… asking Jeff Bezos to help himself and his contributing authors.

Dear Jeff,

We all know that the only thing you fear is the loss of income. I wonder if you are aware how much you are losing from non sales of ebooks in your literary section? Currently you have several million books of ours consigned to the literary equivalent of purgatory. Why? Because of your company’s ridiculous rating system, designed to consign a book to oblivion in a couple of days after it goes live on Amazon if it isn’t instantly bought in its thousands by the general public worldwide.

Someone close to you who you trust needs to make you aware of how much lost profit is currently sitting on your electronic shelves! It’s bad enough that you allowed your minions to come up with ways of saving money by changing the rules regarding the pittance paid out…

I subscribe to an Australian government website called ‘Stay Smart Online’. The site sends me notifications of current security alerts, and this is the latest:

‘As a precaution, Twitter is urging more than 330 million users to change their password after a glitch left log-in details exposed in the company’s internal computer system.

When you set a password for your account, Twitter uses technology that masks it, so no one can see your password.

The company recently identified a bug that stored unmasked passwords in an internal log. Twitter found this error itself, removed the passwords and is now looking at how it can prevent this from happening again.

Twitter has advised it has fixed the bug, and has no reason to believe the passwords left Twitter’s systems or were misused by anyone.’

Despite these assurances, however, you really should change your Twitter password now. More importantly, you should…

Extract from an article on Reedsy:

No matter what kind of book you’re writing, all self-publishing authors will eventually reach the same question: what’s the best way to market your book?

The great news is that you’re not the first indie author to face this challenge.

By following in the footsteps of those who have succeeded before you, you can create a focused and effective plan that will get people snatching up your book.

In this post, we offer up dozens of book marketing ideas that you can steal for your own promotional efforts.

Continue reading HERE

Don’t you hate it when you’re talking to somebody and they are all wishy washy? Why can’t they just come out and say it? Most of the time you know what they are getting at and want to spit it out for them. Well the same thing goes for writing.

The surest way to gain and hold a readers attention is through definite, specific, concrete writing. Don’t make me as a reader try to figure out what you are trying to say. It’s not my place to write your novel. I just want to read and enjoy. Allow me to enter the realm of your imagination without trying to figure out every little detail myself.

Examples:

The weather was dreadful. vs. It rained everyday for a week.

He was happy to take possession of his well earned reward. vs. He smiled as he placed the coin in his pocket.

I…

Fake books sold on Amazon could be used for money laundering

 Nonsensical? Many high-priced books whose texts are gibberish are offered for sale on Amazon. Photograph: John Macdougall/AFP/Getty Images

“Worthless” books priced at up to thousands, of dollars on Amazon.com and which contain only nonsensical text have been identified as possible vehicles for money laundering by an author whose name was, he says, used to send almost $24,000 (£17,200) to an unknown and fraudulent seller.

Amazon’s self-publishing arm CreateSpace makes it relatively straightforward to publish a title that contains any text, provided that this isn’t “placeholder” or dummy text, and allowing fake books to be sold on the Amazon website at a price chosen by the seller.

Read the rest of this story HERE.

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Book clinic: do editors often have to cut authors down to size?

 Maxwell Perkins, editor, at Scribner’s, of F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas…

Often the first thing to catch a reader’s eye is your cover–does the image “speak” to them? is the title striking?

The second thing is usually the blurb on the back of your book. Now, if you’re traditionally published by one of the Big 5, they will handle this for you. However, if you work with a mid-size, small press or happen to be an Indie Author who self-publishes, you’ll know just how tricky getting the right words on the back of your book can be.

I’ve been following Katlin at Ink & Quills since she started her blog, and one thing I know for sure is that she takes the business of writing seriously and enjoys sharing her discoveries with other authors.

The “outline” below is a basic list of what to keep in mind when crafting your blurb. Just remember that combining intrigue and tension with crisp writing…

In an ever evolving effort to make this blog a better resource to Authors, Writers, poets and fellow bloggers,  I have created these pages to index various external sites and in-blog articles that I hope will be useful, (including over 530 HOW TO 101: articles)

Just click on the links below to be taken to the relevant pages:

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

EBOOK FORMATTING

EDITING TIPS: 101

EDITORS

GRAMMAR – ENGLISH

HOW TO: 101

HOW TO – MAKE AUDIOBOOKS

HOW TO – BUILD A BOOK TRAILER

INFORMATION-BUSINESS

MARKETING

PUBLISHERS

REVIEWERS

This index and associated pages will be added to over time 😀