Taking Your Pulse – A BookPulse Tutorial

Quick heads up: Since I only uploaded my one book, I didn’t anticipate a problem with this. Apparently, you can’t upload more than one book unless you have a separate Facebook page for each one. This is important information BookPulse might want to place front and centre, just sayin’.

There are some things I am extremely lazy about. Unfortunately, one of those things tends to be self-promotion. I am not good at it and have no great love for it. Actually, it’s worse than that: I actively dislike it. But we’re constantly told (let’s be honest, “harangued” might be a better word) that it’s an essential part of the writer’s toolkit… and not only independent writers but those poor captives of the publishing industry, the traditional writers, too. I kid, of course: we are all brothers and sisters of The Mighty Word, and “Kumbaya” sounds exactly the same when sung by my gruel-spattered co-minions as it does in the lofty yet slightly sterile halls of Simon & Schuster… although the soft moans of existential despair accompanying the former can be a little disconcerting.

But I digress. As I tend to do. Probably because I can already feel the ennui descending as my main topic looms like a grey, haunted, driverless engine on a fog-blanketed night.

So. Once in a while, I break out of my truculent, indolent recalcitrance and stumble on something potentially useful to our collective writerly aspirations. (Apparently, I also break out the Thesaurus.) Continue reading “Taking Your Pulse – A BookPulse Tutorial”

Pimping

I am going to share a very important secret with you. It is part of what makes IU successful. It helps me sell books. It helps my friends. It helps the community. And you can do it from the comfort of your own bathroom (or kitchen…whatever). It’s called pimping, and you don’t even need a feather hat (it helps though).

Continue reading “Pimping”

Goodbye For Now, Kindle Select

I have officially taken Joe Café out of the madness that is Kindle Select. I went in with reservations, and I came out with my reservations cancelled…or with legal gambling casinos on them. Or something. A lot of electrons or whatever got moved around. No doubt about that.

The deal with Kindle Select is that you give the digital rights for your book to Amazon and they ‘promote’ your book while it is in the program. You get five free promotion days for every ninety (free for everybody). Prime members can borrow for free at any time. Yadda. Yadda.

I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do. I also don’t like not selling very many books, so I took my laptop to the crossroads and the rest is history.

Continue reading “Goodbye For Now, Kindle Select”

Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…

Yes, I totally stole this post title from a Counting Crows album. I’m an old guy, so sue me. No wait, please don’t.

All last month, my Ed’s Casual Friday column here at IU consisted of a four-part look at one-star reviews on a hundred novels regarded as the “best” literature has to offer. The astute among you may have noticed that doing those four articles allowed me to write a full month of posts all at once, and then basically not show up for the rest of July. My lack of presence was not exclusive to IU, but to all the “social media outlets” around which us writerly types tend to congregate. Facebook pages, boards, groups, sites, lists, on and on, ad nauseum. I largely stayed off line for all of July, and I didn’t really do any writing, either. After finishing the fourth book in a series and releasing it at the end of June, before launching into book five I took a couple Mental Health days that turned into a week, and then the full month. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: August and Everything After…”