Day: December 17, 2013

Sneak Peek: The Unbelievable Story of How I Met Your Mother

Today we have a sneak peek from the comedy by Preston Randall: The Unbelievable Story of How I Met Your Mother.

Daniel Zurenski is about to encounter a crazy array of characters who are going to change his life forever. It starts with Fred Zimmerman who scrubs pots at The Spaghetti Barn restaurant and accidentally sets off a disastrous chain of events. There’s the volatile restaurant manager Paolo and his greasy head chef nephew Tony. Then there’s a fanatical sports reporter named Bruce Jagerski who dreams of winning a marathon if only he didn’t have such a bizarre running style. All come together during marathon race weekend in this hilarious tale which will keep you guessing right to the finish line.

This book is available from Amazon.com and Amazon UK.

Here is an excerpt from The Unbelievable Story of How I Met Your Mother…

Continue reading “Sneak Peek: The Unbelievable Story of How I Met Your Mother”

Reference Books for Inspiration

I first acknowledged I was a writer in my heart when I read a dozen writing reference books cover-to-cover as though they were novels. There was a thrill in discovering something both foreign and familiar — learning about the nuances of development that I itched to put into practice, at the same time recognizing techniques that I do instinctively, pleased to think there was a writer’s scaffold in my brain.

Sometimes I forget that excitement, and writing feels like a commitment that I’m in too deep. Everything new I write sputters and dies within pages, if it doesn’t put me to sleep first. After the usual period of thinking it was all a mistake and I should quit right now, I find myself flipping through a few trigger books on my shelves, reading the underlined passages that clicked the first time I read them. Eventually that little glow starts to flicker inside again. So, I thought I would share some of these books with you. Continue reading “Reference Books for Inspiration”

Kindle Countdown Confusion

Oh my. Talk about counter-intuitive. Kindle Countdown made my brain hurt.

The instructions could be laid out a LOT better for people embarking on it for the first time. Martin Crosbie touched on this in his recent post about mistakes.

If you’re just running a Countdown promotion and not doing any kind of advertising with it, then none of this might be a big deal to you. But, if you’re trying to make the most of your Countdown promo, then that’s an entirely different story. Think about it – if you pay for an ad which runs online – that’s international. If people click on your book and it’s not “on sale” in the country they’re in…well, you and I both know how annoying that kind of thing can be. So, if you want your book to be on sale everywhere, it can get a little tricky (again, as Martin mentioned in his article).

It was my (incorrect) understanding that you had a choice between running a U.S. Countdown promotion or a UK promotion. Wrong. You can run both at the same time, but you have to know HOW. Continue reading “Kindle Countdown Confusion”

My Year of Reading Indie

At the end of 2012, I mentally perused the books I’d read in the previous twelve months and realized that except for revisiting Anna Karenina and enjoying The Maltese Falcon as part of my community’s Big Reads program, not a single traditionally published title sat among them. That was quite a revelation for this bookworm who once got herself kicked out of a library at closing time and feels a magnetic attraction toward bookstores. Continue reading “My Year of Reading Indie”