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.”
Tag: Writing
Fifteen Things NOT to Say in Response to a Book Review
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”
Honesty and the Self-Publisher
A Guest Post
by George Copeland
When Raymond Chandler wrote that poor writers are dishonest without knowing it, he had no reason to suspect there’d one day be a militantly tenacious army of them slinging their stuff with the ad hoc marketing arm of social media. Bad writing has always been with us, but what’s new in its current form is the rise of a concomitant philistine ethic, a seeming celebration of the act of writing itself, not of a more deliberate and circumspect writing culture in search of excellence for its own sake. It’s a touchy subject. Bring the problem up in a room of indies and you’ll get the hard stare of rough men sniffing out the double agent in their midst. Continue reading “Honesty and the Self-Publisher”
I Love To Write Day: How it All Began
Guest post by John Riddle
In the spring of 2002 I was driving from my home in Delaware to the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writer’s conference in Asheville, North Carolina, where I was scheduled to speak My oldest daughter, Bonnie, was in the car with me; she was a college student at the time and interested in attending some of the workshops. Even though she was already a published writer, she knew the value of learning more about the craft of writing.
As I was passing through the Richmond, Virginia, area, I was thinking about a magazine interview I had to do the following week. Normally I am the one interviewing someone and then writing an article, but this time I was going to be the subject of the article. Writer’s Digest magazine wanted to do a profile of me, highlighting my success in writing for so many Websites over the past few months. Continue reading “I Love To Write Day: How it All Began”