Member Blog

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The Eyes of Editing

Publishing my first novel has been a very interesting experience. Now that it is being read by many and reviews are pouring in, I’m learning something new regarding editing – you need many eyes.

I did pay to have my text professionally proofread and edited, however, even then things have squeezed through the cracks. After release, I noticed an inconsistency myself among the 81,000 words, and just recently an Amazon reader commented on a few minor problems in her review.

One of my goals as a self-published author is to gain R-E-S-P-E-C-T. (Boy, I’d break out in song right now […]

2020-02-21T06:46:50+02:00January 7th, 2010|Categories: Member Blog|Tags: |

Novel Seeking Readers: an experiment

For information and to request a copy of the novel this piece refers to, absolutely Free-Of-Charge, please visit

www.ktapproximate.blogspot.com

It has long been my belief that any and every opinion that can be held about a novel will be—that there is an artificiality in an author desiring to know whether their novel is “liked” or “disliked.”  In my heart, there has always been a desire to converse about my work, to know someone’s “thoughts” on it, their “opinion” being an attaché, unavoidably there, but not of grave relevance.  When I converse with friends or colleagues about some novel, it begins […]

2011-10-08T19:44:15+02:00January 5th, 2010|Categories: Member Blog|

Sexy New E-Readers on the Horizon

Ars Technica’s Jon Stokes has an interesting article about upcoming e-readers that will be hyped next week at CES 2010:

All signs indicate that the e-reader is to CES 2010 what the razor-thin LED-backlit TV was to CES 2009—a technology whose time in the commercial spotlight is now at hand, and which will make a huge, multi-vendor push into the market in the coming year. A whole raft of e-reader devices and technologies will be on display at next week’s CES—were I to cover all of them, this article would run for many pages. This being the case, in this

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2011-10-08T20:33:57+02:00December 29th, 2009|Categories: Member Blog|

The Daunting Task of Marketing

This past weekend I went to a local bookstore and purchased four magazines – Writer’s Digest, Writer’s Yearbook, Writer’s Digest Anniversary Issue, and The Writer. I found some great articles and terrific resources and links.

One article in particular stood out to me, “Should Publishers Pay Authors for Promoting Their Own Books?” written by Chuck Leddy. It’s a great read about how authors of traditional publishing houses are expected to promote their own work using their own money to do so.

After reading the stories on how difficult it is to promote your work these days, I still don’t see […]

2020-02-21T04:00:36+02:00December 29th, 2009|Categories: Member Blog|Tags: |

What Book Designers Do with Their Time

Reprinted from my blog on book cover design.

Part 1: It Should Only Take Five Minutes

“It shouldn’t take more than five minutes or so. I saw a web designer do it once.”

Words that make any print designer cringe. I remember one client I had a few years ago who wanted seven or eight images combined to make a design and he told me it would take only a few minutes.

First, I had to find all these images. Just for the heck of it, you try a search on fotosearch.com, istockphoto.com, bigstockphoto.com or photos.com for some similar […]

2014-09-22T08:15:34+02:00October 29th, 2009|Categories: Member Blog|

A Publishing Person Self-Publishes

Kent Anderson works in scholarly publishing, runs the blog The Scholarly Kitchen, and writes the Johnny Denovo Mysteries under the pen name Andrew Kent.

I’ve always been a publishing person, from the time I spent studying copyright pages in books around age 8 to creating what still look like sophisticated magazines as an adolescent using only a typewriter, pen and ink drawings, and Scotch tape, then photocopying the resulting layouts. I’ve worked in bookstores, typeset professionally, written for newspapers, compiled indexes (or indices if you so prefer), launched titles, designed and created reference works, redesigned magazines and journals, created […]

2016-06-07T00:31:38+02:00May 4th, 2009|Categories: Member Blog|

A Review of Serial Novels Online

(Originally posted at The Podler Review of Books)

There is a quiet revolution happening on the Internet; serialized fiction seems to have exploded in the last few years. You can explore the phenomenon at Webfiction Guide and Muse’s Success. There you will find some interesting stuff. And a few gems.

Here are some serials that have caught my interest.
Mr. Abernathy I love the presentation. The only unfortunate thing is the .pdf format–not everyone has a high-speed connection.
Tying them together is the elusive “Mr. Abernathy”, a man known only through enigmatic references in scattered documents and journals
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2023-06-13T13:57:21+02:00March 6th, 2009|Categories: Member Blog|Tags: |
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