Writing

I Take Thee … Making That Commitment to Your Book

“Congratulations on your book.”

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.

The first hurdle that most encounter is what I call the Forty-Page Block. It’s not always page forty. Sometimes it’s page twenty-five or page one hundred and twenty-five. Whichever page number it is, at some point there’s a block that separates the authors from the wannabes.

At this hurdle, many writers will simply throw in the towel […]

2020-02-21T06:46:19+02:00June 16th, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: , |

What’s the Story?

When, a few years ago, I started writing a book, friends would ask me what it was about. I’d say it was about a lot of things – a world where no one believes in anything, conspiracy theory, drugs, the lost dreams of the Sixties and Seventies – but that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. They wanted to know what the story was. In truth, there wasn’t much of one. I thought I could write a novel based on ideas rather than character and story.

I may have been extraordinarily naïve, but it took me a while to come […]

2011-05-24T12:51:40+02:00May 24th, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: |

Building Your Book Audience

(Excerpt from The Indie Journey: Secrets to Writing Success by Scott Nicholson)

There’s a common belief among writers that the route through New York and then to America’s bookshelves is the best way to build an audience. Certainly, there are plenty of advantages to letting someone else worry about all that paperwork, especially when they are earning most of the money.

But I don’t think we can automatically assume that being on store shelves is going to grow your audience better than self-publishing. In fact, I believe the exact opposite. I believe anyone wrapped up under contract for the next […]

2011-05-18T12:30:35+02:00May 18th, 2011|Categories: Book Excerpt, Features|Tags: |

We Work For Money

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay” – Mark Twain

There are a lot of writers who attempt to produce “art.” It is polished. Loved. Studied in-depth and then gently caressed into the beautiful flower the author has nurtured in their heart.

But as any good gardener knows, you can’t pop a hot-house orchid outside on the first night of spring. You have to harden it. Put it out a little at a time. Get it ready to face the grim realities of wind and weather. Granted you don’t do so with orchids, but you get the […]

2020-02-20T13:17:43+02:00April 8th, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: |

Write what YOU want to read…or watch.

In my youth, I was surrounded by books and movies (I even worked in a dollar theater for a time that showed second-run movies.), so I guess you could say that “stories” are what helped me grow up.  Even when I was in college at the U.S. Naval Academy, I was a history major, primarily because the classes were like sitting through advanced story-time, at least in my opinion.  I wrote the requisite papers for school, but it wasn’t until my graduate work that I really caught the writing bug.

I wrote a paper on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps […]

2011-03-30T15:01:57+02:00March 30th, 2011|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: |

eBook Authors: Use The POWER of Links

One of the first things an eBook Author must learn to use is the power of links. Whether you’re creating your ebook, setting up your web site, writing a blog or joining a group on the Internet, hyperlinks are what make things happen. The more clicks, the more chances of your success. The synergy created by links is a powerful thing.

With that said, where should you put links? The following is a list of possible opportunities for linking.

Your eBook Author Page

Let’s start with your ebook. You should always have an author page with links to everything in […]

2019-02-18T12:22:05+02:00March 24th, 2011|Categories: Member Blog, Resources|Tags: , |

The Writing Process

Writing takes me to new heightsOne 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.

First I don’t sit down and say to myself, “Self, you must come up with an […]

2011-03-03T15:26:28+02:00March 3rd, 2011|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: , |

Book Publishing: A Tale of Two Authors

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 author had actually added value to the eBook.

I was struck by the parallel of the Dickens novel and the struggle between the French peasants and the aristocrats and the current book industry. Dickens’s initial paragraph reads like he is writing a blog on the […]

2019-02-18T12:24:05+02:00January 19th, 2011|Categories: Member Blog|Tags: |
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