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

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…

Hold on a sec, I got some thoughts about your memoir

You open your email, and O frabjous day! A publisher has come calling! They’ve seen your work in a literary magazine and wonder if you have a chapbook, or would like to be in their anthology.  Or you didn’t win a contest, but your work “shows merit” and “deserves to be published.” Maybe you wanted a faster process than querying agents, or figured your work better suited a small press, so you cast out to a few publishers, and one has bitten.

You read a little further. This publishing house “considers work for both traditional and hybrid publishing.” If your book is seen as better suited to a hybrid deal—perhaps due to “the difficulty in placing the books of new or untried authors, as well as the general increased competition in publishing today”—the publisher feels “that it may…

As many of you know, in my day job I work as a web developer. Most of my skills I’ve picked up in the past 25 years of web design, from Internet marketing to social media, have proven useful once I started writing. One of them was logo design: I’ve helped a number of clients with their logos; something that is often a slow, arduous process.

Well, no more! I was recently approached by a company called DesignEvo to test-drive their online logo designer and I was amazed. Within seconds, I designed my first logo. Thay have a gazillion templates and graphics to choose from, making the process as painless as you can possibly imagine. Best of all, they store your logos for you so you can edit them in the future, should you (or a client) decide on, say, a new color.

So, are you interested in a…