Month: July 2014

Title Envy

hidden title 120x177Author, oh author, why is your title so tiny? Don’t you want your book to have a big title, like the other books do? I know you do. And I know you know that size matters.

Then why, oh why, are you not using the space on your book’s cover to better display your title? What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?

This perplexes me. This drives me up the wall. This makes me want to scream.

When you post a book to Thrifty Thursday or Print Book Party, do you just leave? Do you not come back to see your spiffy book cover looking all happy on our pages? Because if you did – you might see that no one can read your title.

The majority of what I’m seeing lately looks like this: Continue reading “Title Envy”

Your Knot Write

Your Knot WriteA long time ago (at least in internet time) I did a post on homonym or homophone errors titled Watt Due Ewe Mien. We all know the most common errors and hopefully look for them when we’re proofing our own work. Most of us have words and phrases in our vocabulary we use less often than the heavy hitters like their, there, and they’re that we know (or think we know) how to say, but have trouble getting them right in our writing. (Or should that be write in our righting?) My own personal bugaboo is sale and sell. You’ve probably identified some of your own. Or maybe you haven’t. What I’m going to cover here are semi-common words and phrases I see wrong more often than I’d expect and a bit of discussion about each. I’ve seen all of these make it past the author’s self-editing and whatever editors, proofreaders, and beta readers assisted them to land smack dab in the middle of a book. Multiple times. Hopefully this will help you avoid these same mistakes. In each I’ll list the wrong usage first, the correct one last. Continue reading “Your Knot Write”

Featured Book: Don’t Tell Anyone

Don't Tell Anyone (award cover)Don’t Tell Anyone
by Laurie Boris
Genres: literature, women’s fiction
Available at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

When a family accidentally learns that their matriarch has breast cancer, their complicated weave of family secrets and lies begins to unravel. Can they hold their own lives together long enough to help Mom with hers? Winner, The Kindle Book Review’s 2013 Best Indie Books Award.

Excerpt:

“Ma. I got to tell you something.”

Estelle couldn’t hold it in any longer. “She’s drinking.”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t I warn you? Properly raised Jewish girls don’t drink like fish! Unitarian? What kind of meshugge religion is that? With all that coffee, and talk about the origin of the universe, and letting people believe in God or not?” She paused to catch her breath, and then lowered her voice. “You know her father was drunk at the wedding.”

“Ma, I was drunk at the wedding. So was Charlie.”

Apparently her elder son still failed to see the distinction. “No. There’s drunk and there’s drunk. You were celebrating. He was drunk. It’s in the genes. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you come home one day and find your wife passed out on the sofa–on my sofa–and your son sticking his finger in electrical sockets and eating rat poison.”

What others are saying:

“She told a good story, gave me believable characters and dialogue, and added in some humor as well. I didn’t want this book to end.” – Amazon Customer (Lynne Schneider)

Kindle Unlimited

KindleUnlimitedYou’d have to have been living under a rock for the past week (or on vacation somewhere where there’s no internet) to have missed Amazon’s big news about its newest feature, Kindle Unlimited.

For the low, low price of $9.99 a month, Amazon.com will let readers download an unlimited number of ebooks and audiobooks from its special Kindle Unlimited store. (Those of you who are forced, by geographical happenstance, into shopping from Amazon’s other storefronts are out of luck. Sorry about that.) And this month, Amazon’s making the service free, so everyone can try it out.

This would seem to be a boon for the voracious reader. One trad-pubbed novel can set you back $9.99 or more, and a single audiobook costs easily twice that. The drawback for readers, though, is that Big 5 books are severely under-represented in the KU store. So people who pick books based on the bestseller lists are going to be disappointed. There are other factors limiting reader interest in KU, but I’d rather talk today about what this means for indie authors. Continue reading “Kindle Unlimited”