Celebrating Independent Authors
Howard Johnson is the readers’ choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge.
The winning entry is rewarded 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 entry:
Continue reading “Howard Johnson Wins Flash Fiction Challenge”
When I read a post from an author I respect that I strongly disagree with I often like to sit back and think about it. I have a passionate nature, well suited to writing murder mysteries where I can cut off people’s heads when annoyed. It is better for me to contemplate the error of the article, in my opinion, than to shoot from the hip. I like that expression and I couldn’t care less that it is a cliché. I was confronted recently with this type of situation in a post bemoaning the uselessness of the Amazon review system. Continue reading “Artistic Snobbery”
Here’s the deal. In March Kat Brooks wrote a post for IU called The Case for Legible Titles. Three months later Brooks did it again, talking about Title Envy. (I’m not going to mention the post she did in 2012 about, you guessed it, book covers. Judging a Book by Its Cover) Oops. That slipped out. All of these posts and others are linked on a very special page, cleverly called Resource: Book Covers.
Brooks doesn’t think anyone is reading her posts. So I told her I had the perfect title. Then she kicked the post back to me and said “Are You Stupid?” wasn’t acceptable and proposed this one instead.
Why do covers matter so much? Read all those posts and you’ll see several reasons. I’ll boil them down to just one. Bad cover = Less Sales. It’s a simple equation and you don’t have to be a math genius to understand. It comes down to what causes a person to buy (or even more important, not buy) your book. Here’s how it works. Continue reading “Love’s Savagely Bad Book Covers”