Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

E-Texts For All (Even Lucy)

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This article, by Char Booth, originally appeared on the Library Journal site on 8/5/10. If you’re publishing for the Kindle and haven’t enabled text-to-speech, this article just might change your mind.

If digital literacy is exploding, the visually disabled are taking the shrapnel. I would wager that most librarians consider ourselves committed to accessibility and make individual and organizational efforts to comply with (and often exceed) the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in our buildings and the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 standards on our websites. We may not, however, have had the sobering experience of trying to access an ebook or e-journal using screen-reading software or other assistive technology. Despite our best intentions, this limited insight can lead us unwittingly to collection development and web design decisions that make digital literacy far more difficult for the print disabled.

Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with Lucy Greco, a colleague and disability advocate at the University of California-Berkeley (UC-B). Lucy, who has been blind from birth, has transformed my understanding of the word ­access. Not only do librarians need to understand the accessibility front of the ebook wars, we have the responsibility to embrace our advocacy role in shaping its outcome. As one of the few public sector agencies charged with recognizing the access rights of all, libraries must collectively examine how we can steer the e-text trajectory-from ebooks to e-journals to any other format-in a more universally usable direction.

Ebooks and DRM
Lucy is partial to a few sayings that have helped me understand the e-text accessibility paradox. The first is that "ebooks were created by the blind, then made inaccessible by the sighted."

Online text formats like DAISY and EPUB were pioneered in part by the accessibility movement as an alternative to expensive and cumbersome Braille texts. As ebooks have gained popularity, however, digital text became inexorably less accessible as for-profit readers like the Kindle and Sony Reader muscled onto the scene. A patina of digital rights management (DRM) has been added in order to protect the intellectual property of vendors, contrary to the open and accessible orientation libraries have long held toward literacy and learning.

Device- and interface-specific ebooks are often "locked down" to other readers, meaning that by default they block attempts to be read by JAWS and other screen-reading software. The Kindle—still the dominant hardware ereader—has text-to-speech capability, but its speech menus remain inaccessible despite a 2009 promise from Amazon. [The Kindle 3, announced last week, has addressed this particular flaw.—Ed.] Hence the recent Department of Justice letter to college presidents warning against inaccessible emerging technology use and a suit brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Arizona State University’s Kindle DX pilot.

Dollars = leverage
 

 

Read the rest of the article on Library Journal.

Understanding Fonts and Typography

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The design of your book has a critical part to play in how readable it is. Whether you’re designing the book yourself, or hiring a professional book designer, it pays to understand the basic building blocks that books are made of. Type fonts and they way they are arranged on the page—typography.

After deciding on the size of your book, the next big design decision is picking a type font for the body of your book. Although many classic book typefaces look similar they can have a sizable affect on the overall look and readability of the page.

Here are some articles that will give you a little background in book typography:

5 Favorite Fonts for Interior Book Design
3 Great Typeface Combinations You Can Use in Your Book

There are thousands of type faces avaialbe for digital typography, most of which are available for download at various type foundries on the web. But very few of these fonts are used for books.

Classic Book Typefaces

Most of the typefaces we use for books are classic typefaces, either oldstyle or transitional designs. The designs of these typefaces trace their roots to the very infancy of printing, in the years when printing with type first spread from Germany thoughout Europe.

It was in Italy that the earliest type designers and book printers created many of the letterforms that influence us today. You could say that our culture has grown up, grown literate, and grown learned through the agency of these typefaces, and I think that’s one of the reasons they have such a firm place in our cultural history.

Here’s an article I wrote for Self-Publishing Review that will give you some idea of the kind of history embedded in our typefaces:

Deconstructing Bembo: Typographic Beauty and Bloody Murder

Typography on the Book Page

When you start designing and laying out your pages in whatever program you’re using, you want your book to look professional. You can do this by conforming to standard conventions and making good choices.

Here are some articles that deal with the makeup of book pages:

Elements of the Book Page
5 Layout Mistakes that Make You Look Unprofessional
The Title Page
The Poetry of the Typography of Poetry
Book Page Layout for a Long Narrative
The Typographer’s Curse: Automatic Leading

The Coming of the EBooks

Behind the self-effacing practice of book design lies the history of the printed book, and all the marvelous innovators and printers who came before us. While we don’t yet know how far books will travel away from the classical models that have ruled book design for centuries, we can be sure that digitization and the evolution of ebooks will change typography forever.

Now we’re just seeing the beginnings of what will eventually become a robust capacity for typographic design. Caution though, it may be a bit rocky getting there:

Apple iPad Typography: Fonts We Actually Want
iPad’s ePub: The “Book” of the Future?
Books on the iPad’s iBookstore

Your book is taking shape now, starting to look like the book it will become. Tasteful and readable typography will do its part to help make your book stand out from the crowd. As your book moves closer to completion, you’ll move on to our next topic, Making Print Choices. Onward.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer site.

How to Write a Great First Draft

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Many writers think a first draft of a novel has to crappy. Anne Lamott in her nonfiction book about writing, Bird by Bird, has a chapter called Shitty First Drafts. A recent Murderati blog post was titled “Your first draft is always going to suck.” 

I respectfully disagree. Of course, no first draft is publishable as is, but it doesn’t have to suck either.  There’s no reason a novelist can’t craft a readable first draft that needs only minor revisions in the second round. Every writer has his/her own style, but my personal belief is that if you start your journey with a good road map and a tangible destination, you won’t get lost.

In other words, I believe I write decent first drafts. Which saves me a lot of time and trouble. How do I do it? With a lot of advance planning. These ideas may only be workable for crime fiction, but here’s how I craft a great first draft without any gaping holes or illogical twists:

1. Create an outline. Once I have a basic story idea (comprised of an exciting incident, major plot developments, and overview ending), I start filling in the details. I structure my outline by days (Tuesday, Wed., etc.), then outline the basic events/scenes that happen on each day, noting which POV the section will be told from. For police procedurals (and most mysteries), in which everything happens in a very short period of time, this seems essential. Some people (like Stephen King) tell you not to outline, that it ruins creativity. Again, I disagree. So I fill in as much detail as I can at this point, especially for the first ten chapters and/or plot developments.

2. Write out the story logic. In a mystery/suspense novel, much of what happens before and during the story timeline is off page — actions by the perpetrators that the detective and reader learn of after the fact. Many of these events and/or motives are not revealed until the end of the story. I worry that I won’t be able to convey to readers how and why it all happened. So I map it out—all the connections, events, and motivations that take place on and off the page. Bad guy Bob knows bad guy Ray from prison. Bob meets young girl at homeless shelter. Young girl tells Bob about the money she found . . .

3. Beef up the outline. As I write the first 50 pages or so, new ideas come to me and I fill in the rest of outline as I go along. I continue adding to the outline, and by about the middle of the story, I have it completed.

4. Create a timeline. A lot happens in my stories, which usually take place in about six to ten days. I keep the timeline filled in as I write the story. This way I can always look at my timeline and know exactly when an important event took place (Monday, 8 a.m.: Jackson interrogates Gorman in the jail). It’s much faster to check the timeline than scroll through a 350-page Word document. The timeline keeps also me from writing an impossible number of events into a 24-hour day.

5. Keep an idea/problem journal. I constantly get ideas for other parts of the story or realize things I need to change, so I enter these notes into a Word file as I think of them. (Ryan needs to see Lexa earlier in the story, where?). I keep this file open as I write. Some ideas never get used, but some prove to be crucial. Eventually, all the problems get resolved as well. I use the Notebook layout feature in Word for this so I can keep the outline, timeline, notes, problems, and evidence all in the same file, using different tabs. I love this feature.

6. Keep an evidence file. This idea won’t apply to romance novels, but for crime stories, it’s useful. I make note of every piece of evidence that I introduce and every idea I get for evidence that I want to introduce. I refer to this file regularly as I write, so that I’m sure to process and/or explain all the evidence before the story ends. In my first novel (The Sex Club), a pair of orange panties didn’t make it into the file or the wrap up, and sure enough, a book club discussion leader asked me who they belonged to.

7. Update my character database. It took me a few stories to finally put all my character information into one database, but it was a worthwhile effort. Now, as I write, I enter each character name (even throwaway people who never come up again) into the database, including their function, any physical description, or any other information such as phone number, address, type of car, or favorite music. Now, when I need to know what I named someone earlier in the story or in a previous novel, it’s right there in my Excel database (Zeke Palmers; morgue assistant; short, with gray ponytail). For information about how to set up a file like this, see How to Create a Character Database.

As a general rule, I like to get the whole story down on the page before I do much rewriting, but I’ve learned to stop at 50 pages for two reasons. One, I like to go back and polish the first chunk of the story in case an agent or editor asks to see it. Two, I usually give this first chunk to a few beta readers to see if I’m on the right track. So far, I have been.

 

Look Out Below! Morrell's Exclusive Deal Empowers Authors, Readers, Amazon; Opens Trap Door for Traditional Publishers

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How big a deal is it when a bestselling author like David Morrell decides to skip traditional publishers altogether and announces that he is going direct to Kindle with his new full-length thriller, which is available today in the Kindle Store along with six of his backlist titles including six that were out of print?

It is a very, very big deal.

I thought it was a pretty big deal in February 2009 when Amazon announced that it had signed Stephen King for a Kindle exclusive book deal with Ur, and I was subsequently jazzed when Anne Rice made noises about going direct to Kindle and Joe Konrath pulled his popular Jack Daniels series from traditional publishers in favor of an exclusive direct-to-Kindle deal for the series’ latest, Shaken (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Mysteries).

And I apologize for being a teensy bit self-referential in pasting in this paragraph from p. 92 of the August 2008 paperback print edition of The Complete User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle:
 

Since I ordinarily come at these things from a bookselling perspective, I’ve been thinking for a while that the time should come soon when Amazon should arrange with Stephen King or J.D. Salinger to release his or her next book for the Kindle 60 days ahead of print, and then keeping doing this about once a month. Of course Amazon already knows that: nothing sells TVs like must-see TV.

After all, this one is not rocket science, and David Morrell is not Stephen King or J.D. Salinger. In fact, for these purposes, he’s better than King or Salinger. Why? Well, King is just that, the King, and his success as a fiction writer is so relentless and otherworldly that very, very few hardworking fiction writers are going to see him as an example.

Morrell? Yes, he has written over two dozen novels, made gazillions from film adaptations, and sold a ton of books. But his success is not so inaccessible that other writers won’t look at his decision to go "direct to Kindle" and decide that maybe they should do the math for themselves.

Morrell is not the first to do this, but he’s the biggest yet to bring out a new title this way. Konrath does not need his Morrell’s validation, but one effect of Morrell’s move is that a lot fewer people are going to refer to Konrath as "an exception" and a lot more are going to start calling him a trailblazer.

More and more authors are going to follow this trail, and they will soon be making more money and achieving more stable success than would have been the case if they had remained in what will increasingly be revealed as the sad, diminishing little world of the traditional publishers. And of course, for every popular author who decides to go "direct to Kindle" there will be thousands more Kindles sold.

Related post: Bestselling Author David Morrell Goes "Direct to Kindle" with 10 Kindle Exclusives Including The Naked Edge, a New, Never-Before Published Full-Length Thriller

 

This is a cross-posting from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

Risner To Speak At Women Health Fair

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I’ve been invited to be the guest speaker at Van Buren County Hospital’s Women Health Fair in Keosauqua, Iowa on October 14, 2010 from 2:30 – 5:30 p.m. I’ll be speaking about my Alzheimer’s Caregiver Experiences. This year’s theme is "Fight Like A Girl". The expected attendance is around 200. This sounds like a fun experience, but I think I’ll keep my fingers crossed that I do a good job.

How did I end up with this invitation? I joined a website for Iowa authors http://wwwhttp://www.iowacenterforthebooks.org Any group looking for a speaker can read a list of books I’ve written and my biography. This is the second speaking engagement I’ve received from that website. I don’t think I can remind other authors often enough to check out their state resources for authors.

What was it in my biography that qualifies me to speak at a Hospital Health Fair? Let me tell you. My experiences include helping my mother care for my father for ten years while he battled Alzheimer’s disease and working in long term care at the Keystone Nursing Care Center in Keystone, Iowa as a Certified Nurse Aide for almost sixteen years. It’s not often you meet someone like me that is a CNA/author/speaker. That’s because I didn’t just do my job for the paycheck. I tried to make a difference in the lives of the residents by understanding how Alzheimer’s disease affected them and their families and doing something about it. In my time as CNA, I was awarded the 2004 award for Certified Nurse Aide by the Iowa Health Care Association and 2006 Professional Caregiver Award by the Alzheimer’s Association. Those awards will be mentioned along with a picture of me on the marketing director’s advertising about the Health Fair CNA/author/speaker.

While I took care of my father, I kept a journal. After his death, I turned that journal into a story about what it was like for his family to take care of him. Realizing there are many books on the market about caregivers struggling to care for someone, I made my book different by adding helpful caregiving tips at the end of chapters. Plus, I had the advantage of being able to write this book from a CNA point of view. The book is Hello Alzheimer’s Good Bye Dad.

As more residents with Alzheimer’s were admitted to the nursing home, I met many families baffled by what the disease was doing to their loved ones. I started a support group to help. I listened and explained what I knew from my experiences with my father and my job. Early on I decided I needed to write a book of examples about how to relate to someone with Alzheimer’s. That book is Open A Window.

Anyone that wants to be an author needs some speaking ability. I’ve been speaking since 1998. The Alzheimer’s Association asked me to speak at a conference for ministers. I was scared stiff, and the subject was a painful one, talking about caring for my father. When I received a packet from the Alzheimer’s Association in the mail with the survey about how the ministers liked my speech, I was overwhelmed by their great comments. Also in that packet was a form to fill out and send back if I wanted to be in the volunteer speakers bureau. There was a need in my area on the far side of the county when the Alzheimer’s Association didn’t have as many experienced employees. Now adequate staff has eliminated the need for volunteer speakers, but I still get an invitation once in a while and I go. Education about Alzheimer’s disease is very important for families. Have I spoke before an audience of 200 people? No! But how much different can that be than speaking to 20 – 50. Besides, I’m doing two sessions so I won’t have 400 eyes looking at me at the same time.

The administer at the nursing home asked me several times to be the speaker for inservices on Alzheimer’s. For one inservice, I wrote a fifteen minute skit about a woman, with Alzheimer’s, in the nursing home. Two nieces came to visit and didn’t know how to relate to her. The employee who found the most mistakes made by the nieces received dinner for two at a restaurant. That skit later became my three act play, Floating Feathers Of Yesterdays.

Van Buren County Hospital’s Marketing Director wants me to bring my books to sell and sign. There will be a variety of health related booths besides mine. My husband has consented to go along with me on this three hour drive. He can help carry in the boxes of books and watch the table while I’m not there. I’ve found he makes a good salesman for my books. He has read them all and never fails to tell people that he likes what he read.

An added plus is I get to take my Amish books, too. When I had the idea to write them, I thought if I set my series about Nurse Hal Among the Amish somewhere in Iowa that might be a way to increase sales in my area. Turns out the marketing director at the hospital says she likes the idea very much that the books are set in southern Iowa and for the Health Fair theme it’s an added bonus that the books are about a nurse. "A Promise Is A Promise and The Rainbow’s End – books in my Nurse Hal Among The Amish series.

So now I’ve a speech to write and practice. Plus I’ve been thinking about what I want on my table. Just recently, I printed out a large batch of business cards and bought a card holder to display them. I have three short story books. These were stories I entered and placed with in contests. I’m taking them to use in a give away. People can sign up for the drawing, and I’ll mail the book from home after I draw. That way no one has to worry about being there for the drawing. Since the three books are different themes, people can list a preference when they put their name in the basket. I will put a list of my books and a business card in with the winning book so that might encourage the winner to want to read more of my books. One of these books goes along with the health theme for that day – Butterfly and Angel Wings.

I’m looking forward to the opportunity and the drive. Fall is coming. The timbered hills along the way should be lovely in October. The marketing director asked if I charged a fee. My answer was I’m free. Ever since I helped my mom with my father I’ve liked educating others suffering the pain of watching a loved one go through Alzheimer’s disease. The bonus is now that I’m an author I get to talk about my books at the same time and sell them. I’ll tell you all about how the Health Fair went after October 14th.

 

Self Publishing or Indie – What's in a name

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 The playing field of publishing has tilted, but it hasn’t leveled by any means. The vast majority of books sold still involve the cutting down of a tree and the passing through of some very tiny gates. But it is has tilted, and if you step back, and make a little director’s square with your hands, you’ll see that it is skewed in favor of those who understand the digital world.

There is no doubt that some of the Big Six (BS) will alter course to swing their mammoth tankers towards the unchartered waters of the social consumer. Others will order the champagne to flow and tell the orchestra on the poop deck to play louder. What shape the industry will take is anybody’s guess, but if you’re looking for direction, Mike Shatzkin’s blog is a good place to go. He has a very good piece with Random House CEO, on transitioning from B2B to B2C.

But this post isn’t about the calamity,or not, that BS are facing. Rather it hopes to delve into something of a different nature. An insecure, abused orphan, lacking in confidence, and reaching its adolescent years suffering from an identity crisis; Self Publishing.

It’s a well-known fact that the label, self publishing, carries with it a stigma. The stigma that once you’ve self-published you’re finished as a writer. A stigma born of the past,  and carefully nurtured by those with a vested interest in the present. The BIG argument from the BS train is that the slush pile is being put on-line. For a near hysterical diatribe from an extremely arrogant and myopic viewpoint, from a lady who’s clearly suffering her own identity crisis ("I’m the man") go here, feel free to flame comment. Guess what, they’re right. The slush pile is being put on-line. So what. I can reject something just as quick as you can, however unlike you, I don’t think that I am the sole arbiter of taste, nor do I believe that I am unique.

We’re reliably informed by many Agent blogs that the vast majority of "real books" by "real authors" (i.e. pure BS), never earn out their advances and end up being returned. OK, so an agent chose those books and BS editors squabbled over them, the marketers marketed and the sales people sold; and then the public didn’t buy them. I can do that :-).

There is a lot of crap out there from both Trad and Indie publishing. Both parties are aware of this and neither has a solution. BS say the slush is going on-line, Self Publishers (SP) are saying we need to change our name from SP to Indie Publishers (IP) to help distinguish between good Indie and bad Indie. Why? Because self publishing has that stigma and it isn’t bleeding palms. How do you change the perception that something published by an individual is at least the equal of something published by a corporation. For a quick and sad (in my opinion) look at how decisions are made about books have a read over here.

You don’t. The market will decide. What has changed is that the market is now a lot bigger and this is a good thing.

The good stuff will float to the top. Amazon‘s way of doing this is via reviews – user driven reviews. Goodreads and LibraryThing are two other sites where readers write reviews on books. And it works. Yes there are the "release reviews" which are impossible to avoid or to police, (hey publishers print "his latest bestseller" on the front of books which haven’t been released yet), but if the author hasn’t done their work in marketing then that’s all the reviews that author is going to get.

If the author has done their work and spread the message that their new book is available, then some people will sample, some will buy, and the reviews will add up. Some will be mean-spirited, I haven’t had my coffee yet, 1 star for you type reviews, with the reviewer not even having read the book (hey, that happens at agencies too); other reviews will be well thought out by passionate readers who have read past work by the author and didn’t like or liked the work for reasons which they point out in the review.

There are two broad assumptions in the BS world. One – Self publishing is OK for niche non-fiction (thanks for that, I’ll rush to print with my in-depth study of the impact of pet rocks upon the modern American Psyche); and Two; that self publishers are a lazy lot who have no idea about editing, cover design, and (here’s the cruncher) what sells. I’ve read enough blogs and seen enough evidence to know that the first assumption is simply BS, and the second is just plain rude.

Excluding my time (in my day job I’m charged out at US$3,000 a day), I’ve spent about USD6,000 on getting my book, TAG, to where it is. The cover and copy editing remain to be finished, and when they’re done I’ll have spent a total of about USD8,000 on the book. Then I’ll put it up for sale on Amazon and Smashwords. I consider every penny that I’ve invested to be money well spent. The vast proportion went on developmental editing; which for me was a crash course in writing. I don’t have the time to take an MFA, and whilst books about how to write, help, there is nothing like having a professional critique of your own work to advance.

My publishing goal is simple: put out a great product. That means an attractive cover, no typo’s, and a well written, hopefully, entertaining story. How hard is that? Dam hard, but it can be done. Will the market like the book? Who knows? But if they don’t, it won’t be because of errors in the text or a crappy cover, ergo laziness. Maybe the writing isn’t ready for prime-time, but I can get feedback on that from an audience. As opposed to trying to decipher months of silence interspersed with snippets of "I didn’t fall in love with it."

What happens if it doesn’t sell? I’ll write another one. I’ve already started, quite some time ago, about a month after the first one. If that doesn’t sell? OK, I’ll write another one. My writing goal is to have what I write read by people, lots of them, and I’d like those people to pay what I write. That is verification. Each time I write I get better. Each time I publish I’ll get better. Each time I read reviews and see feedback I’ll get better. The difference is that I’ll use the market to tell me what they like and what they don’t.

From my perspective the business model offered by BS, and the model offered by IP (note: the acronym for Indie Publishing is also commonly used for Intellectual Property; whereas the acronym of Big Six… well I’m sure you get it) boils down to one significant difference and one thing only. No, it isn’t money, (if it does sell) you stand to make much more with IP.

The only reason that you should consider going with BS is because, for now, they still have the reach. They can put your book on a shelf. All the rest you can do as well, if not better, than Trad. Why? Because BS is firing a whole bunch of talented people and those people are going to want to eat. The shingles will be hung and in some instances they’ll say, I know you can’t afford me so I’ll take a cut, let’s say 20% of that 70% you get from Amazon – deal? Deal.

People don’t buy books from publishers. They buy them from authors. In the past this meant that you had to get on a bookshelf and the bookshelf was a monopoly. Now a portion of that bookshelf is electronic. Your average, serious, Indie author knows their customers better than any of the BS. How many of the BS actually know who is behind the Bookscan numbers. How many email addresses, blogs and facebook pages are tucked away in their CRM databases? I suspect, given that one CEO of a BS recently claimed that the high cost of ebooks was justified due to the high cost of digital warehousing (I’m not making this up), that the answer is, "More champagne Harper, and do get the orchestra to play a Waltz."

 

7 Reasons You Need A Facebook Fan Page

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Facebook Pages (also known as Fan Pages) look similar to personal Profiles, but they are designed for business use and they are a terrific way to promote yourself and your business. You can create a Page for your business, book, or even a character in a book. People join your Page by clicking the "like" button at the top of the page. (That button used to say "become a fan.")

Facebook Pages have several advantages over personal Profiles:

1.  You’re limited to 5,000 friends on your Profile, but there’s no limit on the number of people who can "like" your Page.

2.  Pages are designed for business use, so it’s more acceptable to be promotional on a Page than on a Profile.

3.  You can create multiple Pages to promote different products or businesses.

4.  You can send a message to everyone who has joined your page. Your message will show up in the Update section of each fan’s Inbox.

5.  You can create customized "tabs" or screens on your Page. For example, you can create a tab to promote your book and include your cover image, book video trailer and other content on that tab.

6.  After people join your Page, they will be directed to the Wall tab each time they visit the Page. But you can create a customized welcome screen for new visitors to land on. And each of the "tabs" or screens on your Page has its own URL that you can link to directly from outside of Facebook.
 

7.  You can use your Page to increase your email subscriber list, by adding an opt-in form and free bonus to one of the tabs. In the screenshot below you can see the Free Ebook tab that I added to my own Page.

FreeEbook

Learn how to create custom content like this on your own Facebook page in the August issue of The Savvy Book Marketer Newsletter. If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up now and you’ll receive exclusive access to the newsletter archives, including my tutorial, How to Create Custom Content on Your Facebook Page. You’ll also get a free copy of my ebook, Top Book Marketing Tips.

To learn more about how to use Facebook to promote yourself and your book, read Facebook Guide for Authors or The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Successful Social Marketing.

Have you already created a Facebook Page? Please share the link using the comment section below.
 

 

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Just joining the group

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I write on my own and with my husband (no easy feat). We have a number of books to our credit (check out www.deadlyduomysteries.com) and this summer I learned I could self-publish a Kindle version of Hemlock Lake. So, with a little help from a cover designer and a lot of help from a text conversion expert, I did.

It’s a mainstream mystery set in the Catskill Mountains and deals with betrayal, revenge, love, loss, and redemption set against the search for an arsonist turned killer in a remote community.

I live in Vancouver, Washington, where I teach classes in novel-writing, edit manuscripts for other writers, and work as a substitute teacher to feed my writing habit.

Book Marketing: Use Your Email Signature Effectively

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You have probably heard this advice before, but have you done anything about it? What does your email signature say right now?

I get emails every day from people commenting on the blog, asking questions or telling me about their books which I love to receive and happily reply to. However, over 50% of those emails do not have any links in their email signature, and many have no email signature at all. Some have an image of a business card with no clickable links to their website or book for sale which is not very useful either.

How many emails do you send a day? To friends, your accountant, business colleagues, potential clients, potential readers and more. If your email signature is set up, you are constantly sending people your information and doing ‘passive’ marketing, spreading the word about you, your brand and your books. Use your email signature wisely and those people might click through and read more about your book/join your email list or contact you for business.

So, today’s book marketing advice is to sort out your email signature right now!

What information should an email signature contain?

To make sure people know who you are and can buy your books, you should include some of the following aspects:

  • Your full name, your business name and tagline if you have one, or an explanation of what you do. Don’t assume people know what you are about.
     
  • Your website and blog URL prefixed by http:// which makes it directly clickable (you should always use that prefix on the web for clickable links)
     
  • Your book titles and where people can buy them or find out more information e.g. Amazon.com links or specific pages of your website
     
  • A hook or offer for the reader that catches their eye if it is a topic they are interested in e.g. I mention my Author 2.0 Blueprint
     
  • Social media links including Twitter, Facebook and any other main site that is relevant (you don’t have to use them all!)
     
  • Address and phone details if they are relevant to how you run your business
     
  • Logo or picture of you or your books if you want to include them. This is not mandatory, but if you do include them, make sure you also include plain text links as well.

My basic email signature is shown above. It is an image here but as an email signature all the links are clickable.

I don’t use any fancy formatting or images right now but there are plugins and code you can use to make it look prettier. That is great but just get something basic up for starters and worry about formatting later. If people want to know more about you, they want the information right in front of them. They don’t want to search for it.

If you’re having problems with your email, try Gmail

Some people have problems with their email accounts and providers. It seems some of them make it very difficult to set up email signatures. If you’re struggling with email, I highly recommend using http://www.gmail.com which is Google’s own free online email service. You can set up a signature through the Settings page, and then the General area. There are also a host more benefits including easily searchable text, contacts and tasks integration and much more.

What do you include on your email signature now? Do you have any favorite tools for making it attractive?

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

For Most Book Lovers, The Future Is Here

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Every morning I check one of my favorite book business newsletters, Shelf Awareness, and one of my favorite features there is a "quotation of the day" that is often provocative. This morning’s quotation is an interesting one from William Gibson, whose latest novel, Zero History, was released yesterday:

"My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book–and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper."    
–William Gibson

I love the idea too, and I am certainly a fan of the imaginative energy behind various print-on-demand technologies including the Espresso Book Machine, which is popping up in a growing number of well-capitalized bookstores but remains a pretty expensive technology for many others.     

But here’s what’s a little funny about the quotation: it’s not a "futuristic dream scenario" at all. Amazon has been doing this with tens of thousands of "real books" for over three years. I know they are real books because they have sold thousands of copies of my books. The print quality and production values are better than copies that I used to have printed at a reputable printing company an hour from where I live, and the production costs are lower, and the price for customers is as low as on any comparable trade paperbacks.

It’s true that I can’t "go into" Amazon’s "bookshop," which means that I have the convenience of buying such books in seconds and waiting 24 to 48 hours for their delivery. It is also true that I can’t get a deluxe hardcover edition, which of course eliminates less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all book transactions.

If I don’t want to wait 24 to 48 hours, of course, I can download many of these books instantly and directly to my Kindle, BlackBerry, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, PC, or Mac.

Either way, I think that the future is probably here for most of us, Mr. Gibson. And I am liking it.

I love bookstores, too. And I loved the grand old publishing companies of the mid-20th century. And my collection of great 45 RPM records and LPs. And horses, too.

Related post: William Gibson’s Futuristic ‘Dream Scenario’: Enhanced POD


This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

Ebook Revolution Well Underway

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Exactly a year ago, I wrote about how ebooks are the future. Today I read that the Oxford English Dictionary, the mighty volumes that record our very language itself, will only be available online. You can read a bit about that here.

Now, I’m a speculative fiction writer. I love science fiction. I’ve said this before – my iPhone does way more than Captain Kirk’s communicator could ever do. The iPad is suspiciously like Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s PADD (Personal Access Display Device). Incidentally, check out the gibberish on the PADD screen in the picture below. Are we really surprised that things like a multi-volume behemoth are crumbling under the weight of online use? We can’t have the future and the past together. That’d be some weird time twister where everyone’s confused.

As a writer, I often use a dictionary to check words. You know which one I use most? www.dictionary.com. I have a beautiful printed dictionary, in fact I have a few, but I rarely use them. If I’m not at my computer, I use the dictionary.com app on my iPhone. It’s easy and it’s good for the planet. You can hear the trees breathing a sigh of relief.

But you may also remember me gushing about how much I love Angela Slatter’s new book. Not just because it’s awesome storytelling, but because the physical book is just a beautiful thing to hold and behold. It was limited to 300 copies. Here’s a relevant quote from my previous post a year ago, that I linked at the start of this one:

But here’s my prediction – 99% of the books of the future will be either electronic or Print-On-Demand. Within twenty years or so traditional off-set print runs will be used exclusively for high-end collectors edition books.

I know – quoting myself. What a wanker. But you get my point. We have to accept that these things are happening and we have to accept that it’s not a bad development. I heard a statistic on the radio today that by the end of next year, one in ten books bought will be ebooks. Ten per cent of market share. That’s a lot for a new technology. It’s already around the three to five per cent mark. But literacy rates are expected to go up as well, as more people will have access to more reading options more often.

That 20 year estimate in my quote above could be grossly inaccurate. It might all happen far quicker than that. It’s the future people. Embrace it. Real books aren’t going anywhere, because too many of us love them. But the face of reading is changing just like the nature of book buying and book publishing is changing. Don’t be scared – it’s all really quite exciting.

EDIT – There’s been a fair amount of chatter about this post on Twitter and other places and one of the things that keeps getting mentioned again and again is, more or less, “I just hate reading from a screen, simple as that.”

Well, it’s worth noting that ebook readers are evolving rapidly too. Already the Kindle and other e-ink devices are replicating the printed page very well. Screens will soon be so advanced that they’re just like a printed page. And isn’t that deliciously ironic. Accept it – we already live in a digital future. The Schwarzschild radius has long since passed.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

On Beyond Ebooks

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This post, by JA Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/27/10.

I’m loving the ebook revolution.

Obviously, I enjoy the money I’m making (close to $500 a day).

But it’s more than that. I’m able to do things I never could have done in the traditional publishing world.

Not only can I release ebooks when they’re finished (rather than waiting a year), and have much greater control over the content, cover, and title, but I can also play with the format and do new, interesting things.

With TRAPPED, I released two different versions of the novel in the same ebook download. The author’s version and the uncut version. It’s pretty cool to show fans all the stuff that was cut, added, and changed, and let them decide for themselves which one they prefer.

With SHAKEN, coming out in October, Amazon is also releasing a dual ebook. SHAKEN takes place during 1989, 2007, and 2010, and jumps around in time. I had a ball writing it, and showing Jack at various stages in her career while she chases the same bad guy over the course of twenty years. But along with the author’s preferred version, the SHAKEN ebook will also come with a linear version. If people want to read the book chronologically, rather than go back and forth in time, they can. And even cooler, it reads well in both versions.

Eager to romp in this new digital playground, I have two more projects that will be released in September.

One is secret, and I’m not going to mention the title or the subject yet. But I will say it is a horror novel. And I will say I’m writing it with three of my peers. Those peers are F. Paul Wilson, Jeff Strand, and Blake Crouch.

When I was working on TRAPPED and ENDURANCE, I followed the same formula as AFRAID. In nutshell, I took a handful of characters and dropped them into a terrifying situation, then followed each of their journeys as they fought an insurmountable evil. No chapter breaks–just direct cuts from POV to POV.

It occurred to me that I could write a book in this style with other authors, and it would be a snap. Instead of me writing every character on my own, each of us could control a character, and the book will follow each storyline until they all converge. It’s the exact same formula as AFRAID, TRAPPED, and ENDURANCE, except we can write it in 1/4 of the time, and it will benefit from four unique inputs.
 

Read the rest of the post on JA Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog.

ISBNs Don't Matter As Much As You Probably Think They Do, But You Might Want To Start Owning Your Own Anyway

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I was about to post an overlong response in a comment thread on Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer blog, but on reflection, realized what I was about to post wasn’t a response, it was a blog entry in its own right. The article associated with the comment thread is about Library of Congress registration information [Editor’s note: the article is reprinted here on Publetariat today], and the subject of ISBN ownership came up in the discussion going on beneath the article, in the comments. And here’s what I have to say about ISBN ownership:

In the case of an individual author who only self-publishes his own manuscripts (as opposed to someone running an imprint, publishing works by other authors) what does it matter, really, who’s the registered owner of the ISBN on a book? There’s no legal or regulatory tie between ISBN ownership/registration and copyright or intellectual property rights. ISBN registration only designates ownership of the ISBN, not ownership of the content of the book to which the ISBN has been assigned.

I’ve used Createspace’s free ISBNs on all of my self-published books to date, and while this technically makes Createspace the ‘publisher of record’ in the ISBN records, I still retain all rights to the published material and I still own the copyrights. CS’s terms of use state this explicitly, and CS is also very adamant that their company not be listed as Publisher on their clients’ books’ copyright pages.

ISBN ownership can help to establish the legitimacy of a publisher’s claim to profits from a given book in a legal challenge situation, but given that CS has made it abundantly clear it never wants to be named as the publisher of record for any of the books it prints and distributes, the likelihood of CS trying to usurp my royalties seems pretty remote. Also, since copyright is the most meaningful measure of intellectual property ownership in the case of a book, and I own the copyrights on my books, the fact that CS is the registered owner of my books’ ISBNs wouldn’t allow CS to claim my intellectual property rights, either. One caveat: the financial and legal waters would be a bit murkier if I were running an imprint and publishing other authors’ works as well as my own, and in that case I would absolutely want to purchase and register all the ISBNs in the name of my imprint.

While not being the registered ISBN owner prevents me from listing the books with wholesale catalogs myself, since Createspace now offers to create wholesale catalog listings as part of their service, it’s a non-issue for me. My CS books are available on Amazon, Amazon UK, through Barnes and Noble, and through every other bookseller and retailer that stocks its inventory via the Ingram or Baker & Taylor catalogs, and that’s most of them.

Borders is a special case, in that its online and in-store inventory is stocked from an internally-maintained catalog; the only way any publisher, indie or mainstream, gets her books listed with Borders is to get one of Borders’ buyers to add them to Borders’ internal catalog. Since my CS books are listed in the Ingram and Baker & Taylor catalogs, from which Borders draws entries for its internal catalog, I could approach a Borders buyer and inquire about getting my CS books added to Borders’ catalog if I wanted to, but I haven’t bothered.

True, my books aren’t available through European wholesale book catalogs (since only the registered ISBN owner can list books with those catalogs), but since I’m not promoting my books in foreign markets nor releasing them in foreign language editions, I don’t think I’m missing out on many sales there. Amazon UK is the #1 bookseller for English-language books in Europe, and my CS books are already listed on that site.

While not being the registered ISBN owner also prevents me from registering my books with the Library of Congress, I don’t really care about that and I don’t think anyone else does either—with respect to my books, anyway. It would matter if I were trying to get my self-pub books stocked by public and institutional libraries, but let’s face it: self-pub books, novels especially, aren’t likely to be stocked by those libraries anyway.

If I self-publish anything new in the future I’ll most likely purchase my own ISBN/barcode blocks for the new projects, but only because "premium" or "expanded" distribution options offered by print and digital publishing service providers increasingly require that the author/imprint be the registered owner of the ISBN. Since this is already a requirement for Smashwords’ premium ebook catalog, I expect it’s going to become commonplace for ebooks to have ISBNs just like print books and hard media audiobooks.

Even so, I still see the whole thing as little more than an administrative hoop through which I’ll soon be forced to jump and an extra expense I’ll be forced to shoulder to make retailers’ lives easier. Cost of doing business, and all that. I’m still not likely to list my self-published books with European wholesale catalogs, nor Borders’ internal catalog, and I definitely won’t bother registering them with the Library of Congress.

I have always maintained, and still maintain, that ISBNs are merely tracking numbers used by retailers, libraries and government agencies to organize, and retain control over, their inventory of books—nothing more, and nothing less. Some people (and I’m not talking about Joel Friedlander or anyone who’s commented on his article) treat ISBN purchase and ownership like some kind of mark of legitimacy, and others even go so far as to tell self-publishers that if your book’s ISBN isn’t registered in your name, that fact alone makes your book a "vanity" project and you an amateur who doesn’t deserve to wear the name "author".

Horsefeathers. There may be compelling business reasons for this or that indie author to purchase and register his own ISBNs, and there are definitely compelling business reasons for imprints to do so. But that’s all they are: business reasons.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author blog.

CIP: What It Means, How to Read It, Who Should Get It

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There is one place in printed books were we look for all kinds of editorial, bibliographic, legal, promotional and production information: the copyright page. But among all this information, data, legal notices and marketing and contact information, there’s one piece of content on the copyright page that is obscure to most people who pick up the book: the CIP data block, issued by the Library of Congress’ Cataloging in Publication program.

According to the Library of Congress, the CIP program allows catalogers to

complete the descriptive cataloging …, assign subject headings …, and assign full Library of Congress and Dewey decimal classification numbers. … A machine-readable version of the record is distributed to large libraries, bibliographic utilities, and book vendors around the world.

This transmission of data is what makes participation in the program useful for selling books. Being listed in the databases of large libraries and book wholesalers thanks to the Library of Congress program eliminates one of the obstacles to achieving library sales for a book. And for many books, libraries are a critical part of their market.
 

The Problem with the Program

Unfortunately, the CIP program excludes self-publishers from participating, and that applies to authors who have [self-published through a print service company like Lulu or Createspace]. It also excludes publishers who have issued less than 3 books by authors other than themselves. This effectively bars self-publishers from the program, even those whose books would be of great interest to libraries.

The good news is that participation in the Library of Congress’ Preassigned Control Number (PCN) program is open to all publishers who list a U.S. place of publication on the title or copyright page, and who maintain an office inside the U.S. where they can answer questions from the catalogers. And once you have a PCN you can pay for your own CIP to be created.

CIP data blocks created by the Library of Congress are known as LC-CIP. Those created by a publisher, or by a third party on behalf of a publisher, are known as P-CIP. The chief source for P-CIP for many years has been Quality Books, a distributor of small press books to libraries. Their fee for this service is $100.

As with the Library of Congress, you will have to fill out their forms and supply information about your book. A cataloger will analyze your submission and produce a P-CIP data block to be printed in your book. Of course, the downside is that this record will not be distributed to large libraries and wholesalers, the way the Library of Congress’ record is distributed.

This leads to the question of whether it’s worth it for a self-publisher to go through the time and expense of having a P-CIP data block produced for her book. And the answer is actually quite simple: If you anticipate making any appreciable sale to libraries, it’s probably well worthwhile to get P-CIP. Having this cataloging information simply makes librarians’ jobs that much easier, reducing their resistance just a bit to acquiring your book for their collection.

Particularly if you publish reference books, histories, books about local events that would be of interest to libraries in your region, travel books, directories, how-to books on popular topics, or similar books, you could well have a good sized market with the thousands of libraries, both public and private, throughout the country.

What Does it All Mean?

 

Copyright page CIP data block

Click to enlarge

This brings us to the data block itself, and our attempts to decode the arcane notation of the catalogers. Here’s a line by line guide to what’s in the CIP in this illustration (and this is a complete invention, just for illustration).

 

A. Alerts the librarian the CIP was prepared by or for the Publisher

B. The main entry under which the book is cataloged, always the author’s name.

C. The title, followed by a statement of responsibility, in this case assigning authorship to John and Joan Doe.

D. Physical description of the book, almost always blank since the books are usually not yet published.

E. Notes whether an index or other bibliographical entries are in the book.

F. ISBN

G. Subject headings, conforming to Library of Congress usage. Here’s an important note from Lisa Shiel, an experienced CIP cataloger: “The subject headings . . . MUST be authorized Library of Congress subject headings or it isn’t really CIP–and it isn’t properly cataloged. . . . Unless you are experienced with choosing subject headings you may misunderstand the intricacies of cataloging or inadvertently choose a heading that has fallen out of favor.” See the comments to the blog post for Lisa’s complete comments.

H. Indicates other ways the book will be cataloged, here by title as well as by author.

I. Library of Congress classification number.

J. Dewey Decimal classification number.

K. Library of Congress PCN. Note the year the number was issued is in the first four digits.

Note that since this article was published I have incorporated the information generously provided in the comments by Lisa Shiel, an experienced CIP cataloger.

So there you have it. Here are some resources for going further into the CIP area:

  1. Library of Congress PCN program information
     
  2. Quality Books P-CIP Program
     
  3. Adrienne Ehlert Bashista, a freelance Cataloger-At-Large who prepares P-CIP data blocks for publishers
     
  4. Five Rainbows CIP Cataloging service

Takeaway: Although participation in the Library of Congress CIP program is closed to self-publishers, understanding this data block and how it’s used by librarians will tell you whether to go to the time and trouble to acquire your own.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Me and My Best Friend: When Publishing Goes Bad

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For me, there has only been one story in publishing over the past few days, and it is this one, about Leo Hunter, six years of age, signing a 23 book deal with a US publisher. I didn’t get the chance to dig deep enough when the story first broke (supposedly) when I posted about it here and on also on Facebook on Friday.

The UK media piece most commentators have focused on was in the Daily Mirror newspaper. The real revelations about this story have been filling the blogosphere for the past few days, but I’ve yet to see one actually link to where this whirlwind first began. If you were only to follow the UK media who covered the story, you could be forgiven for believing ‘Me and My Best Friend’ by J. S. Huntlands had just been published this week. It wasn’t, and this torrid little saga, and the real author behind it, has actually been on the map with this particular book since July 2009, when it was first published by Strategic Book Publishing.

  Firstly, let’s deal with the source of the Daily Mirror story. It’s penned by Rod Chaytor, but like some national news stories, it was ‘lifted’ from a provincial piece written the day before by Paul Whyatt in This is Derbyshire. This is a provincial newspaper in the UK where Jamie Hunter lives. Who is Jamie Hunter? Ah, here’s the rub. She is Leo Hunter’s mother, an author of one book published by AuthorHouse in 2008 called ‘Nick: Twisted Minds’, a self-published and heart-felt story of domestic violence. Who wrote ‘Nick: Twisted Minds’? Well, officially, J. S. Huntlands, but you see, Huntlands is the pseudonym of Jamie Hunter. Where things start to get a little muddled is that the children’s book penned by Leo Hunter, aged 6, is also officially authored by J. S. Huntlands. But that’s ok, because in the Mirror piece Jamie Hunter says: 

"He’s so young that he is not allowed to sign a contract with the publishers. It’s unfortunate because it means his name doesn’t get to go on the book, but we make sure everyone we know realises that he is the author."

Really, Jamie? In the introduction to the book, you say:  

“Thank you to my son for the inspiration to write this series.”

OK, he provided the ‘inspiration’ and chat that led you to write this book, but he is not the author of the book, no more than I am or JK Rowling is. Jamie Hunter also says she sent the book to JK Rowling. Her son is certainly at six years of age seeing the lights of stardom. In the media piece, he is quoted as saying:
 

I like Harry Potter but I like my books even more. I would like to be more famous than JK Rowling and even more famous than Cheryl Cole and Simon Cowell.

Jamie said her son comes up with ideas for a basic plot – for example, a boy who gets lost – and then she helps him make notes that help him write the story.

She said: "He’s very bossy and tells me exactly how he wants the front page to look like and how the illustrations should appear.

 UK Mirror article.

  Here is what the back blurb says on ‘Me and My Friends’:
 

“J. S. Huntlands is the author of Nick Twisted Minds and is currently working on more books in this series as well as 23 more books in the Me and My Best Friends Series.

Huntlands is a full-time writer as well as mom to a wonderful four-year-old boy.”

Take careful note of the age – not six, now it is four years of age.

‘Me and My Best Friends’ was actually first published in July 2009 by vanity publisher, Strategic Book Publishing, now under a lawsuit by Florida’s Attorney General’s Office, and the publishing group it is run by is headed up by Robert M. Fletcher, vanity publisher and literary agent scammer.

Strategic Book Publishing has also goofed up on the book’s product description on Amazon – it is for a completely different book!  

I am trying to be kind here to one of Fletcher’s authors, but she has got sucked into his publishing scam as well as fooling herself into being one of his represented authors in his other literacy agency scams, but she has done herself no favours now – in the past week – or in the past year. This is Jamie posting (spamming) Making Light, a literary blog last year where Fletcher and Strategic Book Publishing were being discussed.
 

#14 ::: JS Huntlands ::: (view all by) ::: September 04, 2009, 08:08 AM:

Set in today’s day and time, Me and My Best Friend is about a young boy, his faithful companion and their exciting adventures.

Henry and Liam are the best of friends and they do everything together. They can run and play all day long. But when Henry the puppy gets tired and tries to take a nap, three-year-old Liam keeps waking him, wanting him to play some more. Will Henry get any rest?

Get your children involved with this beautifully illustrated book. Your child will love to match up words and pictures, and find Liam, who keeps hiding in his bedroom. Perfect for the young reader!

About the Author

J.S. Huntlands is the author of Nick Twisted Minds and is currently working on more books in this series, as well as 23 more books in the Me and My Best Friend series. Huntlands is a full-time writer, as well as a mom to a wonderful four-year-old boy. This book is dedicated to her son in hopes that he never forgets his best friend.

 Resident writer James D. MacDonald reacted to the above posting:


#23 ::: James D. Macdonald ::: (view all by) ::: September 04, 2009, 10:22 AM:

If you Google on "Set in today’s day and time, Me and My Best Friend" you’ll get over 900 hits for this particular comment spam.

She’s trying hard….

What she needs to do now is get in touch with the Florida Attorney General and hope that she can get restitution.


#30 ::: JS Huntlands ::: (view all by) ::: January 25, 2010, 07:23 AM:

Wow,

What can I say? You have strong views. Thank you for the advise.

No I didn’t read this before signing the contract with AEG. I got rid of my website as my 12 months for free ran out and AEG offered a free web site. (good idea at the time)

I don’t have 1000’s of books in my house but, AEG do try to make you have x amount on hand. I own one of each of my books. I have been though a rough time but still no excuse for typo’s (typed for you Joel Polowin,) or not doing my homework. There are 100’s and 1000’s of publisher’s out there. It’s not so easy finding the right one for you. 

On the plus side for me though I did sign a ‘traditional contract’ So publishing cost me nothing. The advertising however can be very costly with nothing in return. Hence I have done it myself. Ie: live radio shows, newspaper reports. The blogging. I thought a great way to get out there. Clearly not such a great idea. Thank you again for your thoughts
 

Interestingly on Answers.com, we also have the following:

What books does jk rowling like?

A: Nick Twisted Minds written by J. S. Huntlands.
Her children like Me and My Best Friend also written by J. S. Huntlands

 

Somehow, I don’t think it was JK who supplied this answer! Ms Hunter has been a very busy girl with her marketing steamroller.

And I don’t think Jamie Hunter learned anything from James’ advice from all accounts in the last week. Somewhere in here should have been the story of a woman experiencing domestic violence and finding hope in the words she wrote in a book, but along the way, it got messed up in a vanity dream, and somehow, a wonderful, bright and creative kid got mixed up in that dream too. He should never have been a part of it, and I’m baffled as to why Jamie Hunter choose to involve her son in her own literary ambitions. 

I have no doubt what he has experienced with mom over the past couple of years could make him the next JK Rowling or Stephen King, but right now he isn’t, and shouldn’t be, and for the UK media or the people who love him to expect that, would be grossly unfair. We must live our lives as adults, and leave our children to dream theirs.

This story is also building up some steam over on AbsoluteWrite.

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing.