Author: K.S. Brooks

K.S. Brooks is an award-winning novelist, photographer, and photo-journalist, author of over 30 titles, and executive director and administrator of Indies Unlimited. Brooks is currently a photo-journalist and chief copy editor for two NE Washington newspapers.  She teaches self-publishing and writing topics for the Community Colleges of Spokane, and served on the Indie Author Day advisory board. For more about K.S. Brooks, visit her website and her Amazon author page.

Timing Is Everything: Facebook Tutorial

I discovered something interesting by accident last week. How many times have you said to yourself Damn, I wish I could schedule my Facebook updates so that they’d post at a later time?  Well, guess what? Now you can – at least from your “page” anyway. (I’ve not seen a way to do it from my personal profile.)

Facebook Fan Page

So, go to your page, and start typing in an update to all your fans. You can even upload a photo – anything you want to schedule to post at a later date. The strange thing about this (if you haven’t already “set it up”) is that once you click the little clock in the bottom left-hand corner of your posting window, you go to another screen, and moving forward will blow away what you’ve written. Make sure to copy it before you do anything else. NOW, click on the little clock.

Continue reading “Timing Is Everything: Facebook Tutorial”

Novel Ideas for Novel Contests

Judge and Author K.S. Brooks
Judge not, lest ye be rendered into incoherent babbling. And a really bad headache.

Novel Ideas for Novel Contests – or…what NOT to do when entering your manuscript in a novel-writing contest.

I’ve been a first-tier level judge for a prestigious novel-writing contest for about five years now. First-tier? Yeah, that means I’m important. Okay, maybe not. What it’s supposed to mean is that at least one someone else has already read through the entries and has sent me the very best of those. Now I get the final word. Or something like that. Sounds important, anyway. Continue reading “Novel Ideas for Novel Contests”

The Blurb Doctor Is In

The Doctor Is In.
Don’t worry, this won’t hurt a bit.

In my last post, I grumbled about mistakes commonly made in book descriptions/synopses. If you missed that phenomenal piece of curmudgeonly brilliance, you can read it here. This week, I pony up and come through as promised – the Blurb Doctor is in. Trust me, this is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.

Writing a book description or “book blurb” can be the most difficult part of the process for some authors. I don’t know why I have a knack for it. I also don’t know how some people have figured that out (before I came out of the closet with it just now) and have approached me to help them with theirs.

If you’re just getting started, you should check out our Book Description Basics article.

I tried to devise a formula that could be used by anyone for any book of any subject. Would you like to know how that went? Well, it looked something like this:  Continue reading “The Blurb Doctor Is In”

Common Book Description and Synopsis Issues

Author K. S. Brooks
Author K. S. Brooks

Honestly? I’m not in the mood to write this post. Or any post. I’m feeling quite curmudgeonly at the moment. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s because I am, in fact, a curmudgeon. So, I’m not going to write it. I’m going to re-run my post on Common Synopsis Issues. Why? Because recently I’ve seen some things which confuse me.

On a daily basis I review dozens of author queries. Some of them bombard me with information, which comes understandably with eagerness. (Note: please don’t make me work too hard to find what it is I need so we can feature your book.) But what I find perplexing is the authors whose book descriptions on retail sites are confusing, lacking, or non-existent. Sometimes authors put information about themselves where their book description should be. Sometimes there’s a list of questions in place of a description. I believe the author is trying to tantalize the potential customer with those questions. I’m not so sure it works. I know it doesn’t work on me. Continue reading “Common Book Description and Synopsis Issues”