As someone who makes online contact with authors on a daily basis, there are a few things that actually IRK me (not a pretty sight), so please excuse me while I arrange this soapbox more comfortably and elaborate further.

These irk-making issues are not unique to me and have been expressed by many people – including many non-irk making authors – so unless you want to LOSE potential readers, fans and friends, you need to STOP doing the following IMMEDIATELY on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Goodreads, Shefari, Librarything, et al:

Making your first contact with the immortal words:

Get my books at ***************

LIKE my FB Page at ***************

Follow my Website / blog at ***************

And similar well meant (?), but self-centred sayings!!!!!

Think about it for a few moments – WHY did this person start Following / Liking / Send you a Friend / Connection Request?

Is it…

So, you’ve written and published a book. Congratulations! Good for you!

And welcome to the club … I have some sobering news, though. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to write and publish a book – TODAY! So far this year, 2,396,061 books have been published, worldwide. How do you expect it’s possible for any one book to compete with numbers like that when searching for interested readers, not to mention buyers with money to spend? And how can any one author ever suppose their newly published book is better or more important than those other 2 million+ books, so much better that one author can expect readers, bloggers and reviewers to fall all over themselves in an attempt to help promote and publicize said book?

Many of these delusional, self-centred authors do exist, unfortunately … so many, in fact, that I feel the…

It seems to be time – again! – to remind some “authors” out there how they should be conducting themselves in the world of promoting their books. Not everyone has bad manners, but there are enough who make it difficult for the rest of us who DO abide by those guidelines and rules and maintain decent behaviour.

This need to reiterate what I’ve railed on about before here came about after a reviewer posted this poem to her own blog – a poem that was actually a cry for help and an oblique explanation of how she’d been treated recently by indie authors she had set herself up to help promote. I reblogged her poem here then wrote to the reviewer directly to tell her I understood what she was going through.

Fortunately, this reviewer’s experience has had a happy (!) ending, or at least her problem has been resolved…

by Destine Williams

Hey, everybody, Destine here from The Zen Zone. Don’t shoot me for the pun. There’s a good reason for it I swear!

Maybe you’ve run into the problem of your settings feeling a little too thin, or characters feeling too cardboardy. But at the same time you don’t want to make huge lists and sheets of things to make something unique.

by Writer in Wedges

So you have written your short story and cannot wait to release it into the world. But before doing that, it is important to take some extra time to make sure your story is properly edited, despite the fact that editing is nowhere near as fun as writing.

Thanks for joining me again! Last week, you started from the beginning, re-writing through the opening act of your first draft. You set a weekly and daily goal for yourself, you pumped up the tension in your opening, you laid the ground-work for the average work-a-day world of your protagonist, and you explored the primary question underlying the inciting incident: “Why is today unlike every other day?” This week, we look at the Counter-Argument.

Rewriting the Counter-Argument

The Counter-Argument is the opposite side of your story question coin, the resistance against which your heroine struggles through the rest of the story. This counter-argument should be presented to the reader roughly 2/3rds of the way through your opening act.

(I’m assuming a classic Three-Act Structure here: Beginning, Middle, and End. With other act structures, your mileage may vary, but the principle is the same; the Counter-Argument is introduced about 15%…