Tag: author blogs

Luctor et Emergo

Trust the soup of your creativity.

I wasn’t sure how to start my last post of 2013 until one evening when I was watching a replay of game six of the Stanley Cup playoffs from 2004. The Calgary Flames were up on the Tampa Bay Lightning three games to two. My family had the luck and forethought to purchase four tickets before the 2004 playoffs began. I just knew we were going to win the Stanley Cup. Seeing the Lightning win game seven and the ensuing celebration with the traditional raising of the cup over the victors’ heads is something I will never forget. How did I know they were going to win? Continue reading “Luctor et Emergo”

Thriving After A Poor Review

Rutgers graduate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz gets trashed. I loved “Oscar Wao.”

It is late in the evening and you are about to make a mistake that will cause you to toss and turn all night. Sleep will elude you as you see the words dancing in front of your eyes, taunting you with their black and white judgment. There, defiling your Amazon author page, is a one-star review. Blood pounds in your veins as you read. You are naked, revealed to the world as a pretender, a poser, certainly not a writer. Your head drops to your desk, and you slip slowly into madness.

If this hasn’t happened to you yet, then you either haven’t been writing long enough or you lead a charmed existence. The one-star review is a rite of passage. No matter how great the writer, no matter how brilliant the masterpiece, someone will feel that the book was disappointing. Or they will hate it and advise others to skip it. Continue reading “Thriving After A Poor Review”

Not One Stinkin’ Dime

I decided to try an experiment. What would happen, I wondered, if I set-up a crowdfunding appeal on either Kickstarter or Indiegogo? I had written a post, Kickstart Your Indie Project, on Indies Unlimited in favor of Kickstarter, and my fellow IU writer Rich Meyer had written one, Mendicancy – The First Refuge of The Modern Indie, critiquing the idea of independent authors asking for money to fund their book costs. What better way to prove my point that people are happy to fund novels, and to gain visibility for my book at the same time, than to put together a crowdfunding campaign? Continue reading “Not One Stinkin’ Dime”

How To Make Money From Fan Fiction

I would love to be a fly on the wall at Amazon when they devise new programs like Kindle Worlds. They are capitalists to the core, and I’m not saying this is a bad thing. If there is a way to make a profit in the changing digital landscape they will figure it out.

Kindle Worlds is Amazon’s answer to the unsated need for quality fan fiction. Fan fiction, a written piece of work not officially sanctioned by the original creators, is tremendously popular. On the site http://www.fanfiction.net there are hundreds of communities where the obsessed fans can share their stories. The site http://harrypotterfanfiction.com contains over 80,000 stories about the world of Harry, Hogwarts, etc. The fan fiction movement has been growing at a rapid pace and the time was ripe for Amazon to come up with a way to cash in on the trend. Continue reading “How To Make Money From Fan Fiction”