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.

Continue reading HERE

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.

Continue reading HERE

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

Before I jump in to my topic this morning, grab your coffee and pull up a chair … I have some gorgeous pictures I want to share with you!Gorgeous place, isn’t it?  Don’t you just love all the wildlife running free?  What?  Where is it?  It is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  Feel free to grab a couple of the pictures to remember it by, for soon … soon it is likely that it will no longer be so pristine, so beautiful, and the animals are likely to be gone.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), one of the last unspoiled landscapes in the world, occupies 19.3 million acres of stunning wildlands in northeastern Alaska.This land has long been a source of controversy between those who would protect both the land and the wildlife, and the others who would like to drill for oil on the land.  In…

Have you ever heard someone refer to writing as elegant. It’s orderly and graceful. It flows.

By adding elegance to your writing, you can turn clear, precise, but clunky prose into a musical composition.

Elegance gives your writing a tangible feeling of beauty. It makes people say wow. Elegance isn’t just the wording, but the way it is presented.

Is your style disciplined and orderly, or is it inconsistent? Presentation elegance requires consistency from the beginning of your novel to the end.

When you use dashes, do you leave spaces between the words or not?

•  second-handed
• second – handed

When you write titles of books, do you italicize or enclose using quotation marks?

• Little Women
• “Little Women”
• ‘Little Women’

Do you use the oxford comma to separate the last item in a list?

• She brought apples, bananas, and grapes to the picnic.
• She brought apples, bananas and grapes to the…

Greetings to all the Archer’s Aim readers. I hope everyone had a good Memorial day weekend. Everyone in my part of the country is dealing with the tropical storm and all the associated rain, so our weekend was a little up and down. Anyway, I thought that today I would share a little more behind-the-scenes of what it’s like being an author.

Many authors like me work a day job so we don’t have all day to spend on our writing. For self published authors, there are a lot of tasks that go into writing beyond merely getting words onto paper. We have to spend a precious allotment of time on other details including artwork, marketing, blogging and much more. So that can add a self published author’s plate on any given day.

Since I’m now dictating my newest books, my writing day begins with dictation into a recording device…

by Ryan Lanz

I love the show Survivor. I know, I know. It’s a guilty pleasure.

I’m a bit of a junkie for the show. I’ve probably seen 90% of the episodes since it started 57 years ago (ish). May Jeff Probst never retire. I was wondering to myself why I love the show so much. Sure, the scenery is beautiful, and the challenges are fun to watch. But plenty of shows have that sort of thing. Then it hit me: the conflict. Survivor is rife with conflict. People are selected from different walks of life and put together as strangers in a high stress environment. Shenanigans ensue.

Hello to all the story Empire readers. I hope everyone had a good Memorial day weekend. For those of us not on vacation, it’s been back to work and with that in mind I thought I would provide a few writing-tips to get the most out of your dictation.

One of the main reasons to begin using the dictation as a writing tool is because of workload. In my case, my new job reduced my ability to accomplish enough writing so dictation became necessary. Otherwise, you may find that your writing demands have increased and you simply must accomplish more in the available time. Here are some ways to transition to dictation that I found helpful.

Follow a Script

When I began using Dragon several months ago, I quickly realized there was more to dictation than simply speaking words into a microphone. Without some preparation, I tended to have numerous…