Writer, Reader, Reviewer

3starsSometimes I hate being an author.

No, that’s not true. I never hate being a writer or an author. I love writing; I love reading. I love supporting other authors and especially, obviously, my friends. What I hate is writing critical reviews. Recently my buddy, Yvonne Hertberger, wrote about a similar situation where she was called on to assess a book. It wasn’t pretty.

Case in point. Recently I read a friend’s latest. I wanted to like it; I really did. But I didn’t. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for most of the characters, I found the pace slow and therefore frustrating, and there were many things that it seemed I was supposed to implicitly understand but did not. Whenever I read a book that affects me like this, I have to wonder: is it not grabbing me because I’m not giving it enough time and concentration, or am I not giving it time and concentration because it’s not grabbing me? Continue reading “Writer, Reader, Reviewer”

When is FREE not free? Answer – when you do a Free book promotion.

Pete Barber
Pete Barber

Guest post
by Pete Barber

On May 17th, 2014 I offered my self-published technothriller, NanoStrike, free for five days on Amazon. My novel was downloaded 39,000 times. Perhaps my experience can help others.

Step one–I freshened up my novel, which I self-published in 2012 but never promoted. I retitled, recovered, rewrote, and reedited. If you’d like to know why, I recently wrote a blog post about this for Big Al’s Book & Pals.

I withdrew the old novel from all distribution channels except Amazon, waited two weeks, updated the title and cover on Amazon, then enrolled in KDP.

I was ready for my promotion. Continue reading “When is FREE not free? Answer – when you do a Free book promotion.”

Keywords Vs. Tags

keywords and tagsWhat is the difference between a keyword and a tag? That’s a very good question. Theoretically, they are the same thing. Since most of the time this question is being asked from a blogger’s standpoint, that’s how it shall be answered. And I’ll be using Indies Unlimited as an example to make it easy to follow.

The incredibly simplified answer to the question is: keywords are used to find things via search engines; tags are used to find things within your own blog. So, you would use keywords to help label your article so when people search on Google, they hopefully use the words in your article (or in your article’s keyword Metadata). Just so you know, metadata is “a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.” Thank you, Wikipedia. By the way, did you know Wiki has a series of pages on George Clooney? Anyway, your keywords make up a set of data that describes the information in your article. Got it?

Tags also describe your article, but they do it more like an internal filing system, if you will. About a year ago, the Evil Mastermind wrote an article about using keywords in book titles. Let’s say that article wowed you (of course it did!) and you want to read other articles with similar content at Indies Unlimited. At the bottom of the article, under the share buttons (which you always use, right?), you will find this: Continue reading “Keywords Vs. Tags”

How to Increase Facebook Visibility

file3371281797656Those of you who have Facebook pages or read Jim Devitt’s posts probably know that the social media giant is showing a ridiculously small percentage of your fan page posts to your readers, and that this percentage has been dropping lately. Right now, going by an average of my last few posts, I’m reaching about 4% of my fans. Which is pretty sucky. Continue reading “How to Increase Facebook Visibility”