More

You may have used bitly.com to shorten your URLs into cute little chunks, which let you craft Tweets that maximize the word limit. While this bookmarking site handles that function pretty spiffily, it can also help you track the effectiveness of your content and share links with others.

First, create a bitly profile if you haven’t already. It’s the usual deal: enter a user name and password, put in your e-mail address and verify it. I’ll wait while you do that, because I’m nice that way. Continue reading “Use Bitly to Track URL Traffic and More”