The Secret Women of the Civil War

To transcend gender, through loyalty on both sides of the American Civil War, was the women who disguised themselves as men to fight alongside in this bloodiest of wars raging.

To get around the law preventing women from fighting, hundreds upon hundreds of such women took to a male disguise of the time, risking prison and being sent home, some even keeping up this disguise for many years afterwards. Some identities were kept and some were widely known about amongst their fellow soldiers.

The perception of equals in today’s standards was far different to the time of a far lower esteem women held in the eyes of most men of the time, hence being the Victorian Era. A woman’s place was in the domestic realm and this was all there was to it. Among the daring and forbidden nature of such actions by…

Hello SErs! Harmony here 🙂 Happy Wednesday.

Today, due to popular demand, I’d like to outline an easy way to format your books for ebook publishing. In the past, you had to know HTML to do any serious editing on your converted book, and using Word meant deleting lots of extra coding that did you no favours. More recently, however, we’ve seen new programs that can do so much for us. One such writer’s program that makes the conversion process so much easier and stress free (once you know the software) is Scrivener, on which PH Solomon has so kindly written lots of posts on the ins and outs here on Story Empire. If you haven’t seen them yet, please do look through our archives.

Word of Warning: this is a long post. Apologies for that. To make it easier to navigate, or take a break and find your place…

Indie authors often focus primarily on ebooks because that’s where we can compete in terms of price and readership.

But there are still a LOT of readers who prefer print, and an underserved market with Large Print editions.

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Does anything contribute to sudden discomfort and fits of blinking into the middle distance than a poorly-placed bit of punctuation?

What the hell does “daily” mean? If it’s sliced everyday, you don’t put “daily” in scare-quotes like that!

Who is the guy who writes the copy that goes on the packaging? Where is their copy editor? Do these people realize just how much strife they’ve caused me? It’s 5:45 in the morning, I’m trying to make a sandwich to send my kid off to school, and now my sleep-addled brain is burning out its tires trying to puzzle out just why in the name of all that’s holy the word “daily” isn’t just the word daily there.

Is it more-or-less daily? Like, some days they slice it, some days they don’t, but on the average, they slice it every day? Or is it “daily” as in taking place on…

Very good breakdown from Derek on understanding why Amazon is deleting reviews. Nobody took me (and others) seriously when we said it was not wise to include the words, “I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.” Maybe you’ll listen to Derek:

“So it’s fine to give copies of books or ARCs away as long as you don’t require a review in exchange. Jennetta Penner recommends language like “I received an ARC at no cost from the author” – so you might want to ask your readers to stop using the word “exchange” in book reviews.”

CLICK HERE TO READ THROUGH TO THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE.

As a reminder, Renaissance is 99cents on Amazon. I’ve never received 20+ reviews but I am almost there! I need just one more review to reach this mini milestone. To purchase this book at just 99cents. CLICK HERE and, if you…

Ok, so it’s more like one shortcut word rather than one click, but one click sounds better, right? And since adding fifty hashtags would constitute shameless self-promotion, I figured that a shameless title would suit. Not that I condone or advise adding fifty of them, but have you found yourself typing in the same hashtags over and over, making typos, or forgetting which ones you’d used before? Well, have I got a solution for you, which can be done in three easy steps!

The steps below are for iPhone, sorry Android users. You might need to look for “shortcuts” or something similar under the “settings”. You’re smart, you’ll figure it out.

Step 1. Open “Settings” and navigate to “General” > “Keyboards” > “Text Replacement”. It probably already contains a shortcut for OMG. Because OMG, your mind is about to be blown.

Step 2. Click on the “+” in the top…

on The Write Life:

Have you ever wanted a magical editing wand?

Just imagine: A flick of the wrist would be all that stood between you and the end of editing your writing. No frustration. Minimal time investment. An amazing manuscript or blog post.

Alas, no such magic wand exists.

But we do have automatic editing tools, which are the next-best things.

Just remember that automatic editing tools are designed to make editing easier, not to eliminate the work completely.

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on The Book Designer:

If you’re an author in today’s cut-throat competitive marketplace, you need every advantage to convince readers that they should spend their time and money with you versus the millions of other authors.

One of the best ways to do that is by becoming an expert in one or more topics that tie into your book, and then promoting that expertise everywhere.

This remains one of the biggest missed opportunities I see among those who write fiction or nonfiction.

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Jumping into the indie author scene, for me, was a calculated risk. Like I do with a lot of decisions, I looked at the pros and cons.

Pros:

• You can easily publish your work on a number of platforms at little or no cost (Amazon, Nook, Smashwords, etc.).
• The royalties for sales are good. If you price a book on Amazon over $2.99, for instance, you will get 70% of the selling price as royalties.
• You can write at your own pace in whatever style you want.
• You can directly interact with your readers on many platforms (blogs, mailing, lists, social media, author signing events).
• There is an organized community of independent authors and you can learn from others and help others that are just getting started.
• My writing would be judged directly by the readers and not some low-on-the-totem-pole publishing house employee looking for the flavor of the month.
• Trend-setters like Hugh Howey