Celebrating Independent Authors
A guest post
by Alana Woods
I won’t keep you long but this is a lesson every yet-to-publish author really should read.
It’s a lesson in doing your homework before committing yourself publishing-wise.
My first published book AUTOMATON went to print in 2001. I used my own name—Alana Woods—because I‘ve never seen the point of using a pseudonym. I want everyone, and I mean everyone, to know that it was ME, yes ME, who wrote it. Continue reading “The One (But Not Only) Alana Woods”
Let me start by outlining my own history of involvement in the wacky world of online everything. Before March of 2011, my presence in Virtual World consisted of an e-mail account I checked once a week or so. If I remembered. I usually didn’t. March 2011, however, was when I first hit that “Publish” button over at KDP, and I figured I had better dive into the digital world, seeing as I was trying to sell digital books. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: How not to sell (me) a book.”
This article makes me feel a little weird because it runs counter to a longstanding peeve I’ve had with internet writing information. Namely the widespread impression that anybody with a keyboard is equally qualified to tell other people about how to write and publish, whether or not their degree of knowledge on that subject is greater than or equal to the average ass of the average rat.
I know of two blogs in which 13 year old writers give advice on how to write novels. Dozens with invaluable insights on writing from high school kids. How many more with scintillating tips from people who just wrote their first book, or are going to finish it any day now, except blogging writing advice takes up so much of their time? Many of the newbie forums like Writers Digest are packed with total wannabes who have no sense of irony when it comes to contradicting published authors, even best-selling authors. The equality of information seems to reduce experience to the quotidian.
You can imagine how fond I am of this sort of thing. Continue reading “EX-PERTISE”
This is not a hate post, or at least it’s not solely a hate post. 😉
Just for myself, I really don’t believe an author has any business saying anything to a reviewer in public. Let’s be clear: Readers do not review books on behalf of writers. The function of a review is not to service an author’s ego. Reviews are a way for someone who has read a book to tell people who are thinking of reading it whether or not they would recommend doing so. That’s pretty much it. It is a reader-to-reader equation which, I personally think, the writer of the book in question should keep out of altogether. Continue reading “Fifteen Things NOT to Say in Response to a Book Review”