Publetariat

In observance of Halloween, Publetariat is going dark—and spooky!—for the night of Sunday, October 31st, which means no new content will be posted to the site until Monday night at 6pm Pacific Standard Time. Have fun, drive safe, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow night. (no need to click through – this is the end of the post)

I’ve been without an internet or phone for two days. As I’m writing this blog post, I have a connection but it keeps coming and going. Seems the wind gusting up to 50 miles an hour is interfering so I’m making this short.

I’ve always liked to read westerns and watch cowboy shows. Maybe because I was raised that way. In the fifties my parents took us to western movies in a vacant lot during the summer. We sat on hard benches on Saturday evenings and enjoyed every minute. Since westerns were the only movies we went to see I didn’t realize there were any other kind for a long time.

When I worked with a woman that loves westerns, she encouraged me to write one. That’s when I wrote The Dark Wind Howls Over Mary – my first Stringbean Hooper Western. I didn’t think there would be another one until the same woman asked me to continue with Stringbean Hooper’s story. She even gave me a story line to follow. All right, so here it is the book she is waiting for – Small Feet’s Many Moon Journey – ISBN 1453899448.

Back Cover

Looking forward to a journey across country to San Jose, California, Stringbean Hooper and his wife, Theo, have no idea just how much trouble they can get into. Theo considers this trip their honeymoon and a change to be at her brother, Brock’s wedding. Stringbean has been in one place too long and is eager to see country he hasn’t seen before.

Stringbean gets them lost in Indian territory and upsets the Indians. The couple escapes a flood, a mad bear, spends the night in a run down cabin with a woman crazy with prairie fever and more.

Through it all, Stringbean meets the challenges with his usual sense of humor, but he notices as the journey drags on Theo is getting crankier by the minute. He sure hopes she lightens up by the time they get to her brother’s wedding in San Jose. It didn’t help him any to have warning advice freely handed out to Theo, known as Small Feet, by Indian shaman Matilda Vinci. The old woman warns Theo to be careful while traveling with Stringbean who’s Sioux name is Walking Dead. He might get her killed.

Now I’m waiting until November 1 to start my next book in the NaNoWriMo contest. This will be the third book in the Nurse Hal Among The Amish Series I’m working on during the contest. So because I am in earnest this year about getting my 50,000 words in, I’ll be working on that instead of posting to my blog. Last year was my first time in the contest. I found getting to the finish line was harder than I thought it would be. Too many days I was away from the computer, and I just couldn’t catch up so this time I’m prepared to stick with writing. I’ll let you know how I did the last of November.

This post, by Mary W. Walters, originally appeared on her The Militant Writer on 1/5/10.

(This essay was first published in a slightly different form in The Rumpus in Oct. ’09.)

Wise employers have learned that in order to maximize results in today’s fast-paced work environments they must tailor their managerial skills to the dispositions of their various employees. A proliferation of books, articles, workshops and on-line seminars exist to help human-resources personnel understand the nature of those who work for them, and develop appropriate individual strategies to stimulate productivity.

Until now, one entire class of worker has been overlooked in these analyses: the undercover writers—to be specific, those poets, dramatists and creators of literary fiction and non-fiction who have for one reason or another eschewed careers in academe, and whose parents and/or spouses and/or children are no longer willing to support them. Unable to make a living from creative enterprise, they have been forced to conceal their true vocations in order to seek employment among the rank and file.

The men and women who make up this segment of the workplace population are intelligent and crafty, and they have very little to lose. Indeed they could be dangerous if they worked together—but fortunately it is not their disposition to operate in groups. It is not due to any danger to the employing organization that managers will find it of value to identify such people on their staffs; in fact, most writers will contribute knowledge, creativity, experience and a range of other skills and talents to their jobs, almost in spite of themselves. However, these people can best be encouraged to maximize their workplace contributions when managers know who they are, and are able to tailor administrative strategies to suit their particular strengths and weaknesses. This guide is intended to assist them.

Identification pre-employment

Creative writers can be difficult to detect during job interviews. Over time, many of them have built entire careers as fallback positions for their art, some even having acquired degrees in interesting areas of specialization like astrophysics or early-Victorian stage design. As result, they can be found not only in writing-related occupations, but in fields that range from railway maintenance to health care. However, they have learned that it does not suit their short-term goals to explain to job-selection committees that they intend to support a highly time-consuming writing vocation, quite aside from themselves and any dependents they may have, on the proceeds of the position for which they are applying.

Read the rest of the post on Mary W. Walters‘ The Militant Writer.

This post, by John Betcher, originally appeared on his Self-Publishing Central blog on 10/8/10.

I apologize for the long time between posts here at Self-Publishing Central. I was out of town for a week. My "day job" has been busy. I’ve been doing a lot of editing on a new manuscript. AND I’ve been preparing for my very first Blog Tour.

Although my tour won’t start until November, I’ve already learned a lot about blog touring, and I thought I’d share it here.

You can do it yourself for free.

If you are enterprising . . . and/or short of funds . . . you can set up your own blog tour. Here are some thoughts for your consideration.

The main objective of a blog tour is to promote yourself and your book to an audience that might not otherwise know you exist. To that end, your first job in setting up a tour is to identify blogs with followers who might be part of your target audience.

Be creative. Use Google. Check to see who the blogs have featured recently. Look for another author in your genre and see if they have a blog tour schedule posted. Maybe you can take a similar tour route. Quality of blogs is more important than quantity.

Once you’ve identified the blogs for your tour, you’ll need to provide the bloggers with the information they want, in the form in which they want it. Some bloggers want a guest post. In that case, you write a blog post on a subject agreed between you and the host blogger.
 

Read the rest of the post on John Betcher’s Self-Publishing Central blog.

Of course it is, but is it the most escapist? A recent blog post by Anne Hamilton (which was part of Helen Lowe’s blog tour for the launch of The Heir Of Night) got me thinking about this subject again. In that post, Anne says:

When I was growing up, SFF was generally derided as ‘escapist’. I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘realistic’ fiction is far more deserving of that title. It’s ephemeral and transient, rarely lasting to the end of a decade. It doesn’t transcend its own culture or time or deal with anything beyond the superficial. However the best of SFF – fantasy, in particular – engages in a struggle with name and thus with identity and destiny.

That’s a great quote. But how accurate is she? I’d suggest that she’s revealed a rarely considered truth.

She says that non-genre fiction, or ‘realistic’ fiction as she calls it, is “ephemeral and transient, rarely lasting to the end of a decade”. It’s true that non-genre fiction, slice of life stories, often date very quickly. But I dispute that that makes them any less relevant. Take a classic like To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee as an example. That book is a masterpiece, a beautifully crafted story with fantastic characters. Pretty much everything about it is still relevant today and it explores some very important concepts. I don’t think a book like that is transient or short lived. I do think it’s escapism though, however much it makes us look at ourselves and question how we might react in a similar situation.

Other non-genre work might date and age more quickly, becoming largely irrelevant beyond an interesting peek into days gone by. Science fiction, however, is way more likely to date very quickly. At the speed of technological advancement we’re currently experiencing, you can start writing a sci-fi novel and the concept is no longer sci-fi by the time you type “The End”.

So why am I suggesting that Anne Hamilton is right? Most non-genre fiction is looking at the trials and tribulations of people whose lives are very similar to our own. They live in the same world, the same time, more or less, and have similar concerns. When we read about those lives it’s pure escapism because those people aren’t us. We might wonder what we’d do in a similar situation, but that’s about it.

When you start to look at SFF, particularly fantasy, you open up doors not available in contemporary non-genre fiction. You get to explore the human condition within a mythic framework where anything goes. As much as stories like this are the wildest kind of escapism, they also serve to hold a mirror up to humanity as a whole. While a story about a white suburban family’s social wranglings might make a white suburban reader consider their own life, a good science fiction story will make us consider humanity as a species. Good SFF takes us on a journey not only of personal exploration but beyond ourselves to our culture and identity.

Of course, non-genre fiction can do these things too, but nothing does it so well or with as much scope as SFF.

Ever since people could speak they told stories. Stories about real people was gossip. Stories about life were myths. Myths are the original fantasy epics. Every race has its creation myths – these great mysterious stories from beyond the human, trying to answer the massive questions about why we’re here and where we come from. Of course, just because we can ask those questions doesn’t mean there’s an answer. Religion is built on the concept that there’s an answer for every question we can ask, and there’s nothing more human than that kind of arrogance. And religion is just where people take a lucky dip of all the great myths and decide completely arbitrarily (though usually by birth) that one is the absolute truth while all the others are funny stories. Which is astounding. But I digress.

With mythology we can escape the boundaries of real life and explore those great big questions far more deeply than we ever can with non-genre fiction. That’s what makes non-genre stuff pure escapism while fantasy is much more. SFF often addresses far bigger questions and concerns than non-genre fiction ever does. Of course, the lines are very blurred and all fiction is escapism. Good fiction is escapism that makes you think. Nothing makes you think more, in my opinion, than good SFF. As Anne Hamilton said, it “engages in a struggle with name and thus with identity and destiny”.

Caveat: I know this is likely to be a fairly contentious post, with people citing many examples to back up one side of the argument or the other. Most arguments find their truths somewhere in the middle, but bring it on. Leave your comments with your thoughts. I’ve written this with a purely rambling mind while I thought about the subject and I’m very open to others’ thoughts on it.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

This post, from Douglas Bonneville, originally appeared on the bonfx site on 8/11/10. There’s some excellent guidance here for anyone laying out a print publication.

When it comes to making font combinations, there are principles and methods, but no absolutes. You can’t apply all the principles or ideas listed here at the same time. Just peruse this list of ideas and see what strikes you as interesting, and then pursue creating your own interesting typeface pairs!

In no particular order of importance…

1. Combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. The farther apart the typeface styles are, as a generic but not infallible guideline, the more luck you’ll have. Fonts that are too similar look bad together. Go for concord or contrast but avoid the murky middle ground where all you end up with conflict. Put Garamond and Sabon together to see what “murky” means. Or try Helvetica and Univers together, which is just as bad.
    
2. Don’t choose two serifs or two sans serifs to create a combination, unless they are radically different in some way.
    
3. Avoid choosing typefaces from the same categories, like Script or Slabs. You won’t get enough contrast, and will end up with conflict. For instance, Clarendon and Rockwell together is not a good thing at all.
    
4. Get enough difference in point size between the various fonts to make contrast.
    
5. Assign distinct roles to each font and commit to them without variance.
    
6. Try finding fonts from different categories that have similar x-heights and glyph widths. For instance, Futura with Times New Roman just doesn’t work that well because there is too much contrast between x-heights and widths, but in this case, mostly widths. However, if you are going to work with a condensed font, you can overcome this problem because now you’ve gone for an extreme contrast.
    
7. Find some kind of relationship between the basic shapes. For instance, look to the letter O in upper and lower case. Round letter O’s and taller oval O’s, in general don’t seem to like each other when creating pairs.
    
8. Contrast the overall weight of the fonts. For instance, Didot and Rockwell look really bad together for many reasons, but one clearly because they both have a heavy presence and just look mad at each other on the same page.

Read the rest of the post on bonfx.

Many of Publetariat’s members are active bloggers on the site, and there’s a lot of quality material being posted in member blogs. Prompted by member LJ Sellers, the author of the blog entry being reprinted today as a feature article, I’ve decided to add a new member feature/benefit to the Publetariat site.

The ten most recent member blog posts are already featured on the front page of the site in a link list in the right-hand column, but beginning with this post, once a week I will personally scan that top ten list for an article to be promoted to the front page as a feature article. I may not always find a post that meets the site’s editorial criteria, but I will be actively seeking them.

The goal is to provide useful content to site members and visitors while providing site members with an outlet for wider exposure. People who like what they find in a blog post are likely to click through and view the author’s member profile, and may even be inspired to go a step further and follow any links they find there for the author’s website(s) and book(s). In a way, it’s like bartering for free advertising on the Publetariat site.

In order to make the cut a post must be on a topic of interest to other site members and visitors, it must be professionally presented (occasional typos happen, but in general the piece must be grammatically correct, with proper spelling and punctuation), it should not have a primarily self-promotional focus, and must be of a length comparable to the site’s usual feature article content. Note that all content posted to this site remains the intellectual property of the author, so don’t worry that having your blog posts promoted to feature article status will force you to surrender any rights to the material.

So members, update your member profiles with links to your external sites and book pages, and start blogging! I’ll be watching.  =’)

This post, by Paolo Chikiamco, Publisher, Rocket Kapre Books, originally appeared on Digital Book World on 9/21/10.

“Virtue, then, is a kind of moderation inasmuch as it aims at the mean or moderate amount.”

– Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics.

Being a philosophy major, I’m of the opinion that the great thinkers of the past have something important to say about every aspect of life, even our modern life. As such, I hope you’ll humor me as I open this talk on a decidedly modern topic – the opportunities for independent publishers in this digital book revolution – by talking about Aristotle and the Golden Mean.

For Aristotle, virtue or excellence is that trait which, when possessed in the right amount, keeps something in good condition, and allows it to perform its function well. One of the key phrases there is “possessed in the right amount” – Aristotle believed that virtue could only be found at some optimal point between two extremes, that of excess and that of deficiency. To use the most common example, the virtue of courage is found between the two extremes of cowardice and recklessness.

What does this have to do with publishing? Right now, publishing is defined by two extremes. First are the Big Publishers, the ones with substantial investment in the old status quo of print books, the entities with big-name authors, enviable capital and long-standing connections with distributors and media outlets. At the second extreme are the Self-Publishers, a class of authors which have always been with us – for authors, such as Aristotle himself, were releasing their works to the public long before third-party publishers existed – but who have in the past been stigmatized, as well as sidelined from the most lucrative types of commerce by an inability to match the scale of access and distribution available to Big Publishing. (In the Philippines, the most visible form of self-publishing – social networking aside – is the burgeoning indie komiks [comics] scene.)

Of course, “in the past” here must be taken to mean B.T.I. – Before The Internet. While I would not go so far as to say that the playing field has been leveled – although I’d argue that it is on its way there – the fact that the publishing landscape has been irrevocably altered cannot, at this point, be doubted.

“Nothing endures but change.”

– Heraclitus

Read the rest of the post on Digital Book World.

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze‘s Born to Be Brothers blog.

This post, by Kristen Lamb, originally appeared on her blog on 10/6/10.

Welcome to WANA Wednesday, based off my best-selling book We Are Not Alone–The Writer’s Guide to Social Media. This is the day I dedicate to making your social media experience more enjoyable and productive. Many authors have gotten the message that they need to be on social media and they need to be blogging. But one of the big problems I notice is there is a failure to understand how search engines work and how to use them in our favor. What good is posting content if no one can find it, right?

What I am going to teach you today is going to help you rise even more above the masses of competition all clamoring for the public’s attention and money.

These days the competition is fierce. Barnes and Noble just announced its self-publishing service PubIt so everybody can get published. The gates have been thrown open and it is every writer for himself. Why I brought up this new development in self-publishing is that it highlights why it is even more critical for authors to have a platform. Unless you happen to already be a household name, your social media platform is more critical now than ever.

As a debut fiction author you will be competing against counterparts who have a solid social media presence and a blog following. Are you prepared? The odds are not in our favor. According to the BEA, 93% of novels sell less than 1000 copies. A solid social media platform can make all the difference.  In earlier blogs, we have discussed using your name as a brand. Anything else will cripple a platform and leave an author stressed out and spread too thinly. Our goal is to get our names to do the heavy lifting (sales) so we have time to write.

So why is a name so important?

Today we are going to have a quick lesson on how search engines work. By the end of this lesson, I am sure it will be much clearer why your name is so critical.

Read the rest of the post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

Novels are like lovers – you only pick the ones you think you’ll like, but no two are really the same. Sometimes they’re just awesome and make you feel special. Sometimes they let you down. Often they can surprise you, make you feel a whole range of emotions. And when it’s over, you sometimes wish it could go on forever and other times you’re glad, because it started to feel like more work than it was worth. Or you’re satisfied and it lasted just as long as it was supposed to.

And I’ll stop there before my analogy disappears up its own arsehole. The thing is, it occurred to me today that this applies to writing novels as well as reading them. I’m currently around 94,000 words into my third novel. I’ve written numerous short stories, a couple of novellas and now I’m close to typing those strange words – The End – on my third novel length work. Novels are certainly unique creatures and while many bear similarities, just like lovers, no two are the same. And no two writing processes are the same either.

I’m still very much a journeyman writer. Perhaps when I get to that stage where I’ve written loads of books I’ll have developed some kind of process that’s familiar and practiced, but there’s a part of me that hopes that never happens. I like the excitement of taking on a new project and if it all started to feel the same I might lose the urge.

RealmShift was the first novel I wrote. Not the first one I started, not by a long way. I’ve written varying amounts of several novels. But it was the first one I finished and knew was a real novel. It went through many more redrafts and rewrites before it was published, of course, but I remember the feeling of reaching the end of that manuscript. I remember the feeling of writing it, feeling the story pouring out, astounded at how it was telling itself. Other times I struggled, trying to make something work. But there was a distinct vibe to writing RealmShift. I knew the main character inside out, I knew the mission he was on, but I wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to end until I got there.

My second book is MageSign, the sequel to RealmShift. When I started writing that I knew exactly how it was going to end. The final climax was the entire reason for writing it, but I wasn’t sure how to get there. I had lots of notes and plans written, but there were huge gaps that I trusted myself to fill as I got to them. Which I did. There was a distinct vibe to writing MageSign too, and it felt very different to RealmShift.

Now I’m close to finishing the first draft of my next book. It’s the same “world” as RealmShift and MageSign, but a whole new story with all new characters. There are a couple of cameos from key players in the first two books, but that’s mainly for the geeky fun of it. This book feels very different again. Where RealmShift grew from the main character, and MageSign grew from the final climax, this one has grown from a strange and weird concept. The concept led me to develop a main character and that subsequently led to the story. It feels quite different to either of the previous two.

I wanted to write something different. My books are dark fantasy thrillers, and this new one is too, but with a slightly different feel, a different pace. I’m playing with different archetypes, different character relationships and a pervading sense of dread rather than a flat out race against time. And it’s been a struggle. This story has been harder to get out than either of the previous two. A lot harder, in fact. That’s not because it’s more complicated. If anything, it’s a simpler concept than either of the previous two, with fewer key characters. I don’t know yet if it’s any good. I think it’s awesome, but you always feel like that with a new lover. Hopefully I’ve written something better than ever, less predictable, more nuanced. The fragile, insecure writer in me wonders if I’ve blurted out a pile of shit.

When I finish a novel, I immediately go through it again, sorting out all the little issues that occurred to me along the way, that I made notes about as I wrote. Sometimes something will happen later in the book that means I need to change something near the start. Or I’ll have a better idea and need to rework something. Then there are all the little bits and pieces that I can weave in here and there to make the whole story arc flow seamlessly, and often some of those things can only be added later, when you know exactly how it all ends.

After that, assuming I don’t decide I need a complete rewrite (pleaseno!), the next stage is to put the book away for at least a few weeks. I’ll write other things in that time. I have a couple of short stories clamouring to be written and I want to write the next Ghost Of The Black novella. Then I’ll go back to this novel and redraft again. That’s when I’ll really get a feel for what I’ve created.

Only time will tell. Regardless, I’m very close to the end of actually writing it, as opposed to revising it, and some time in the next couple of weeks (I hope) I’ll type those two fateful words. The End. Then I’ll sit back in my chair staring at a completed manuscript. I suppose I’ll have to brace myself and, after the process described above, send it out to the beta readers and see what they have to say.

I wonder how other writers do it? If there process is anything like mine?

Anyway, it’s another novel, like the others I’ve written in so many ways. It’s the kind of thing I think I’ll like. At times it made me feel special and awesome. I really hope it doesn’t let me down… or would that be me letting it down?

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

This post, by Wanda Shapiro, originally appeared on her One Girl One Novel site on 10/3/10.

I must respond to the Wall Street Journal’s recent story, Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books, which discusses the plight of literary novelists who are finding it harder and harder to make a living. According to the Journal, e-books are to blame but as an indie author of literary fiction, I have two things to say to that. First, stop blaming e-books, and second, don’t cry for me Wall Street Journal.  

According to the Journal, e-books are bad for debut novelists. Supposedly, the lower prices of e-books and the increasing sales of e-books are to blame for lower advances, less risk-taking, and a loss of patience for the cultivation of young novelist. The article talks about the general decline in book sales, shrinking retailers who are buying fewer titles, publishers who are making fewer deals (especially with new writers), and authors with fewer meet and greet opportunities who are making half as much per e-book. We’re lead to believe that e-books are killing literary authors who weren’t suffering at all before the advent and wide spread popularity of e-books.

While there’s a lot of truth in this article, blaming it all on e-books is not a logical conclusion. It’s true that literary authors have been a particularly hard hit segment of the writing population, but literary authors were having a hard time making a living long before e-books, and publishers are not without culpability. Publishers blame the readers for the decline in literary fiction but they’re the ones who publish the books and it’s no secret how they feel about literature.

It’s also no secret that the publishing industry is in shambles, I can only guess the Journal made such an illogical leap because the general state of the publishing industry is being blamed with increasing frequency on the rise of the e-book. This article gave an accurate albeit grim picture of the publishing industry from the point of view of a literary novelist but few of the supporting facts have any logical connection to e-books.

Let’s face it, authors of literary fiction were abandoned by the majority of the publishing industry a long time ago and if we’re going to talk about the grim truths of the publishing industry we need to stop blaming e-books. The only one who can be blamed for the current state of the publishing industry is the publishing industry. It’s not technology’s fault and it’s not the economies’ fault and it’s not the readers’ fault.

Read the rest of the post on Wanda Shapiro‘s One Girl One Novel site.

This article, by William Germano, originally appeared on The Chronicle of Higher Education site on 9/30/10.

I’ve been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It’s a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.

Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I’m struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them?

In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and its appearance on various materials. The second was the development during the first years of the Christian era of the codex—the thing with pages and a cover—first as a supplement and eventually as a replacement for the older technology of the scroll. The third was what we think of as the Gutenberg moment, the European deployment of movable type, in the 15th century. And the fourth is, of course, the digital revolution in the middle of which we find ourselves today.

When we say "book," we hear the name of a physical object, even if we’re thinking outside the codex. The codex bound text in a particular way, organizing words into pages, and as a result literally reframed ideas. The static text image on my desktop is the electronic cousin of late antiquity’s reading invention. When my screen is still, or when I arrange text into two or four pages, like so much visual real estate, I am replicating a medieval codex, unbinding its beautifully illuminated pages. Yet reading digitally is also a scroll-like engagement—the fact that we "scroll down" connects us to a reading practice that dates back several millennia. One of the things that book historians study is the change in, and persistence of, reading technologies over time, and what those historians have demonstrated is that good technologies don’t eradicate earlier good technologies. They overlap with them—or morph, so that the old and the new may persist alongside yet another development. Think Post-its, printed books, PC’s, and iPads, all in the same office cubicle.

The book has a long history, but the concept of the "history of the book" is comparatively new. In the 1950s, two Frenchmen—Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin—brought out L’apparition du livre, or, in English, The Coming of the Book, a work of scholarship that became one of the signs marking the arrival of a new scholarly discipline. Book history’s objective was analysis of the function of the book in European culture, and since the 1970s, it has continually expanded its scope, emerging as a trading zone among various disciplines, a rare scholarly arena where the work of librarians, archivists, and scholarly publishers can intersect with the work of traditional scholars and theorists, all members of what the economist Fritz Machlup termed the "knowledge industry."

Read the rest of the article on The Chronicle of Higher Education site. 

Hello fellow authors,

I’ve worked in publishing most of my adult life, either as a journalist, editor, or both. I’m now a freelance fiction editor and the author of the Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series. I have three Jackson books available and the fourth coming shortly:
The Sex Club
Secrets to Die For
Thrilled to Death
Passions of the Dead

I started out self-published, was picked up by a small press, and now I’m going back to being indie. I also have two standalone thrillers: The Baby Thief and The Suicide Effect. All my novels are available as e-books for $2.99. Mystery Scene and Spinetingler magazines have given me terrific reviews, and my readership is enthusiastic and growing.
http://ljsellers.com

I also offer reasonable freelance rates to authors who have decided to self-publish and need someone to proofread their manuscript (for typos, missing words, and syntax errors).
http://ljsellers.com/wordpress/editing-services

L.J. Sellers

Today’s blog is about the world-wide introduction of Pip: a Very Special Caterpillar. Pip’s creator, my very good friend for many years, Becky Macri, along with (people) illustrator Bonita Feeney, have created Pip, the youngest of six caterpillars, that faces some very big issues and challenges. This tender story of the enduring love between parent and child is sure to become a classic.