Author: Valerie Douglas

Marketing – A novel experience

Valerie Douglas

You see, the thing is, marketing ain’t art. It just isn’t. Writing is art. One is left brain (marketing), the other right brain (writing). For most people anyway… except those lefties. Now, according to some measures, some folks say I’m reasonably successful at this whole writing thing. Am I getting rich at it? No. Could I make a living at it? I am, like any other small business person, for the moment. Will I still be making a living at it in a year? I sure hope so. But make no mistake about it, writing is also a business, and Indie writing even more so. All I can tell you is what has been working for me.

One of the first and best pieces of advice I ever read – and one of the ones most ignored is Continue reading “Marketing – A novel experience”

Glass Houses

Valerie Douglas

I live in a glass house it sometimes seems and some people sure do like to throw stones. I’m a writer, you see, and unlike a painter almost everyone thinks they can do what I do.  After all, we all learned to write in grade school. Even worse, I’m an independent writer and people make assumptions about that. Personally, I don’t have any complaints there, it’s part of the job, but lately it seems almost habit for some people to add the line ‘it needed and editor for spelling and gramatical errors’ to every indie writer review. (That, by the way, is a direct quote from a review.) Continue reading “Glass Houses”

Publishers – Writer Beware

Valerie Douglas

“Publishers are just middlemen. That’s all. If artists could remember that more often, they’d save themselves a lot of aggravation. ” – Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative

Ah, the lure of the publisher, the allure of the printed book sitting there in your hands, beckoning to you. Isn’t that the stuff of every author’s dreams? An e-book is great but don’t we all long to hold a book in our hands with our name below the title? I know I did. There’s also the sense of security and the idea that maybe we won’t have to work quite as hard, that they’ll pick up some of the load of marketing. Continue reading “Publishers – Writer Beware”

Words, and how to love them…

Author Valerie Douglas
Author Valerie Douglas

If any topic was foreordained to write, it was this one.  (No, I didn’t mean preordained, although I could have used that as well. *grins*)

First I saw this quote from Roy Blount, Jr. – “The last time somebody said, ‘I find I can write much better with a word processor.’, I replied, ‘They used to say the same thing about drugs.’ ”

Then I opened a lovely e-mail from a fan, the last line of which said, “Your book was fun and refreshingly intelligent in the genre (erotica), and therefore it not only made me happy to read it, but kind of renewed my faith that you can still write romance novels using wonderful words like ‘sere’.'” Wasn’t that wonderful? I wonder what she’ll do when she finds out that in the sequel the heroine is a physics professor who quotes string theory to explain magic? (And sere is a wonderful word, isn’t it?) Continue reading “Words, and how to love them…”