Never let it be said that I, your intrepid reporter, won’t go to the ends of the indie author universe for you. To mark Indies Unlimited’s second blogiversary, I have done just that! Well, not exactly. But I did venture down into the bowels of our nuclear-powered Death Star to interview the man who keeps everything around here running tickety-boo: our chief engineer, Tavish MacTavish. Continue reading “LynneQuisition: Tavish MacTavish, Nuclear Death Star Chief Engineer”
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.
Who or What is New Publisher House?
I just love big numbers, don’t you? Especially when they have a dollar sign in front of them. Take this one: $52 billion. A good-sized number, wouldn’t you say? I mean, if you took 52 billion dollar bills and stretched them end-to-end, they would reach…um…a really long way. (Liberal arts major here, okay?)
Why my fixation on this number? A new, and somewhat mysterious, company called New Publisher House featured it prominently it in the executive summary of “State of Independence 2014,” its report on indie publishing: “The self-publishing book market in the US currently represents over $52 billion in untapped revenue. This is twice the size of the established mainstream book publishing market’s total annual sales revenue.” Continue reading “Who or What is New Publisher House?”
Simple Living and the Indie Author
Many years ago, I co-authored a nonfiction book on simple living in urban areas. You can still find used copies on Amazon (but I am here to tell you that it’s not worth what the scalpers — sorry, the fine purveyors of gently-used books — are trying to sell it for).
Over the years since writing that book, I’ve gotten away from the practice of living simply. But it occurred to me recently that it could be a viable route for indies who want to be career writers – that is, they’d love to be able to live off of their writing income. Of course, a lot of people who write for a living already have this down pat, whether by necessity or by design. But on the off-chance this is a foreign notion to some folks, I thought it was worth talking about.
The concept is (forgive me) simple. You figure out, by trial and error, what the phrase “having enough” means to you: enough time in the day; enough stuff to maintain and not one thing more; and so on. It’s a process of streamlining your life so that it only contains the people, things, and activities that satisfy you. So don’t worry – nobody’s going to make you live off the grid in a tent. (Unless that’s what makes you happy. And if it does, hey, don’t let me stop you.) Continue reading “Simple Living and the Indie Author”
Dialogue: Punctuation
“There was something I was going to write about for my Indies Unlimited post this week,” I said to my daughter Kat. “Do you remember what it was?”
“Hmm. Maybe it was punctuation in dialogue,” she said.
“You’re right!” I said. “You were saying that your teachers never went over it in school.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We concentrated on learning the rules for writing essays, because that’s what kids need to know to pass the state-mandated tests.”
I interjected, “Which the kids need to do so the teachers can keep their jobs.”
“Exactly. And there’s no dialogue in an essay.” Continue reading “Dialogue: Punctuation”