Book Brief: Believing Again

Believing Again - A Tale of two ChristmasesBelieving Again: A Tale Of Two Christmases
by Martin Crosbie
Genre of this Book: Contemporary Romance
Word count: 37,000 words

Two weeks before Christmas, Becky gets what she always wanted. James proposes to her and promises that they’ll have lots of Christmases together.

When Stephen returns home after serving overseas all he wants is to spend Christmas with his new wife, Myra. All he can think about is her touch, her warmth.

A compelling story of two couples, traveling their separate paths, building their lives together, until one day a secret is revealed that changes all of their lives.

And, afterward, nothing will ever be the same again.

Believing Again: A Tale of two Christmases is a heart-warming tale of love, commitment, family, and, of course, Christmas.

This book is available from Amazon. Continue reading “Book Brief: Believing Again”

How Genre Labeling Keeps Some Books from Being Discovered

Guest post
by Sylvia Engdahl

Fans of my past novels are sometimes surprised to learn that I have become an indie author. I’m known to librarians as the author of six successful Young Adult science fiction novels, including an award-winner, that were first published by Atheneum in the 1970s and have all been reissued in hardcover as well as paperback by different publishers in the 21st century. They are enjoyed by adults as well as teens, and three of them were reprinted by a small press as adult science fiction. So why did I publish my recent adult science fiction trilogy, now concluded with Defender of the Flame, myself? Continue reading “How Genre Labeling Keeps Some Books from Being Discovered”

Tell Me a Story

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it seems like every fifth indie author I meet is writing some kind of genre fiction – sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, romance….

Oh, wait. Apparently I’m not that far off the mark. The Guardian ran a story this week about how indie books accounted for more than twenty percent of the genre e-books sold in the UK last year. The stats come from Bowker Market Research, which ought to know a thing or two about book sales and distribution.

Bowker says trad-pubbed books still dominate when dead-tree volumes are included – just two percent of all books sold in the UK last year were published by indies. But when only e-book sales are tallied, the percentage of indie books pops up fast. And when you look at only genre fiction, we indies own a healthy slice of the marketplace. Continue reading “Tell Me a Story”

If You’re Going to Steal…

I admit it: when I ran across this article in Salon, I giggled a little at the title: “Most Contemporary Literary Fiction Is Terrible”. In it, J. Robert Lennon refutes a column by another writer who suggests that young literary fiction writers should be reading the stories that are getting published in their genre, and familiarizing themselves with the best anthologies of short fiction, the literary magazines, and so on.

I giggled because I am a reformed literary fiction writer, a proud graduate of a master’s program in fiction writing where literary fiction was touted as the only really, truly decent fiction to be writing. When I was in grad school, I read a bunch of these publications on a fairly regular basis – sometimes for class, sometimes on my own. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how some of the stories had gotten published. Maybe the writing was pretty good, but the ending didn’t make sense – things would sort of wind down in a burst of lyricism without resolving any part of the plot. Or, more often than not, the writing wasn’t any better than the stuff we were turning out in class – yet these writers had gotten published while we were collecting rejection slips. Continue reading “If You’re Going to Steal…”