The Gertrude Threshold by Christopher Brooks
Like the best of apocalyptic fiction, The Gertrude Threshold deals with many serious themes within a highly readable […]
Status Quo by Henry Mosquera
Lemat is living every writer’s nightmare: the starving artist, unknown and unheralded. He hits such rock bottom that he attempts suicide, splits up with a girlfriend and gets fired from his job. He then meets Guy, a talent agent who urges him to write something lurid and incendiary, which is more like doing a deal with the devil. Selling out his artistic soul works: he becomes famous and controversial, lands a 6-figure publishing contract, but comes to realize that compromising one’s integrity also comes at a great price.
In this day and age, with so many writers and artists clawing […]
Workman’s Complication by Rich Leder
A private eye novel is only as good as its protagonist, and Kate McCall is a richly defined and humorous central character. She may be reluctant to […]
How to Write a Book Blurb
By far, the weakest part of many self-published books is the synopsis found on Amazon and elsewhere. Worse than the cover, worse than the writing in the book itself, there are a lot of blurbs on Amazon that are pretty near atrocious. I include my own books in this category. Writing a decent blurb is an artform totally separate from writing a book.
Authors are also on record saying this is their least favorite part of the process. It can make you feel icky writing superlatives about your own book. At the same time, too many superlatives can literally be […]
Review: The Kingdom of Assassins by Erik Mackenzie ★★★★
JA Konrath Reveals Initiative to Get Indie eBooks into Libraries
Big news from JA Konrath’s blog. He’s created a site and service called EbooksareForever to aid both libraries and authors in stocking indie titles. From his blog post:
[…]For the past year, my business partner, August Wainwright, and I have been talking to acquisitions librarians across the country, and they crave an alternative to the status quo. These libraries are looking to buy thousands of ebooks at once in order to best serve their patrons and community.
Their main wish is to be treated fairly – which means they want to own the ebooks they purchase, acquire good content
The Button Chronicles by Juniko Moody
The Button Chronicles by Juniko Moody is the highly inventive dystopian novel about the very nature of human evolution. Replete with its own inventive language, The Button Chronicles is about a dark 22nd century where mysterious buttons appear from out of nowhere. When pressed, a person disappears, and soon there are buttons for every person on earth, with millions of people disappearing. No one knows where they came from or how the devices work. A suspenseful and thought-provoking read, The Button Chronicles asks serious questions about the nature of reality and how mankind can survive on its current dystopian path.[…]
Why Clean Reader Doesn’t Matter
Unpopular, minority opinion: Clean Reader doesn’t matter. In brief: an app called Clean Reader aimed to remove swear words from books, replacing then with freaking and crap, etc. Cue the outrage of authors who claimed this as censorship. Smashwords and others then removed titles from the app.
To begin, I write books with profanity. I’ve had a number of reviews calling out the profanity, some saying I use it “every other word” (I don’t). My writing never struck me as all that profane, but the profanity had a purpose. Bad words are just words, an arrangement of letters. There’s […]