Life, Act Two-sdays: Welcome To The Second Act
This is Life, Act Two. For most of human history, it wasn’t a given to get an Act Two. In fact, it’s still not. But it is worth recognizing. Because it needs to be recognized and acknowledged, otherwise it’s a whole bunch of stage time that gets wasted while the audience fidgets. People don’t talk […]
Great Hopping Blog-Hops!
I’ve been tagged by author Zoe Dawson to participate in the New Year’s Blog Hop this week. I’ve never done a blog-hop before, so already my calves are getting tired… So the purpose of the blog hop is for us authors to reach out to new readers (always a favorite activity–I embarrass myself at parties […]
Life, Act Two: The Big One
Some birthdays are more special than others. Ever hear someone say, “This is the Big One?” when you wish them a happy birthday? A Big One is a birthday where it’s driven home that your life has Changed. We don’t get a lot of birthdays like this. Sometimes when you’re 7, or 10, or 13 […]
Indie Weekend: Will O’The Wisp
Indie authors get into this gig because we’ve got something to say. Maybe we have a story to tell, an observation about life that we want to share with others. Some of us just love words. We love stringing them together like lights on a Christmas tree. Some of us line up our words in […]
Indie Weekend: The Rules
Just because you’re a Lone Wolf doesn’t mean you don’t have to wag the dawg… Indie authoring has opened up whole new vistas of writing possibility, you’ll hear everyone who has an opinion on it say so. And this is True Facts in the same way my need for morning coffee is inversely proportional to […]
Indie Weekend: Wild Wild West
One of the things going it alone has taught me is the idea of just how important and valuable someone else’s help truly is. When you’re going it alone, you don’t have the (theoretical) resources of a huge publisher to back you up when you wonder if your numbers are right on the dashboards, or […]
Indie Weekend: Push It
As I’ve said, this Indie gig is wild. Seems like some days, everything’s back-asswards, right down to the way you approach your writing. I spent enough time in traditional publishing to see a pretty decent glimpse of how careers work in Trad. If you manage to break into trad publishing, there’s a subtle (and not-so-subtle) […]
Indie Weekend: Factoring In Fear
Being an indie means you can’t hide behind a publisher or an editorial department or an agent. You can’t blame a bad ending on an editor or mediocre sales on a marketing department. You can’t blame your career on a mismanaging agent. You are everything, you are in control, and you are responsible. You aren’t, […]
Indie Weekend: Without Anesthesia
Going Indie in publishing is like doing it without a net. What’s “it,” you ask, well, “it” is putting yourself out there, in book form. Every author puts a piece of themselves in their books, and then after that painful surgery of cutting out a piece of your soul and putting it into written form, […]
Indie Weekend: Doing The Math
When you have complete control over your book’s presence in the market, it’s easy to get caught up with monitoring that presence day and night, every day, by the hour or by the minute, but when you get caught up in the minutes, you forget just how many of them are there…and how many of […]