As a self-publishing author, you are Chairman of the Publishing Board and Chief Operating Officer, deciding for yourself, by yourself when to hit the publish button. But what informs your conclusion that today is The Day? One of the biggest chores is to tidy up first. Author Deborah Niemann comments on the trials and tribulations [...]

As a writer, I’m constantly coming up with new worlds, new characters and new storylines to fill the novels that I write. I find it can be somewhat difficult keeping a good mental picture of some of my characters – especially minor ones, and setting can be difficult to keep straight too, considering I make [...]

So when will we start to see REAL ebooks appear on the market? You know the ebooks that take advantage of their digital environment. Ebooks that have been rendered to improve the reader’s ebook experience. As the number of ebook devices explodes into the book reader’s world, the readers are going to expect more. This [...]

The Paper Rats deconstruct some common writer stereotypes. About: Authors  R.J. Keller and Kristen J. Tsetsi like to make videos when they should be writing. Their show is called “Inside The Writers’ Studio.” They are Paper Rats.

A couple of weeks ago, I was cornered by a publisher after an appearance. The point of her rant was how much she could do for me as a publisher. She made her point while poking me in the chest saying, “You should be writing. You shouldn’t be publishing. You should be writing.” But things don’t always work out as we have planned.

By “controversial” I mean, “books I can’t imagine traditional publishers taking a risk on in this dicey economy.” Waiting for Karl Rove is one of those books. It’s irreverent satire, chock full of politically incorrect content, and the “characters” (aside from ourselves) are public figures, mainly in the political arena. Not to mention that it’s [...]

I recently had the honor of reading the first installment in Tom Barczak’s new short story series, Awakening Evarun. If you’ve never heard of Tom Barczak, I can understand. Awakening Evarun is his first ‘published’ piece of work, but I found this debut piece of fantasy to be quite entertaining. I had the opportunity to [...]

Self-publishing and ebooks have carried a stigma from day one by naysayers and the traditional publishing world. They forecast the book publishing pipe filled with poor and unreadable digital content because of the self-publishing ebook author. There has been an increase in errors and poor formatting introduced by the new digital books compared to their [...]

For nine years I worked for an online publicity firm for authors. The company was one of the first, if not the first, dedicated solely to online publicity. When I joined them, in 2000, none of the major publishing houses had online publicity departments. Some of them didn’t yet have company email or Web sites.  [...]

People are impressed with anyone who has completed the task of writing a whole book. There are thousands, if not millions, of people who have sat down to a keyboard to start writing a book but never finished it. Those who do go the distance make a commitment that goes beyond the first writing session.