Can you actually hook a reader in two sentences? I have problems with my elevator speech and that’s a lot longer than two sentences. However, the answer is yes, and I know from experience, you had better hook your reader, or literary agent, right away if you want to make a sell.

The next question for me, is how do I write a 2-sentence hook? My story is complicated, and I don’t even know where to begin.

A 2-story hook has three components. These not only provide the gist of your story, but also an abbreviated outline of what you are trying to accomplish.

1. Character –  Who is your hero or heroine? You don’t want to give that character a name in your 2-sentence write up. Give them an identity.                     Not Anne, but a young orphan girl.      …

In my Elemental Worlds books. Pettic, a farmer’s son is the best friend of the Crown Prince. although there is mention of how this came about in the books, I thought I would give you a fuller account of their meeting.

Pettic woke up early. It was still dark, but he could hear his mother moving around in the downstairs room. Today they would have to get their chores done early. Today they were going to take the two day journey to the capital city of Ponderia.
Pettic had never beem to Glitton. In fact he had never been further than a half day’s journey from the farm that his parents owned. This journey was to celebrate his thirteenth birthday.
He poked his little brother in the ribs. ‘Derkil, get up. We need to do our jobs quickly. Don’t forget that today is the day we’re going to Glitton.’
The…

As those of you who are self-hosting your websites will probably know, beginning this month (July) with the release of Chrome 68, Google Chrome will start marking all HTTP sites as “not secure”:

Depending on your traffic, this may or may not be an issue. Still, many of you will upgrade your hosting with an additional security measure called a Security Socket Layer–or SSL. As the rather technical name suggests, what this does is make sure that the communication between your server and a visitor is secure. As far as web users are concerned, the only difference is that the prefix to their website address will now be HTTPS instead of HTTP, the extra S indicating this is now a Secure server.

Some hosts already provide this free of charge, while others will charge for the upgrade. But there is a snag: the moment you make the move to HTTPS,

by Richard Risemberg

This is the way it is: if your book does not enjoy extensive publicity, it will not sell.

This is not a hard and fast rule, as miracles do happen through word of mouth, but the odds favor ads in this word of white noise that we live in. Sure, Moby Dick is a classic now, but it was a flop in Melville’s lifetime, even though he had already published two bestsellers!

And yes, this includes WordPress.com users! In fact, the whole point is that they can be used on WordPress.comsites (like mine) and look unique, instead of the plain ones you find out there now. But first, here’s the story of how they came about:

When I started revising the draft of my novel Strayborn, I wanted a cool widget that would show on the sidebar of my website my writing progress. I looked/googled around, but everything that was pretty, cool, and had special features used Javascript or some other thing that WordPress.com doesn’t allow. In the end, what I did find was a simple one color bar that showed percentages, so I used that. But after a while, it stopped working. I don’t know what the reason was, but it would no longer work on any of my sites. My frustration flared up.

I got to thinking how I…

There are two types of PDF files that concern writers and from which writers would like to extract editable text.

The first is created by exporting a text document from a word processor or publishing program into a PDF file. The second type is created by scanning printed material and producing a PDF file.

(The second type, the scan, is actually an image file that requires further conversion via OCR (optical character recognition). OCR conversion requires special software, and it falls into the category of “you get what you pay for” and will be the subject of another blog post.)

This post concerns the first type of PDF. A common request I get is: “I had someone do a print layout for my book and it’s been edited and updated, but it’s in a PDF and I need a final copy as a Word doc. Can…

Many new writers and authors often wonder what it takes to be considered a successful author. How many books do they need to sell before they are considered successful? How much money do they need to make in royalties before they can say they’ve really made it? How is success measured?

In our society, and for many of us, success is often defined as money, fame, and power. But I think we do ourselves a big disservice when we define it that way, or base it on specific numbers reached, whether it’s book sales or income.

What about an author who has only published a few books, but they are well-written, filled with heart, humor, and gut-wrenching honesty? What about a new author’s book that opens up unique and fascinating worlds to explore? Or an author’s story that shares the overcoming of a huge difficulty in life that can inspire…