Member Blog

Despite the fact that the UPS tracking showed my iPad in Guangzhou, China on April 2, the enchanting device showed up magically at my doorstep in the morning of Saturday, April 3. Amazing!

Growing up I used to love reading a good book while listening to music. Now I can have a vast number of books with virtually unlimited music selection (thanks to Rhapsody) and can take them anywhere! Would this not have been possible on my laptop and other tablets? Laptops don’t have the form factor to make it convenient. Having to fold open and close a laptop in […]

I’ve been away from Self-Publishing Review for several months, but now that I’ve fulfilled some of the obligations that kept me away, it’s good to be back. The biggest task was judging one of the Spur categories. Two other judges and I read about 30 Western novels, most of which were self-published.

Between a few of the self-published and the traditionally published novels, there was not much difference in quality. That argues against the prejudice that might linger against self-published novels as a category, despite Joseph Wideman’s well-publicized decision that Henry Baum discusses on the front page. The other two […]

MediaBistro.com analyzed what many of us call “meaningless chatter” on Twitter and found, among all the celebrity nonsense, there are plenty of us out there too:

Using highly unscientific methods (a simple TweepSearch to find all the people who included the word “poet,” “novelist,” or “writer” in their Twitter profile), GalleyCat has compiled a year-end census of the literary Twittersphere.

According to simple TweepSearch queries, there are 1,790 novelists, 9,139 poets, 19,490 journalists, 28,529 authors, and a staggering 99,082 writers on Twitter. The publishing world latched on to the microblogging site in 2009, as Twitter writers scored book deals, serialized

I love cutting through the muck of life.  Please get me from A to B in the most efficient manner possible.  I don’t want a long song and dance.  Don’t want to be distracted on the way.  And when I get to where I am going I really, really want to know that I am actually there. We all have the same issue and it should serve as a strong reminder of why building the best possible landing page for those who search is an essential part of book marketing.

This point was hammered home to me again the other […]

It takes a different kind of person to make their own dreams come alive.  Not everyone is prepared to put in the long hours and hard work it takes to bring a novel to the store shelves in non-traditional ways.  I’m one of those crazy, annal retentive, ego centric fools who just has to do things his own way.  I’m not content to let others tell me how my books are going to look or even if they get published.  That’s just not in my character.

As a youth, I saw the movie Star Wars.  Not the Jar-Jar Binks […]