Celebrating Independent Authors
Congrats to Ralph L Angelo Jr, the readers’ choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge.
The winning entry is recognized with a special feature here today and a place in our collection of winners which will be published as an e-book at year end.
Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
Continue reading “Ralph L Angelo Jr Wins Flash Fiction Challenge”
Suicide City, a Love Story
by Julie Frayn
Genre of this Book: Contemporary Fiction
Word count: 75,000
Sixteen-year-old August Bailey fantasizes about an apartment in the city, not a tiny house on an Iowa farm. During another fight about makeup and boys, August’s controlling mother slaps her. And August hops the next bus out of town.
She arrives in the city to discover that reality and fantasy don’t mix. When her money runs out, she is ‘saved’ by seventeen-year-old Reese, a kind boy with electric eyes and a gentleman’s heart. Reese lives on the streets. Each day is a struggle to make the right choice.
August falls in love with Reese, and knows her love can save him. She breaks down his emotional walls and he tells her his secrets – of abuse and the truth about his mother’s death.
As Reese’s feelings for August grow, so does the realization that keeping her could ruin her life too.
This book is available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. Continue reading “Book Brief: Suicide City”
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Pick your favorite classic of literature. One of those books you were forced to read years ago in school. Make it something old enough to be in the public domain. I’m partial to A Tale of Two Cities myself. Your choice is probably different. Maybe Pride and Prejudice, Tom Sawyer, or even (God forbid) Moby Dick (just call me bored stiff). Now pick something more modern, but still a classic you might have read in school from fifty or a hundred years ago. My choice is The Old Man and the Sea. Maybe you prefer Catch-22, something by Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying are a couple possibilities). Or if you prefer a book with a little more heat and your school district was much more enlightened than mine you might choose Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
What are your picks?
All of the books I’ve listed, and I assume those you picked if you didn’t like my suggestions, have stood the test of time. Presumably they were commercially successful. If nothing else, each has sold well over the years with sales to schools and libraries. Now imagine the books you picked hadn’t been published for whatever reason, but the final fully-edited manuscript was discovered and published by the author’s heirs today. We’ll also imagine they published it using a pen name so there isn’t a ton of hype about author X’s undiscovered book. What do you think the odds are that the book would sell? How would the critics react? What do you think the reader reviews on Amazon would look like? Continue reading “Classic or Commercial?”