Month: May 2014

NewsBites: Fresh and Hot!

NewsBitesGather ’round, my indies. Closer…closer… too close! It’s time to hear wondrous tales of fact and fancy and all sorts of what-not – the buzz, the 4-1-1, the low-down, the skinny.

We track down the truth, no matter how many mouse-clicks it takes to get to it.

Today’s NewsBites is brought to you by Wyer’s Cheese: Strong enough for a man, but made for a human.

First up, Indies Unlimited, Carol E. Wyer has a problem and needs your help. Her non-fiction book How Not to Murder Your Grumpy is a finalist for the People’s Book Prize Award and she’s been invited to attend the awards ceremony in London on May 28th when the winner will be announced.

When she got the email, she got over- excited and bought a new dress for the event and now has to justify the expenditure to her grumpy old man who has told her the book won’t win.

Please can you help prove him wrong and bring harmony to the household by voting for her book? You’ll find the bright yellow cover on the finalist page. You need to register to carol wyervote. (That only involves an email address and collecting a password from http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/how_vote.htm) Then, please assist an IU minion and vote for her book?

Voting is from 21st May to 27th May.

How about it? Can ya help a sistah out?.

Round two of the Author Earning Report is out and shows self-published authors are earning 27% more than traditionally published authors for ebooks published since 2011. Just looking at my sales, I have to say I am not at all sure I am holding up my end. Continue reading “NewsBites: Fresh and Hot!”

Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective

Cassie Scot - Paranormal DetectiveCassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective
by Christine Amsden
Genre: science fiction, fantasy, New Adult
Available from Amazon

Cassie Scot was born into a world of magic, but she has none of her own. When she is pulled into a paranormal investigation, and tempted by a handsome sorcerer, she will learn that there are many different types of strength and more than one way to be a hero.

 Excerpt:

“My parents think the longer the name, the more powerful the sorcerer, so they named me Cassandra Morgan Ursula Margaret Scot. You can call me Cassie.

I’ve been called a lot of things in my life: normal, ordinary, and even a disappointment. After the Harry Potter books came out, a couple of people called me a squib. Since I haven’t read them, I have to assume it’s a compliment.

Personally, I prefer normal, which is why the sign on my office door reads: Cassie Scot, Normal Detective.

You have to understand that around here, when your last name is Scot, people are easily confused. Not only are my parents powerful practitioners, but I have six talented brothers and sisters. Plus, my family hasn’t always been known for its subtlety. When weird stuff happens around here, the people who are willing to believe in magic are prone to suspect the Scots.”

What others are saying:

“This a book with a lot of soul in it.” — The Reading Cat

“Aspiring” Indies: Same Stuff, Different Day

indie authors keep outThe indie-author blogosphere (you didn’t know we had one, did you?) lit up this week with fallout from an article Hugh Howey wrote about the shabby treatment of indie authors at the RT Booklovers Convention in New Orleans last weekend.

Howey said he had heard from several people who attended the conference that indie authors – even bestselling ones like Liliana Hart – were labeled “aspiring authors” and shunted to a separate room during the book signing event. And while trad-pubbed authors each had three feet of table space for signing their books, indies were crammed in like sardines next door.

As near as I can make out from the comments, the “aspiring author” thing was either a single comment by a volunteer who misunderstood the difference between the two rooms; or a title attendees picked for themselves upon registration, and if they accidentally ticked “aspiring” instead of “published” on the registration form, it was their own damn fault. Continue reading ““Aspiring” Indies: Same Stuff, Different Day”

Every drunken man’s dream is a book

Anna Castle
Anna Castle

Guest post
by Anna Castle

Every month or so we get another outcry against self-published fiction. Some are aimed at the Beast of Amazon, destroyer of standards and scourge of literature, like George Packer’s bitter lament in The New Yorker (“Cheap words,” February 17, 2014) or Thad McIlroy’s anxious number-crunching on his blog (“How amazon destroyed the publishing ecosystem,” March 12, 2014.) Others, like Donald Maass, rail against self-publishing in general, on the grounds that it produces far more chaff than wheat (Writer Unboxed, “The new class system,” February 5, 2014.)

This dire transformation, this destruction of literature, is blamed on new technologies which have made it far too easy to produce a book, drastically lowering the necessary barriers to publication that have kept the riff-raff out for centuries.

I’m talking about the Internet, right? Continue reading “Every drunken man’s dream is a book”