Author: Lynne Cantwell

Lynne Cantwell grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. She worked as a broadcast journalist for many years; she has written for CNN, the late lamented Mutual/NBC Radio News, and a bunch of radio and TV news outlets you have probably never heard of, including a defunct wire service called Zapnews. But she began as a fantasy writer (in the second grade), and is back at it today. She currently lives near Washington, DC. Learn more about Lynne at her blog and at her Amazon author page.

How to Write a Clean First Draft

Puppy BathI had to open my big mouth, didn’t I?

A few weeks back, in the response to a comment on one of my posts here at IU, I remarked that I save a lot of time in the editing phase by writing “really clean first drafts.” Of course, somebody had to go and ask me how I do it.

That meant I had to deconstruct how I do what I do. First, I found a calm, quiet place, and sat there with a meditation pillow and a candle, and communed with my muse for a while. Then I had a glass of wine. Okay, maybe I had more than one glass of wine. Anyway, I came away from it all with the conclusion that it’s a whole host of things. Here, as best as I can, is my prescription for writing a clean first draft. Continue reading “How to Write a Clean First Draft”

LynneQuisition: Authorly.com

Interviews by Lynne CantwellI keep seeing these ads on Facebook, enticing me to make an app, and I keep thinking it might be kind of cool to be one. Wouldn’t it be neat for my fans to be able to pull me up on their smartphones, so they can tell all their friends about me?

But the app builders I’ve seen all seem to be aimed at brick-and-mortar businesses, or else they want to include just a bio and a list of your books. And then there’s the cost. One place I saw charges for uploading your app to places like iTunes – which would seem to be the whole point of the exercise, you know? – as well as a monthly hosting fee.

Authorly.com is an app-building service that is aimed at indie authors. Devika Soni with Authorly has agreed to take a seat in the comfy chair and answer a few questions for us. Continue reading “LynneQuisition: Authorly.com”

Kindle Unlimited

KindleUnlimitedYou’d have to have been living under a rock for the past week (or on vacation somewhere where there’s no internet) to have missed Amazon’s big news about its newest feature, Kindle Unlimited.

For the low, low price of $9.99 a month, Amazon.com will let readers download an unlimited number of ebooks and audiobooks from its special Kindle Unlimited store. (Those of you who are forced, by geographical happenstance, into shopping from Amazon’s other storefronts are out of luck. Sorry about that.) And this month, Amazon’s making the service free, so everyone can try it out.

This would seem to be a boon for the voracious reader. One trad-pubbed novel can set you back $9.99 or more, and a single audiobook costs easily twice that. The drawback for readers, though, is that Big 5 books are severely under-represented in the KU store. So people who pick books based on the bestseller lists are going to be disappointed. There are other factors limiting reader interest in KU, but I’d rather talk today about what this means for indie authors. Continue reading “Kindle Unlimited”

Smashwords Preorders

SWpreordersIt’s been about a year since Smashwords began beta-testing its preorder feature, and it’s been live for everyone for six months, give or take. Mark Coker was excited enough about rolling out the feature to everyone that he even put together a PowerPoint presentation on leveraging it to your best advantage for your new release.

When I saw that PowerPoint, I got all fired up about using it for the release of Undertow in March. So I did a whole bunch of stuff suggested in the presentation: I uploaded the book file a couple of weeks early, set the introductory price low (99 cents), mentioned the availability of preorders prominently on my blog and Facebook page, stuck the info in a newsletter, and sat back and waited to hit the big-time on release day. Continue reading “Smashwords Preorders”