One of the things I love best about DVDs are the special features. I love learning how and why a movie was made as much as (and maybe more than) the the movie itself. The same goes for books. I love learning about the process that went on from conception to publication and all the steps and changes that happened along. So in that spirit, I thought I’d share my own writing process for those who are curious about where my stories come from.

So, why do free eBooks exist? Why would any person go to the trouble of typing so many words on a page, then spend money to create a cover for that electronic book, only to give it away to people with no expectation of a monetary reward?

It’s because we need reviews.

Andres Dubois, the Welcome speaker had asked the sea of 500 writers how many had found their agent that year…he waited for the response, scanning the audience. Five writers raised their hands.

Longtime Los Angeles indie rock musician Bill See just released his new coming of age “docu-drama” memoir “33 Days.”  This is a recent quick Q & A with him from his Miracle Mile home. Q. How did you come to self-publish? Did you try to get published traditionally? A. D.I.Y. is in my blood from [...]

photo credit: gruntzooki I’ve been seeing a lot of conversation going on lately about self-publishing and how it relates to emerging writers. This is a topic that I’m quite interested in, having both considered the possibility of self-publishing and applied the term ‘emerging’ to myself and my writing. So I thought I’d take a moment [...]

Sometimes when I am Google Reading in the World of the eBook Author, I come across a post that takes me back in time. A post that brings back memories of my early business career. Oh, the world of Peter Drucker, Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle. Daniel Hall did that with a blog on [...]

Zoe Who? A few years ago I took some time off from writing and publishing. When I returned to the scene in early 2009, I found the landscape had changed. Self-publishing was more accepted. The stigma was starting to wear thin. I joined Twitter, realizing that it was an excellent way to link up with [...]

The R-word just won’t go away. I’m talking about rejection. Writers know it well. As an independent author, rejection is just a painful part of the game. I didn’t mail my manuscript to a hundreds of publishers like other authors, but I did mail it to several over the years. And, well, you know the [...]

As an independent author who also publishes his own work, one part of the process to bring books to market is the creation of appropriate covers. From what I have read on message boards, this seems to be one of the most daunting tasks for many writers. In addition, it is also one of the [...]

In the last month or so I started researching the controversy over the sale of the eBook A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Amazon pulling a copy with a price from its store and substituting their own free copy. I was curious about the rendering of the replaced book and whether the [...]