by Lynne Cantwell  on Indies Unlimited:

Recently, I was invited to join a Facebook group whose membership includes a lot of new authors.

I’d forgotten about some of these newbie concerns.

I’d also forgotten how everybody asks the same questions over and over, to the point where those of us who have been at this for a while get kind of tired of answering them. So I thought I’d pull together some of these typical questions and answer them.

Continue reading HERE

No matter what we dream of in fantasy land, reality is always waiting to jump out from the shadows and remind authors that there is more to the job than just writing. It sucks. Many of us wish that the work will speak for itself; that readers will catch on and spread the word like wildfire.

Lala land is a nice place to visit, but it doesn’t create sales. Books are everywhere. More people are ‘writers” than ever. The market has expanded to include sub genres for sub genres but even so there is so much reading material to choose from that many bookworms stick to what they know.

Names are important in writing. When polled, readers still list the author as the most important factor in deciding to purchase a book. That hits indie authors hard when the industry is already built to favor mainstream artists.

The cutesy, “as…

I wanted to address a situation that might be concerning to you.
Facebook – yikes. There are a lot of questions rolling around.

Is my information safe? Is it going away? Should I delete my account? What the heck is going on?!?

Here’s the deal: there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered, and more information will be coming out over the next few weeks.

So what can you do until then?

If your ideal reader uses Facebook as their main social media outlet, there are ways that you can protect your information moving forward – which I’ll address in a minute.

But here are a few things I would encourage you to consider:

1. If you begin to see a dramatic decrease in engagement and growth of your Facebook Page, consider trying another social media outlet. I would encourage you to ask your audience…

This is a guest post by Mollie Porein,  a highly skilled web content writer. She knows what an expository essay is and can help you write this kind of assignment. She is interested in topics about education, writing, blogging, motivation, etc. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter.

I, for one, have always struggled with using LinkedIn to promote my books. So, I found her post particularly intriguing. If you do try her tips, please let us know how they worked out for you!

Using LinkedIn To Promote Your Book

1. Selling yourself

Image: TipScrew

In this day and age, self-promotion can be a rather daunting prospect. Digital marketing in the modern world calls for a rather personal approach to boost your online presence. One of the best ways to do this is through professional networking websites such as LinkedIn.

This multifaceted business-oriented service operates for professional…

There are a handful of commonly held misunderstandings about creative people that I regularly encounter when talking with leaders. Like any stereotype, there are some elements of truth in all of them, but they oversimplify reality and create a lot of roadblocks to healthy collaboration. In addition, when you hold any of these myths to be true, even subconsciously, it can affect your ability to give your team what it truly needs from you.

Myth 1: Creative people just want total freedom.
I hear this all the time from leaders who come from less traditionally “creative” roles. There is a standing belief that creative people want to remove all boundaries so that they can have a wide-open field to play in. This perception is often the result of creative people on their team having pushed back against overly constrictive boundaries or challenged a direction with which they disagree, but it’s…

As a new writer, you probably have many misconceptions. I’ve been at this for a while now and can only laugh at myself when I think about how naïve I was. One of my favorite sayings is you don’t know what you don’t know.

I think my biggest misconception was anybody can write a novel. It’s easy. You get a great story line and put pen to paper, or fingers to keys, whichever you prefer. Well as my more experienced readers know, that’s a laugh.

Writing a novel has been one of the hardest journey’s I have ever taken. And I’m saying journey, because you’re going to be at this for a while. Like years, if you follow the traditional route.

One of the first things you’ll learn, after you receive a mailbox full of rejections for your first draft, is you don’t know how to write a novel…

By getting the word count right. How?

Scene by scene.

I’ve written in the past about the word count for books but a book is made up of chapters. And chapters are made up of scenes. 

A mixture of really short and really long chapters may give your reader a case of whiplash. Make sure that doesn’t happen. 

There is nothing wrong with varying chapter length or writing a book with all short chapters, but I’d avoid the extreme. Scenes set the pace and like stepping stones lead your reader through the book. 

Randy Ingermanson on Advanced Fiction Writing, reminds us to think SCENES not CHAPTERS.

Controlling Chapter Lengths in Your Novel

Things from his post I want to remember:

• Chapters are stepping stones to take the reader through your book.
• Chapters consist and are controlled by SCENES.
• Varying scene length is okay. But be consistent.
• A good average

by Andrea Lundgren

Personally, I like fitting endings even more than happy ones. Sure, it’s nice to know that the characters you’ve read about succeed. When you’ve invested time and emotional energy, you enjoy it when they make it out of their troubles and gain the victory they’ve sought for so long, but I don’t like false endings. I don’t like endings that feel fake, as though the author pulled some strings with the fictional higher powers to give the characters the ending they wanted, rather than what they deserved.

LULU has been publishing books since 2002 with over 2 million titles published. Lulu has developed into an outstanding company with many advantages over both Createspace and Kindle which in recent years caused to many hassles for me personally to want to use them any longer.

One of my favourite parts of Lulu is the LIVE CHAT which helps you through the process of uploading your manuscript if or when you get stuck.  It is a bit of a learning curve and I have gathered the images of the process for everyone to use for any paperback publishing with Lulu.  I will eventually do eBooks as well.

First of all you need to create an account using your email address and finding a unique password. After you sign in you’ll  need to click on CREATE to find the image below.

In Image1 (above) you will find two tabs