Author: Stephen Hise

Stephen Hise is the Evil Mastermind and founder of Indies Unlimited. Hise is an independent author and an avid supporter of the indie author movement. Learn more about Stephen at his website or his Amazon author page.

Good English Word Polish

[Indies Unlimited is brought to you in part by the fine people at Good English, a division of Imelda’s Offshore Holdings and Shoe Equity Fund.]

Authors, is your manuscript dull and lackluster? Are your characters flat and lifeless? Are you plagued by embarrassing typos and malapropisms?

Professional editing can be costly and time-consuming. What’s an author to do?

Thank goodness for Good English Word Polish! Just spray some on your manuscript and watch your prose glisten.

Good English removes unwanted adverbs, strips away verb-tense conflict, aligns backstory, corrects unseemly timeline errors, and eliminates repetitive phrases.

Best of all, Good English Word Polish is non-toxic and typo-allergenic. Try some today! You’ll be glad you did.

Who Are You?

Imagine for a moment that you have been invited to a costume party especially for authors.

You must dress in a costume that reflects the kind of writing you do. If you write in more than one genre, your costume must incorporate some element from each genre.

The game is that readers who attend will try to divine who you are from looking at your costume.

The more genres in which you write, the more elaborate your costume becomes; which may mean it will be harder for readers to guess your identity. That’s not how you win in this game, though. You win by being recognizable. Continue reading “Who Are You?”

Top Ten: The Most Viewed Articles on Indies Unlimited

I’d been wanting to do a top ten list of the most viewed articles on Indies Unlimited for a while now, but I hesitated because, as modesty is perhaps the finest of my many fine qualities, I thought it might be a little embarrassing to see a list of ten articles by me (ahem).

However, through some flaw in the statistics, it appears some other folks actually wrote some articles that people read.

So without further ado, here is a list of Indies Unlimited’s greatest hits: Continue reading “Top Ten: The Most Viewed Articles on Indies Unlimited”

Book Description Epic Fail

One of the neat things about Indies Unlimited is that we get to become acquainted with the books of a whole lot of authors.

Not all those books make it onto the site. Sometimes this is because the subject matter is outside our wheelhouse. Other times, it is related to problems with the book. K.S. Brooks wrote a piece that covers a lot of the mistakes we see.

I don’t want to rehash her entire article, but I do want to focus on book descriptions. When I vet books, this is about as far as I ever have to go. Occasionally, I will read the preview of a book only because I can’t believe the book itself could possibly be as bad as the description. In many instances, the book is WAY better than the book description.

That’s too bad, because you really can’t expect a prospective buyer to take that extra step. Writing book descriptions is hard for authors. Kat wrote an article on how to write a book description. That article is chock full of good advice. Read it. Learn it. Live it.

I tend to organize information into categories. Here are a few of the error categories I have found in looking at book descriptions: Continue reading “Book Description Epic Fail”