I read a lot posts about marketing and selling books. For the most part, they say the same thing. To succeed, a writer (indie or otherwise) needs to: Blog Have a website or “landing page” for his/her book Use social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) Develop a “platform” Build connections with a community of readers…
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I’ve been blogging here for six months now. I enjoy it–find it fun and challenging to think of topics, and it’s nice to run up against an idea and be able to put together a little informal essay on the topic and send it out for the world to see. But at the same time…
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A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of a Free Kindle promotion for Take Back Tomorrow, my book made up into the Top 5 on Amazon’s “Free Science Fiction” list. For about a day, I was hobnobbing with the likes of David Drake and Jules Verne in terms of downloads. And, absurdly, I heard…
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When Jon Stewart interviewed Christopher Walken on The Daily Show recently, he asked Walken if he’d ever had to give one of those fake 555 phone numbers while acting in a film. Stewart’s point was that every time a character uses one of those numbers, it pulls viewers out of the movie. These aren’t real…
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Here’s something that seems to be an accepted truth about and among indie writers: The e-book and indie publishing movements are good for writers, providing countless authors the opportunity to get their material “out there” when it would have been rejected out of hand by traditional publishers and agents. Two underlying arguments: 1. The publishing…
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I’ve been a bit quiet for the last couple of weeks: Christmas stuff, a shift in my schedule, and trying to finish the first draft of my follow-up to Dead Man’s Hand are all taking time away from blogging (and other things I should be doing). I ran into a little problem about halfway through…
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As another round of student papers (the final set for this year) gets ready to come at me, I’m gearing up for looking at more careless mistakes: seemingly random uses of their, there, and they’re; sloppy pronoun references; uses of “now and days” or “now in days” instead of nowadays. Then there are the students…
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I’m offering my science fiction novel, Strictly Analog, as a FREE download today at Amazon. Ted Lomax does his best to get by as a private detective in a society where almost nothing is private any more. He lives in a near-future California that has gained independence from the economically collapsed United States and where…
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My science fiction novel, Take Back Tomorrow, is available as a FREE download today at Amazon. Eddie Royce thinks he’s got things all figured out. He’s managed to cheat the system and gotten himself published in the sci fi pulps by “borrowing” plots from Shakespeare. He doesn’t mind being a cheat and a plagiarist as long…
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