There is just enough detail to bring a face, a room, or a street to life without over burdening the reader with too much dull description. Continue reading Bringing Fresh Light to the Japanese ‘Enlightenment’
the irony of all this is that Amazon are constantly pestering me to post reviews of the books I purchase there! In that instance they don’t seem to care that the author might have reviewed one of my books in the past. Continue reading Indicted by the Goodreads Police
Just recently I have started getting e-mails from people offering to review my book(s). Of course, they want to be paid and I would never pay for a review – even from a prestigious organisation like Kirkus. For one thing, Amazon will punish you if they find out. Nor would I ask for payment in return for a review. But paying for reviews is only one way self-publishers and independently published authors can waste loads-a-money. Here, courtesy of Anne R Allen and Nate Hoffelder are some more: How to Waste Money When Self-Publishing a Book Continue reading Some Ways to Waste Money
the narrative arts – theatre, film and literature – are the windows through which the rest of us are enabled to experience the lives of others. If those lives are miss-represented then it creates the cultural attitudes that drive some men to behave inappropriately toward women Continue reading Saturday Sound Off – #METO and the difficulty of creating believable characters.
Submissions are open at Electric Literature for personal essays. They pay $50. But you only have the next ten days in which to submit. Read the guidelines here: https://electricliterature.com/submissions-are-open-for-general-and-critical-essays-b7e9ac3aa18a Continue reading Calling Non-Fiction Writers
The diamonds, the strong stories, are well worth the cost of the book alone. Continue reading Honest Reviews are Like Gold
If you thought being a writer was just a matter of sitting down and putting your thoughts onto paper, this is for you. There’s a lot more to being an author, especially if you lack the backing of one of the big publishing houses. Even then, you still have to do a lot of this other stuff. Source: What does it mean to be an Indie Author? Continue reading What does it mean to be an Indie Author?
Originally posted on lucinda E Clarke:
I had a dream last night, not as earth shattering as Martin Luther King, I’m not that famous and important, and frankly although I was standing on a stage too, no one was listening to me. Sad isn’t it? Now most of us might dream of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature and then being interviewed on a national Breakfast Show, simpering as the interviewer gushed about our brilliant book – right? Well, my dream wasn’t like that. The stage morphed into a television studio and my interview went something like this: INT: So,… Continue reading I HAD A DREAM
Originally posted on Kristen Lamb's Blog:
As we careen toward the New Year, many emerging writers have a goal to finally publish that novel and I hope you do! But the arts are kind of strange. We often get fixated on the creative side, without really understanding the business side of our business. The publishing world is still in massive upheaval and it is a Digital Wild West. Old rules are falling away and new ones are emerging, but still? Knowledge is power. In my book Rise of the Machines—Human Authors in a Digital World, I go into a… Continue reading The Hard Truth About Publishing—What Writers & Readers NEED to Know
A few days ago one of my Facebook friends shared a meme that listed all the towns and cities in Britain that have Muslim mayors. The clear message was that this is a trend that ought to worry us. I thought of that message whilst reading Paul Berman’s 2004 polemic Terror and Liberalism. He has a lot to say about the complacency of Liberals and their failure to recognise the true nature of past manifestations of totalitarianism. It is, he acknowledges, easy, perhaps too easy, to attribute the actions of Islamist terrorists to some rational cause. A reaction, perhaps, to … Continue reading Terror and Liberalism: a book review
Frank Parker's author site 