Why Proofreading Matters

Last month, the Evil Mastermind had a fun post called Typopotamus, where he discussed typos and some strategies for eradicating them from your writing, including hiring a good editor and proofer. In one of the comments author Jeff Dawson had the following to say:

“Indie readers sometimes spend too much time looking for errors and what nots. This is good and yet bad at the same time. The good part: they are catching errors writers, beta readers and editors are missing. It provides a chance to quickly make the changes and upload a new version. The bad: some readers and reviewers are focusing on miniscule problems and bashing an otherwise good read.” Continue reading “Why Proofreading Matters”

Sneak Peek: Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their Mistakes

Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their MistakesToday we have a sneak peek from the memoir by CJ Rock: Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their Mistakes.

Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their Mistakes recounts a horrific journey at the hands of physicians who repeatedly prescribed endless doses of strong narcotics in an attempt to quell agonizing pain. Caught in a tangled web of ineffective treatment plans and procedures for a decade, renowned specialists from Denver, Las Vegas, and Chicago viewed her not as a patient, but as a human guinea pig-nothing more than an experimental subject. Names have been changed; it was not to protect the guilty.

Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their Mistakes is available from Smashwords and Barnes and Noble.

And now, an excerpt from Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their Mistakes…

Continue reading “Sneak Peek: Doctors Don’t Always Bury Their Mistakes”

Honesty and the Self-Publisher

Raymond Chandler

A Guest Post
by George Copeland

When Raymond Chandler wrote that poor writers are dishonest without knowing it, he had no reason to suspect there’d one day be a militantly tenacious army of them slinging their stuff with the ad hoc marketing arm of social media. Bad writing has always been with us, but what’s new in its current form is the rise of a concomitant philistine ethic, a seeming celebration of the act of writing itself, not of a more deliberate and circumspect writing culture in search of excellence for its own sake. It’s a touchy subject. Bring the problem up in a room of indies and you’ll get the hard stare of rough men sniffing out the double agent in their midst. Continue reading “Honesty and the Self-Publisher”

Beyond KDP Select

I joined Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select in February, and ran a free promotion. I was one of the lucky ones. It was early, and the magic hadn’t faded yet. Through KDP’s free promotion, I managed to get my book to a whole bunch of readers, over 50,000 of them the first time around. Since then I’ve been trying to re-conjure the same magic with varying degrees of success. In this post I’ll tell you what worked and what didn’t work for me, before and after KDP. These results are based on the fact that I have one book published; authors with a series of books or multiple books have had different results, as reported in Rich Meyer’s excellent post here. Continue reading “Beyond KDP Select”