A Dinosaur in a Young Adult’s World

Guest post
by Parker Moose

On June 8th, I released my debut novel. The world replied with crickets. The next day I sent a message to all of my contacts on Twitter and Facebook asking them to buy my book. That got me about a 10 percent response rate and a brief bump in Amazon’s rankings. But then I ran out of people who thought they might have known me in high school, and it was back to anonymity.

Lured by the siren song and royalties of KDP Select, I chose to be exclusive with Amazon and tried my first free promotion. The results of that were inconclusive, except for another brief bump in the standings and the unexpected finding that Germans really love free books. But then, sales tapered off again. It was time to get serious. Continue reading “A Dinosaur in a Young Adult’s World”

Write short stories? But I’m a Novelist!

Get your short stories published, win a couple of contests, then reference them all in a query letter to convince an agent to convince a publisher to take a chance on your novel – that is the path to a traditional book deal, said all of the articles I read.

But don’t they require different skill sets, I wondered: generating an experience in a few hundred words vs. building a world over several hundred pages? What if you’re good at one and not at the other? What if you have limited time to write? Don’t you need to choose?

Fast forward six or seven years to today’s bigger and braver world of indie publishing, and the idea of selling a novel with a portfolio of short stories can seem like an archaic and unnecessary paradigm—and worse, a waste at the expense of the World’s Greatest Novel. But writing short stories can be a good use of time for novelist, budding or otherwise. Below are ten reasons why: Continue reading “Write short stories? But I’m a Novelist!”

The One Constant

The universe is a strange, wondrous, and often cruel place. The tactics it uses to keep people on their paths are not necessarily obvious or kind.

There is always something to be lost, whether it be tangible or not. Friendships may end. Finances may become depleted. People we trust may hurt us. People we don’t know may be rude to us. People we admire may never so much as acknowledge our existence. Tragedy may befall us. Life moves on. Continue reading “The One Constant”

Blogging for Dollars: How to Sell Your Blog on Amazon

You sell your ebooks on Amazon, perhaps, but did you know you could sell subscriptions to your blog there, as well?

That’s one way Barry Parham, award-winning author of humor columns, short stories, and essays, is getting more eyeballs on his work. He started syndicating his weekly humor column, My Weekly Mooncalf, partly through his own blog subscriptions and partly via Kindle downloads from Amazon. “It wasn’t hard to do,” Parham said, “but I did need a quick primer on RSS, and in my case, WordPress.” Continue reading “Blogging for Dollars: How to Sell Your Blog on Amazon”