Independent author
Today begins an exciting virtual journey with an organization I’m a member of called RWISA, a division of RAVE REVIEWS BOOK CLUB. There are going to be 19 blogs over the course of six days, which seems like a lot. Should be a chance to highlight some quality authors. [Read more…] about RWISA Blog Hop Tour
Writing your first novel is, in many ways, a grueling experience. Some of it, I wasn’t entirely prepared for. A lot of it, I definitely didn’t see coming. Through the process, I learned I was well suited and trained for much of it, and not really ready at all for some of it.
I started writing on the morning of Dec. 19, and it took me right at six weeks to write about 85,000 words. From there, it took me six months to edit it and get it to where I felt like it didn’t suck, and could go out into the world. Sometimes, I got frustrated. Other times, I was excited. Almost all the time, I wanted it to be over, and be where I am today, with a brand new novel sitting on Amazon’s virtual shelves and several positive reviews alongside it.
Here are five key lessons I’ve learned from going through this process. If you ever think about writing a book of your own, hopefully you can learn from the stupid things I did, and do fewer stupid things yourself. [Read more…] about 5 Lessons from a First-Time Author
In trawling the interwebz yesterday, I ran across a post at the Self Publishing Advice blog by a Swedish indie author named Anna Belfrage discussing whether or not Twitter can be effective as a marketing tool for self-published authors. And, while I’m certainly a novice — considering I haven’t actually published a book yet, “novice” might even be kind — at self publishing, Anna is an admitted novice at Twitter. So, while I can’t say for sure whether Twitter is necessarily effective at marketing self-published books in particular, I can say it’s been an effective tool in marketing for my past two jobs (Yes, I’m a social/content marketer by day, aspiring author by night/weekend, much like a super hero), and I’m fairly confident I can make it work for me in the author world too.
Now, to her credit, Anna does admit to her inexperience with the medium, and she does acknowledge that Twitter helped somewhat, and could probably help more as she grows her following/becomes more comfortable with using it. But you don’t see much of that unless you read to the end, and I’m afraid there’s a decent bit of not-very-good advice and implied advice earlier in the piece. I wanted to address a bit of it here: [Read more…] about Don’t Fall For These Twitter Distractions
I’ve been a “writer” — minus the “author” evolution — for quite awhile now. Going on 20 years, in fact. Well, “writer” in some respects, anyway. Not necessarily, ya know, a paid writer for all that time, as a few of those years I was in high school and a few more I was almost getting paid to write for the student paper at the University of Tennessee, so “writer” may be a relative term. Let’s say I’ve been writing very regularly since 1996, in a variety of formats from newspapers to magazines to blog posts. I’ve written about sports — lots of it — politics, music, movies, straight news, science, human interest, etc. I’ve interviewed Hillary Clinton — name drop! — and John McCain, Tiger Woods and LeBron James. I’ve spent days at the U.S. Capitol and White House, and I’ve spent them in press boxes in stadiums across several different states. [Read more…] about Evolution/Devolution from Writer to Author
I like when bad things happen to good people. [Read more…] about The Good (Hopefully) Die Young