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.

Looking for Book Review Sites?

Lots of people contact us requesting reviews. Indies Unlimited is not a review site. Fortunately, there are a lot of book reviewers out there. For your convenience, I have posted a list of some of them below. I borrowed this list from the great folks at Book Junkies, and thank them for sharing. You can find some additional book review blogs in my blog roll. Be sure to check them out as well.

Jan Fischer-Wade also put together a list of 14 book review sites that have massive followings over at Curiosity Quills. Note that some reviewers and reviews sites specialize in certain genres, so do your research before submitting a book for review.

In posting this, I make no representation or warranty about whether your book will be accepted for review by any of the reviewers listed, nor the type or quality of the review your book may receive. It is not at all unlikely that if they feel your book needs work, or should just simply be used as fireplace tinder, they will tell you so. That is what makes an objective independent review valuable to both readers and authors. The list is below the fold. If you know of someone who’s not on the list, please add their link in the comments. Continue reading “Looking for Book Review Sites?”

9 Signs Accredited Online Colleges are Out of Control

In case you missed it (and there is a good chance you did), a blog called Accredited Online Colleges ran a little article called 9 Signs Self-Publishing is Out of Control. I am firmly of the belief that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, even when that opinion is stupid and completely wrong.

This article begins with these well-balanced lines: “To paraphrase the immortal words of Truman Capote, there’s a difference between writing and typing. And, to put it gently, we can say with a good amount of confidence that most self-published books were typed, not written. Because communicating with letters assembled into words is a skill most learn by the age of 5, and because written communication has become so ubiquitous in American life, everyone now thinks he’s a writer.”

Why, with such impervious reasoning as that, one might also wonder if anyone with a computer now thinks he’s a blogger. I won’t quote anything further from the article (the link is there if you’d like to have a look). Neither will I conduct a line-by-line vivisection of the deeply flawed reasoning put forth in the article, tempting as that may be.

I do find it fairly dripping with irony. Here the anonymous author takes exception to the technology that has allowed the Philistines to call themselves authors. Presumably, the author is all right with the same technology when put to the purpose of creating accredited online colleges. Yet, the preponderance of the author’s arguments can be applied equally against accredited online colleges. All of this begs the question: Are accredited online colleges out of control? (McNally, did you notice I capitalized after the colon there?) The sad answer to this question is an unqualified yes.

9 Signs Accredited Online Colleges are Out of Control Continue reading “9 Signs Accredited Online Colleges are Out of Control”

Building Your Public Presentation Skills

The cloistered life of a writer can take a toll on your social skills. As an author, we all spend a lot of time in our own heads as opposed to interacting with other people. Social media doesn’t count. I mean the kind of people you actually might have to go outside your house to encounter. Real people—like the ones you see on television. The ones on television don’t count either.

Sooner or later, you will need those social skills because at some point, you will be asked to do a presentation of some sort. Perhaps you will be asked to speak before a book club, or at a library function, or (as in my case) to ask people in the grocery store if they’d like to try a sample of today’s cheese.  Continue reading “Building Your Public Presentation Skills”

What Reviewers Want (Part 2)

Artist's conception of a book reviewer

[This is a golden oldie—it ran on Indies Unlimited back on October 10, 2011.]

In part 1 of this series, we discussed what reviewers want to see (and do not want to see) from authors as regards actual writing. All that stuff is what constitutes the middle of the relationship between an author and a reviewer. There is something more to the relationship on either end.

The relationship begins with the submission of your magnum opus to the reviewer. Next you wait. You keep waiting. You check their website and still don’t see anything. Over an hour has passed, and you are starting to get nervous. My advice (and it really is mine alone—all the reviewers I interviewed were too polite to bring this up), is to keep waiting. Do not call. Do not e-mail. Do not fax. Do not “check in” to see how they like it so far.  Find something else to occupy your mind and your time, because it may take a while. Continue reading “What Reviewers Want (Part 2)”