Day: February 23, 2015

2014 IUEA Winners

STARVoting for the Indies Unlimited Excellence Awards has concluded. We’d like to thank everyone for vigorous participation. The votes constitute an important part of the process, but do not exclusively determine the winner. To balance the votes and prevent the awards from becoming an outright “popularity contest,” we used the Alexa rankings of the finalists in the final calculation. Alexa is is the leading web traffic ranking service, and we regard it as an impartial standard.

The total votes received by each finalist by the close of the polls was divided by each candidate’s Alexa ranking. The rankings used were those recorded for each site on the morning of February 1, 2015.

This methodology was chosen for several reasons. First, while it gives significant weight to the Alexa ranking, it does not allow a site (even with an excellent rating) to win without getting votes. Second, of the various methodologies we tested on dummy data, this was  the only one that did not produce ties. It also removes any potential elements of favoritism.

Both the winners and the finalists exemplify the very spirit of the indie community. We are pleased to present the recipients of the 2014 Indies Unlimited Excellence Awards.

Featured Book: Indies Unlimited 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology

2012 Flash Fiction Anthology The Indies Unlimited 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology features a year’s worth of winning entries from the IndiesUnlimited.com weekly flash fiction challenge. It contains 56 stories by 38 different authors from around the world, with full color pictures by award-winning photographer K. S. Brooks and thought-provoking prompts by five-star author Stephen Hise. From the comic misadventures of a caveman named Og to a deranged zombie picnic, there are a myriad of genres and stories to appeal to every taste.

The Indies Unlimited 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology is available at Amazon.com for Kindle, Standard Edition print, and full-color Deluxe Edition print.

Authors with stories in the anthology include: David Antrobus, Gabrielle Baer, Brian Beam, Robert K. Blechman, Laurie Boris, William C. Busch, Sandra Campbell, Lynne Cantwell, Kent Chapman, Ed Drury, E.J. Fechenda, Terveen Gill, Yvonne Hertzberger, Jacqueline Hopkins, Chris James, Jerriann Law, Bob Lock, Pam Logan, Monica Baguchinsky Lunn, JD Mader, Brianna Lee McKenzie, Teirrah McNair, Donna B. McNicol, Rich Meyer, SP Mount, J. L. Murray, Stephanie Myers, Angela Rigley, Betsy Riley, Marc Emile Samuel, Irina Serban, Shiri Sondheimer, Dianna Stover, Krista Tibbs, Dick C. Waters, Sally Whitney, Renee Pierce Williams, and Carol Wyer.

Avoiding Unintended Consequences of Your Self-Publishing Life

author, you are firedI saw a recent article with the headline The Atlanta fire chief who wrote the homophobic book has been fired. When I read this, I thought it might be a good time for a post about some of the unintended consequences that can occur from your self-publishing life, if you don’t use a little forethought when publishing.

Clearly this fire chief wrote the book and intended to keep his job after writing it. However, things went awry because his job considered his content to be in violation of their standards for employees. While I don’t want to debate whether forethought could have prevented the situation that resulted here, I think the case serves as a reminder that the things we write can have unintended consequences if we’re not careful. Continue reading “Avoiding Unintended Consequences of Your Self-Publishing Life”