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.

Between You and Me, Grammar Matters

If ever a genie wants to grant me three wishes, I am all set. First, I would wish to always stay at the perfect weight, no matter how much I ate. Next, I would wish for financial security, so that I could quit my day job and never have to take another one. And my third wish would be for Amazon and Smashwords to insist that every indie title be vetted by a competent proofreader before they will publish it.

I admit it: I’m picky. It’s probably because I internalized grammar and spelling rules early. Please don’t hurt me, but I was one of those annoying kids in school who always got good grades on her English papers. I was a spelling whiz, too. One of my college journalism professors gave his classes a test on commonly-misspelled words at the beginning each semester. I had two classes with him, so I had to take the test twice. When I aced the thing for the second time, he wrote on my paper, “People in radio don’t need to know how to spell!” I’m still not sure whether he was trying to recruit me for the student newspaper. (And if he was, then it’s clear that he never saw my grade in photography.) Continue reading “Between You and Me, Grammar Matters”

How to Do a TwitterView

People keep talking about what a great marketing tool Twitter is, but some of us – call us the unhip, technologically-challenged generation – can’t help but wonder why. It all just seems like noise to us. Particularly if you’re following a whole bunch of authors who spam your feed with automated “buy my book!!!” tweets. (Of course, nobody here would do that, right?) Continue reading “How to Do a TwitterView”

My Take-Away on Tardif

When I picked up this book (on a KDP Select free day), I was sure I was going to hate it. I figured it would be another rehash of all the information that’s available on the web for free to any indie author with the brains to parse a Google search.

But then I read the first couple of chapters, and realized that maybe Tardif knew what she was talking about. Like many of us, she got burned by a vanity publisher; she got burned again by a badly-managed small press; she spent years schlepping her paperbacks from one personal appearance to another; and then she found KDP Select. Lucky for her, she hit Select in January 2012, when it was in its glory days; the $42,000 month she refers to in her title is March 2012, before Amazon instituted the big algorithm change that made KDP Select much less of a cash cow for indies. Continue reading “My Take-Away on Tardif”

Let’s Play (Blog) Dress-up!

Remember when you were a kid, parading around in Mom’s high heels and boa? Remember how much fun it was? Well, you can recapture that magic by dressing up your blog.

(And if you had so much fun dressing up in Mom’s heels and boa that you’re still doing it? Way too much information, dude.)

Nearly every writing-related website and blog hop has its own widget these days. Usually it’s a button – a picture with a link embedded, so that when you click on the pic, you go to the website. On Blogger, you can add widgets (Blogger calls them gadgets) on your layout page. For a pre-made button, copy the code from the site you want to link to. Then go to your layout page on your blog. Click “Add a gadget” and scroll down the list to “HTML/Javascript.” In the pop-up window, give your widget a title if you want (you don’t have to), paste in the code, and click Save. Then preview your blog. If you don’t like the position of your new button on your blog page, you can go back to layout and click-and-drag it somewhere else until you’re happy. Click “Save arrangement” on the layout page. You’re all set. Continue reading “Let’s Play (Blog) Dress-up!”