Tag: indies

Tips From the Masters: Paul Levine

Paul Levine is one of my recently acquired tastes. He’s another one of those lawyers who started writing best-sellers just to piss us all off. Hey, do us writers start trying cases? But he won me over with a single title: Habeas Porpoise. You gotta love that.

And many love his two main series, Lassiter and Solomon & Lord. Lassiter is the slap-happy attorney who wouldn’t know what to do with an ambulance if he caught it, but can stipulate the wisecracks and rough stuff, Solomon and Lord are sort of odd-couple “Moonlighting” match-up of two counselors most unlikely to form a partnership. But a lot of fun. I really like the sloppy, always-in-danger-of-being-disbarred-and-unfriended heroes in both series, and envy the way he can juggle three or four storylines, each one always hanging its butt over a cliff as we segue to one of the other scenarios. Continue reading “Tips From the Masters: Paul Levine”

Who’s got the power…!

Now that I stuck that neat little ear-worm in your mind…

I read a blog just recently that touched on that very subject, though. (Thanks Ashley Barron. http://bit.ly/HN4BzU )

It seems one of our failings as self/indie published authors is that people perceive us as not having any leadership or defined standards, and that’s why we’re not taken very seriously.  We’re sort of the Wild West of the publishing world.  I’m okay with that but I would both argue the point, and beg to differ.  True, there are a large number of Indie writers for whom proper English, spelling and grammar are somewhat alien. There is a valid argument to be made there in many cases. If there was any benefit to traditional publishing it was that – it filtered out the thousands of wannabe writers who simply didn’t want to do the work.  (Yes, it’s okay to break the rules. First know what the rules are.) Continue reading “Who’s got the power…!”

Ed’s Casual Friday: On Hero Worship

Super HeroesBy the title, you might think that this is going to be a post about heroic characters in books, particularly as I myself write mainly in the Epic (or at least, really long) Fantasy genre. But that is not what this is.

Instead, these are my ruminations on a question that’s been rolling around in my head over the last eleven months or so, in the time since I first uploaded a book to KDP and discovered I had become something called an “Indie.” The question presented itself after wandering around threads in various places with names like “How to avoid Indie books,” and in the wake of the unabashed joy some expressed on the Kindle Forums when all “spamming” writers were herded off to the “Meet Our Authors” enclosure (smallpox-laced blankets now available). The question, basically, goes something like this: Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: On Hero Worship”