Features

Choosing a book editor should be based on whether the editor is a sound and clean worker with knowledge and experience in the language you have written in, using curated or affiliated professionals (I’m with the EFA and listed on Blurb, Reedsy, and ALLi – I think these are good places to start). Despite this transparency in my trade, there seems to be a new wave of paranoia. I keep being asked to sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) to edit your books. An an editor, I’m not happy about this. Why? Well, here are seven reasons.

1.  Amateurs are starting fires […]

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 […]

I’m an indie author and shortly after I self-published my first novel, Inside the Outside, I wrote my first article for Self-Publishing Review, which was called “A Self-Publisher’s Manifesto” (I published an extended version of that article on my website, which I re-titled “An Indie Author’s Manifesto”). As I prepared to self-publish my second novel, The Vampire, the Hunter, and the Girl, I found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be an indie author and how I feel about it. So, I decided to talk about it on my podcast in “Episode 60: […]