Day: February 24, 2014

Writers Are Ugly Actors

sophie jonas-hillGuest Post
by Sophie Jonas-Hill

If writers were better looking, they would be actors. Our skill set is very similar, they have to pretend to be a whole heap of different people, and so do we. In a way, we’re even more versatile because we don’t have the dead eye of the camera judging us and prescribing what we can be. We get to be anyone and everyone regardless of gender or ability or skin colour. Or we should be able to, anyway.

What ever character you’re working on, if they’re not coming to life then I’d heartily recommend taking a long look at the acting profession and try ‘being’ your character for a while, rather than writing them. Continue reading “Writers Are Ugly Actors”

Link Building: The Basics for Your Blog or Website

Link Building Basics Link building is a method used to increase visibility and improve your search rankings. Without getting into a lot of mumble jumble, search engines examine the links to and from your site to assign it a certain ranking. Links aren’t everything in search engine optimization (SEO); however, it accounts for a large percentage of weighting in search results as shown in this survey by MOZ.

If you are interested in growing traffic to you blog or site, growing the link profile will gain attention, traction and traffic from search engines. In addition, the strength of the link plays a big role as well. Spam hits in your blog “comments” do not help in establishing links that matter (which is why you have a “nofollow” option in your settings.) Links acquired from your target community, such as indie writing or publishing, matter more than off topic links.

How do we go about link building? Here are the top ten basic methods to build links and improve your site’s visibility. Continue reading “Link Building: The Basics for Your Blog or Website”

Featured Book: Shadows of Doubt

Shadows of DoubtShadows of Doubt
by Mell Corcoran
Mystery, Crime, Thriller with a touch of Romance and a Paranormal twist
Available from Amazon.

Have you ever been in far too deep to turn away? Detective Lou Donovan is convinced there’s a serial killer on the loose but she has no evidence to prove it. Every step she takes to try and solve the case brings her closer to uncovering a dark secret that will alter her world forever.

Book excerpt:

She proceeded cautiously through the burned out hull of some sort of outbuilding, possibly an old barn or corral once upon a time. Any trace of daylight was long gone, making anything five feet in front of her lost in the pitch black of the moonless night. Not a sound stirring, not even a shuffle from Vinny in the distance as she carefully climbed over a pile of wood that appeared to have once been a barn door. She could smell stale hay and kerosene as she ducked under a collapsed rafter, proceeding deeper into the ruins and trash. He was in here. She could feel it and she shut off her flashlight so as not to give him a spotlight on his target.

What others say:

“Her latest offering, Shadows of Doubt, is a mystery/thriller that challenges your every perception and shakes the marrow of your bones.”  – T. Hall.

2013 IUEA Winners

STARVoting for the Indies Unlimited Excellence Awards has concluded. We’d like to thank everyone for vigorous participation. The votes constitute an important part of the process, but do not exclusively determine the winner. To balance the votes and prevent the awards from becoming an outright “popularity contest,” we used the Alexa rankings of the finalists in the final calculation. Alexa is is the leading web traffic ranking service, and we regard it as an impartial standard.

The total votes received by each finalist by the close of the polls was divided by each candidate’s Alexa ranking. The rankings used were those recorded for each site on the morning of February 6, 2014.

This methodology was chosen for several reasons. First, while it gives significant weight to the Alexa ranking, it does not allow a site (even with an excellent rating) to win without getting votes. Second, of the various methodologies we tested on dummy data, this was  the only one that did not produce ties. It also removes any potential elements of favoritism.

Both the winners and the finalists exemplify the very spirit of the indie community. We are pleased to present the recipients of the 2013 Indies Unlimited Excellence Awards.