Celebrating Independent Authors
Do you ever notice verb tenses that seem to conflict in the same sentence? Every now and then, I’ll run into sentences like these:
Walking into the room, she leaned one elbow on the bar.
Looking at him, she giggled.
The second one works. The first one doesn’t. Why? Let’s break it down: Continue reading “It Was Tense: Past Progressive Verbs”
It’s not just sketchy publishers and not-so-qualified editors who prey on unsuspecting indie authors. People who run writing contests can be less than legit, too.
Even poets can be targets. Maybe especially poets. Even traditionally-published poetry is a hard sell to most people who aren’t taking a college-level English class, so there isn’t a whole lot of it out there. Poets can self-publish, of course, just like any other indie author, and they have done so for years, by contracting with press owners to print chapbooks of their work. But they run up against the same problems fiction and non-fiction writers do, in terms of getting that work noticed. The traditional avenues of wider exposure for poets – other than handing out their chapbooks to random strangers on street corners – have pretty much been limited to submitting their work to contests and/or anthologies. Continue reading “FOULED!: Poetry Contest Scams”
And then there were two: Oyster, one of the three best-known eBook subscription services, announced Monday that it plans to shut down. Oyster has been vying with Scribd and Amazon for customers for its Netflix-like plan, which allows readers to borrow as many eBooks as they want for $9.95 a month. Or it did. Now, Oyster’s founders say they plan to “sunset” the service early next year.
It was a short run for Oyster, which launched in September 2013 as a competitor to Scribd. The marketplace got even more complicated in July 2014, when Amazon started offering Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for $9.99 a month. At that point, Oyster began offering titles for purchase outside of its subscription catalog. Continue reading “Oyster, Shucked: More Changes Coming for eBook Subscription Sites”
Every now and then, when I’m reading, I’ll run across something that makes me go, “Huh?” I’m not talking about the sort of full-on assault perpetrated by authors who don’t think spelling, punctuation, and grammar matter at all. I’m talking about the sort of thing that makes my head wobble a little bit as I frown and say, “Hmm. That doesn’t sound right to me.”
Take, for example, the use of yesterday, today, and tomorrow in fiction. Sometimes they just don’t sit right with me. And it’s always when the narrator of the piece – first person or third, doesn’t matter – is telling about something that occurred in the past. Continue reading “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Writing Tense Confusion”