Month: March 2015

BookLikes Likefest

Booklikes logoBack in February, the amazing Lynne Cantwell introduced us all to BookLikes. BookLikes is sort of a cross between Goodreads and Tumblr – a book review/giveaway/blog site with lots of functionality. So how about we get to know each other on BookLikes better with a like-fest?

Today you can share your blog page and find new friends. Grab that URL which should look like this: http://ksbrooks.booklikes.com/ and paste it in the comments below.  (Not sure where to find your URL? See the image below.) The “follow” button is found in the upper right-hand corner.

booklikes shelf page
Click to enlarge

[Don’t forget, if you right-click the links, you can choose to have them open in a separate tab so you don’t have to worry about navigating back and forth to pages.]

PLEASE be sure to reciprocate by following those who follow you. This is give and take. If everyone plays by the golden rule, we all benefit. Please mark your calendar to check back over the next couple of days. We’ve had to turn comment subscriptions off because we surpass the SPAM email quantity guidelines.

How to Make a Book Perma-Free on Amazon

A Novel Idea by Melissa BowersockI was inspired by IU’s administrators when they came up with the nifty concept of First Chapters, a sampler collection of the first chapters of 22 minion novels. I thought this was a great way to take some new books for a test drive, especially since I can usually make up my mind about a book within the first few pages.  So, duly inspired and with the admin’s blessing, I created my own version, composed of the first chapters of my twelve (to date) novels. Not wanting to steal IU’s thunder with a similar name, I chose A Novel Idea for mine. Not terribly original, but it seemed to fit.

My plan was to make this eBook perma-free so readers anytime, anywhere, could take my first chapters out for a spin and see how they liked them.

There are several avenues to getting eBooks online, and of course Amazon is the 500-pound gorilla, so it gets the most bananas for the buck. However, when uploading a book to KDP, you do not get the option of choosing perma-free for a price. In order to accomplish this, you have to do a little end-around that behemoth primate. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “How to Make a Book Perma-Free on Amazon”

“The Chosen One” Is a Recipe for Writing Failure

Sabrina ZbasnikGuest Post
by S.E. Zbasnik

In speculative fiction, there’s a trick people rely upon to insure their protagonist is the only one who can preserve the kingdom, save the world, and rescue the galaxy from mechanical centipedes. Unroll some ancient parchment, have blind monks read it in catacombs, and declare your main character the chosen one.

Stop.

To say the chosen one has been done to death is to think hurricanes are a little windy. Not only is it a cliché infesting every genre it touches, it’s also a drama killer. Wrack your brain trying to create believable villains, establish obstacles that no one should survive, place your main character in immediate danger, and it all amounts to nothing. We know he’ll survive; he has to. He’s the chosen one. The spoilers are written right there in an ancient scroll only a wandering transient can read because his order failed to maintain itself before the prophesied times. Maybe they should have hosted more pancake feeds to raise funds. Continue reading ““The Chosen One” Is a Recipe for Writing Failure”

Getting Out of My Publish America Contract

#PublishingFoul Logo Indies UnlimitedGuest Post
by Brenda Perlin

This past Sunday, I wrote about my nightmare experience with Publish America. After the way they treated me, I knew my only course of action was to try to get out of my seven-year contract.

Seven long years! I blame myself for signing such a miserable contract but I didn’t know any better. I had high hopes and was flattered that someone actually wanted to publish my story. If they would have said hang from the highest chandelier, I might have done so. I was naive and didn’t realize they were a company that published books not because they thought they were good, but because they thought they could make money off of an inexperienced first-time author. Continue reading “Getting Out of My Publish America Contract”