Member Blog

It’s free to join SPR and blog about your writing experiences. Read the latest blog entries from our community

Publish Your Shorts: Now Is the Time

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s treatise on women and fiction, Mrs. Woolf lamented that, historically, women had to have both money and a room of their own in order to write – two resources that had been universally difficult, if not impossible, for women to attain back then. However, these days women (yes, yes and men, too) only need a computer and the time to write – oh, and a whole lot of confidence. But how can authors get this boost of confidence if they’re discouraged about publishing to begin with?

Easy: by publishing their short stories […]

2014-05-06T11:01:21+02:00September 11th, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|

For Readers Drowning in E-Books, Author Collectives Offer a Lifeline

In an ocean of self-published titles, two questions surface: How can readers find quality e-books, and how can authors of quality e-books find readers?


Before Amazon’s Kindle changed the face of electronic publishing, in 2006, 51,237 self-published titles were printed as physical books that year, according to the data company Bowker. Last year, Bowker estimated that more than 300,000 self-published titles were issued in either print or digital form.

How can readers sift through these hundreds of thousands of self-published titles to find quality e-books that will be worth their investment of money and time?

Author collectives such as the […]

2012-08-28T12:51:03+02:00August 28th, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|

Time Management for Authors: Arguing the Case

Who do you talk to more on social media, your readers or other authors? Do you spend more time online than you do writing? How much of your online time is devoted to arguing about the “future of publishing”?

At Digital Book World’s Expert Publishing Blog, Bob Mayer writes in his post  The Great Publishing Wars of 2012:

I think there is a tipping point in social media for authors.  Where it begins to detract rather than attract.   Where you are turning more people off than you are being of interest to.  Especially if you are on one

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2012-07-09T07:22:52+02:00July 9th, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|

Say When: Publication Readiness

As a self-publishing author, you are Chairman of the Publishing Board and Chief Operating Officer, deciding for yourself, by yourself when to hit the publish button. But what informs your conclusion that today is The Day?

One of the biggest chores is to tidy up first. Author Deborah Niemann comments on the trials and tribulations of proofreading with lots of help:

One thing that will never cease to amaze me about writing a book is how many mistakes there are in the galley, even though the author has read and revised multiples times, and a professional editor has read and

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2020-02-21T06:11:30+02:00July 2nd, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|Tags: |

Permission to Delay: Writing Under Pressure

Self-published authors set their own writing goals. If you fail to write according to your schedule, you answer only to yourself. There may be outside pressure from people who mock your claim to be a “real” writer, but the biggest pressure is internal. The toughest person to answer to is your own self.

Over at Cecile’s Writers, Cecile worries about not writing when she’s worried. In a post titled “Why Bother?” she confronts her lack of output:

And why not? What’s keeping me? I can find countless excuses: I need to work extra hours; I need to spend

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2012-12-20T11:45:07+02:00July 1st, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|

¡Venceremos!

I was going to post this as part of James Moushon’s blog Real Ebooks: Are We still in the Stone Age? But now that I’ve written it, I see it as a separate discussion. It might help, though, to read James’s blog and comments to see, in part, where this is coming from.

I want to make a larger point of my advice about ebook authors wrenching a place at the table at which further development of the ebook business will inevitably be settled.

I started out as a wannabe author more than willing–desperate, in fact–to accept The System for […]

2012-03-01T14:19:15+02:00March 1st, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|

Counting on a Word Count

I get really bent out of shape over word count whenever I edit any of my novel manuscripts. Is my manuscript long enough to be considered a novel?” has been one of the foremost questions haunting my mind. I worry whenever I have to delete sentences and whole paragraphs alike; this apparently decreases the word count.

I constantly check the bottom left hand corner of the Microsoft Word window for the number, then apply some math to figure out how long the published book would be. First, I take the total word count and subtract 24 from it (24 is […]

2013-06-11T12:14:30+02:00February 28th, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|

Get Increased Book Sales with a Combined Marketing Package

*The succeeding article is about Marketing Self Published Books, Optimized Marketing Promotion, Book Marketing Strategies, and many other useful tips about online book marketing.

Get Increased Book Sales with a Combined Marketing Package

Summary: Increase your book sales as an upstart or self-published author by strategically diversifying your marketing campaign in order to reach a broader demographic.

Marketing your book as an upstart or self-published author can generate sufficient sales returns if you know how to strategically plan and diversify your campaign to reach a greater number of demographic readers.

To begin with, a book publicity campaign […]

2012-01-09T17:01:11+02:00January 9th, 2012|Categories: Member Blog|
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