Month: November 2014

Artistic Snobbery

"Hell is the other." Jean-Paul Sartre
“Hell is the other.” Jean-Paul Sartre

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”

Love’s Savagely Bad Book Covers

this is not the worst cover everHere’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”

Give the Gift of Indies Unlimited

snowflakeWe interrupt your normally scheduled programming for this brief, self-serving message!

When you do your holiday shopping this season, please support Indies Unlimited by purchasing IU titles, gear, and more. Already have all that stuff? Well then, don’t forget making unrelated purchases on Amazon.com AFTER clicking through by a link on IU gets us a commission for your purchase! That’s right, your purchase of that toddler toilet training seat sends pennies our way. Help keep our gruel flowing! And we thank you.

Tips for Using Keywords in Blog Posts

dewey cheatum howe writers conferenceAuthors, and others, have blogs and websites because they want to get the word out about whatever their passion is. What good is all that effort if no one ever sees it? Keywords, if used properly, will help get eyeballs on your work.

The key to all things keyword-related (no pun intended) is to put yourself in the shoes of the person doing the searching. What words or phrases would you search on if you were looking for the information? Think about that for a minute. Let’s say you were looking for a book on how to write gumshoe detective novels. Would you search on writing? No. You would get like a bazillion trillion results, none of which would be helpful. Would you search on how to write a book? No. Again, the results would be so broad – you’d never find what you need. You would have to search on the specific phrase of how to write gumshoe detective novels in order to get anything remotely helpful. Right? Let’s keep that logic in mind as we go forward. Continue reading “Tips for Using Keywords in Blog Posts”