Archive | March 2018
Want More Readers for Your Blog and Books? Fix These 5 Website Mistakes…
by Gill Andrews 
on Anne R. Allen site:
You didn’t sign up for this.
Writing and sharing your ideas with others – sure. But this website thing? You just wanted more people to read your stories. But now you spend hours agonizing over blog post topics, looking for free images, and figuring out why that widget on your website refuses to work.
Argh.
It wouldn’t be that bad if it at least would bear fruit, but this damn website isn’t even doing its job! Where are all the new readers and book sales?
I have no idea how to write a book. But I know a lot about websites and how people view them.
And now, after we’ve bonded over how frustrating this is, I’d like to tell you something important: Your website sucks, but I’ll show how to fix it.
“But you haven’t even seen my website!”
You wish!
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Finding Your (Literary) Voice
by Michael Mohr
Finding your literary “voice” in writing is tough, no question. So much of it is organic, visceral, from within. What does that mean? Well, basically it means that you’re not likely to “find your voice” from an MFA class or from a writing seminar or from a writing conference or from a book focusing on voice. All the above mentioned certainly can help. But to truly find your voice, if “find” is really the most accurate word (I’d say “discover”), it’s really more about your confidence, your life experience, and your sense of self as it relates to the world.
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18 Tips For Surviving The SurveillanceAge
How to Preview Your Kindle eBook #pubtips
PREVIEWING YOUR KINDLE eBOOK
This is a thorough guide to help you preview your Kindle eBook.Previewing is best done in several stages.
Proofreading the text
Initial preview for obvious issues
Check the images
Check any drop caps
Click every hyperlink (including the table of contents and footnotes)
Check any tables
Scan the entire eBook for formatting issues
Change the background color
Adjust font size, typeface, line spacing, and device margins
Adjust the orientation between portrait and landscape and scan several pages (or the whole eBook)
Test the eBook out on various devices and apps
Scan the eBook one last time before publishing
Try to preview the Look Inside (see the last section of this article)
Download the free sample after publishing
Check the Look Inside once it becomes available
Be your own first customer and scan the entire book
If you publish any revisions, ask KDP to push the updated book onto your device, and check the revision
PREVIEWING YOUR KINDLE eBOOK
This is a thorough guide to help you preview your Kindle eBook.
Previewing is best done in several stages.
- Proofreading the text
- Initial preview for obvious issues
- Check the images
- Check any drop caps
- Click every hyperlink (including the table of contents and footnotes)
- Check any tables
- Scan the entire eBook for formatting issues
- Change the background color
- Adjust font size, typeface, line spacing, and device margins
- Adjust the orientation between portrait and landscape and scan several pages (or the whole eBook)
- Test the eBook out on various devices and apps
- Scan the eBook one last time before publishing
- Try to preview the Look Inside (see the last section of this article)
- Download the free sample after publishing
- Check the Look Inside once it becomes available
- Be your own first customer and scan the entire book
- If you publish any revisions, ask KDP to push the…
View original post 2,162 more words
The Dead Game
The Dead Game by Susanne Leist
My review follows the book blurb found on Amazon.
“Linda Bennett leaves New York for the slower-paced lifestyle of Oasis, Florida. She opens a bookstore and makes new friends. Life is simple that is until the dead body washes up onshore. She is horrified to learn that dead bodies and disappearing tourists are typical for this small town. Rumors abound of secret parties held by the original residents in their secluded mansions. Once night falls, the tourist-friendly community becomes a haven for evil and dark shadows. However, this is only the beginning.
Linda and her group receive an unsigned invitation to a party at End House, the deserted house in the forest behind the town, a mansion with a violent history. They are pursued through revolving rooms and dangerous traps, barely escaping with their lives, leaving two of their friends trapped inside.
It is up to Linda and her friends to search out The Dead and find the evil one controlling their once peaceful community. Can they trust the Sheriff and his best friend, Todd? THE DEAD GAME has begun.”
*****
Normally I don’t read books with vampires, nevertheless I read this one. I bought as it was free in Kindle and I kept seeing it posted on Twitter. Leist has great grammar and it is a fast-paced paranormal thriller. The entire town of Oasis was strange, and then it got stranger! Twists and turns abound with strange mysterious events happening. Good versus evil (vampires) and I must say I felt a bone chilling cold as I read. There is a vast number of characters, and some I just couldn’t connect with – lacking in this book. I think some editing on those characters would make this book even better! Regardless, FIVE solid stars!
Line Editing: What Is It? By Jami Gold
What Is Line Editing and What Should Line Editors Do? by Jami Gold https://jamigold.com/2018/03/what-is-line-editing-and-what-should-line-editors-do/
Last month, when I put together the Master Lists of writing craft skills to provide insights for self-editing and/or finding editors, I created a list for each phase of editing:
- content/developmental editing (fix story and character-level issues)
- line editing (fix scene and paragraph-level issues)
- copy editing (fix sentence, word, and grammar-level issues)
As I mentioned in the Line Editing post, in my experience, line editing is the hardest type of editing to nail down. We can say that line editing is about how we write scenes and paragraphs, but what does that mean?
Let’s take a closer look at what line editing encompasses…
Why Is Line Editing Hard to Define?
While developmental editing is about the story and characters and copy editing is about grammar rules and sentence-level issues, line editing skills are all about…
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7 Ways to Direct Traffic from Facebook To Your Blog
This is a guest post by Kate Thora. Kate is a Senior Content Specialist for BizSet.com – an online database of company information. In her free time, she loves to catch up with the newest trends on her favorite industry blogs.
7 Ways to Direct Traffic from Facebook To Your Blog
Everyone talks about the benefits of social media marketing. And, without doubt, it’s really important to any enterprise. But unless you’re harnessing your social media pages to meet your ultimate objectives, you’re wasting a lot of time and energy posting on them.
Nevertheless, if your aim is to direct traffic to your blog, there are plenty of ways to achieve this. Here we look at one of the most popular social media platforms, Facebook, and discuss seven ways to direct traffic from Facebook to your blog.
1. Craft Your Post Taglines
Image: Pixabay
You’ve probably spent a fair amount of…
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2 New Agents Seeking Kidlit, YA, Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Memoir and more…
9 Types of Pitches to Use When Promoting Your Book…
on The Book Designer:
When Angels Fly 