Celebrating Independent Authors
Writing advice and insights from the staff of Indies Unlimited.
Fiction authors get to play with all sorts of fun things that our English teachers hardly mentioned. One of those things is italics. Oh, sure, you were supposed to put book titles and stuff in italics when you created that bibliography for your term paper the morning you were supposed to turn it in. But italics are good for more than just entries in a bibliography.
Here are some uses for italics that you may not have gotten into in English class: Continue reading “Italics: When to Use Them”
One piece of indie author advice that gets passed around a lot is, “Join a multi-author boxed set.” According to some, joining a set can increase your visibility and get you in front of new readers and possibly earn some cash.
If a newbie writer is interested in boxed sets, what do you need to know? Here, we’ll go through everything a would-be boxed set author needs to know.
What is a multi-author boxed set? Continue reading “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Multi-Author Boxed Set”
What if you produced an eBook, and one word on almost every page, chosen at random, pulsated gently. What if you produced a paperback, and one random word in every thousand was a different colour.
I can just hear you now. “What a stupid thing to do!” “Why would anybody in their right mind do that?” and, “Why are you throwing distractions at the readers?”
And my answer is, “You’re doing it all the time.”
Book reviews are essential to writers. While we do our best to communicate the essence of our stories through our book descriptions, the reviews from readers tend to go deeper, revealing some of the more detailed layers of our stories to other potential readers. Just think back — do you read reviews of books you’re thinking of buying? And have you ever been swayed to buy/not buy after reading a review? Reviews are immensely important.
However, I’ve heard from lots of readers that they don’t leave reviews. Why? Continue reading “Writing a Book Review”