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.

Breaking News: Amazon to Acquire Goodreads

Amazon.comA News Bulletin
by Lynne Cantwell

 

Amazon has announced that it has reached agreement to acquire Goodreads. According to a news release from Amazon, the deal is expected to close within the next few months. Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle Content, and Goodreads CEO and co-founder Otis Chandler joined in making the announcement.

For now, Goodreads’ headquarters will stay in San Francisco. No other details are available right now – including how much Amazon is paying for Goodreads, and what this means for Shelfari, Amazon’s Goodreads wanna-be site.

Read the press release on Amazon.

Read the announcement on Goodreads.

Let’s do a quick IU poll on this.

The acquisition of Goodreads by Amazon is:

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Review-Only Virtual Tours: Are You Paying for Reviews?

I have to tell you that the whole time the sock puppet controversy was raging, I was cringing inside. The reason? I’ve paid for reviews. Kind of. Oh, not through some fly-by-night “good reviews guaranteed!” outfit. Instead, I’ve bought a couple of review-only blog tours.

I talked last week about virtual blog tours. If you missed that post, you can read it here. One of the flavors of tours that most outfits offer is the review-only tour, in which the operator recruits a number of bloggers to read and review your book. The tour operator asks you to provide a copy of your book, or a coupon or gift card so the reviewer can buy a copy, as well as the usual stuff: blurb, cover image, author picture, and buy links. If the reviewer hates your book, he or she can use the other materials to put together a book feature to run instead of a scathing review. Most of the time, bloggers will post their reviews not only on their blog, but also on Amazon and/or Goodreads, which of course helps your rating. Continue reading “Review-Only Virtual Tours: Are You Paying for Reviews?”

Blog Touring

So if KDP Select isn’t the cash cow for indies that it used to be, what’s left? One option is to get yourself and your name out there on as many book blogging sites as possible. I’m not talking about asking bloggers to review your work (although you certainly can). What I’m talking about is offering yourself as a guest blogger or interview subject. It will help you gain that all-important name recognition, or so the theory goes, and (eventually) that should translate into book sales. Continue reading “Blog Touring”

What, Exactly, Are You Writing?

We’ve talked here before about writing styles, and also about Styles in writing. But I don’t think we’ve talked yet about different big-picture styles of writing – different formats, if you will – for conveying your ideas to someone else. So let’s nail this down.

Let’s say you want to write a business letter. I learned way back in my high school typing class (yes, in fact, it was called “typing” then, not “keyboarding” – and I thought I told you to stay off my lawn!) that a business letter has a specific format. Your address goes at the top, either centered or right-justified; then you double-space and put the date, centered; then triple-space and type the name and address for the person you’re sending the letter to; and so on. A variation on this is the open punctuation business letter, which I’d never heard of until my fellow minion, T.D. McKinnon, mentioned it last week. Continue reading “What, Exactly, Are You Writing?”