Recently, a reader posted a very nice review of Strictly Analog at Amazon, commenting on how the book had a tighter plot than most indie novels and that it was better than most books published by the Big 5 publishers. What remarkable praise. It feels great to read something like that about one of my…
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A couple of weeks back, I assigned Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman” in my Science Fiction class. As I was getting ready for class, I pulled up a couple of clips from Erik Nelson’s brilliant Ellison documentary, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, just to give my students a better sense of the writer. The…
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There are a lot of benefits to indie publishing–control of one’s content, cover, and pricing; higher royalties per sale; not feeling like one’s book is subject to the thousand-and-one hidden machinations that influence decisions in the publishing industry; not having one’s book go out of print…ever. The list goes on and on. Sure, there are…
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I’m working on my next book–kind of feverishly at this point, hoping to get through the next round of edits before the serious work of my day job starts coming in. The latest book, though, isn’t exactly the newest one I’ve written. It’s one that’s been just about done for some time now and has…
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We’re at that point in the semester where my students are getting ready to submit their first essays. I work a lot with college students who are placed in the composition class one level below Freshman Writing; they are, for many reasons, a bit under-prepared for academic discourse, and my main goal is to get…
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So there I was, sitting in the lobby at the Upland Martial Arts Center, watching my daughter (a green belt at the time), go through her forms when the karate-dad sitting next to me mentioned that he’d just put a novel up on Lulu. He’d had a couple of mysteries he’d written years before that…
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I’ve been reading Guy Kawasaki’s excellent book, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book. Kawasaki does a very nice job of describing and explaining each part of the process, stressing that an independent writer in today’s market needs to be all three of those things if he or she is going to succeed while…
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Today I’m in the spotlight at The Poetics Project, thanks to Amanda Riggle who did the interview and posted it. She asked some really good questions about the writing process and some of the decisions that went into The Girl at the End of the World. Head over to The Poetics Project and have a…
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The semester is coming to an end, and I’m watching my Developmental Writing students take their final exams after sixteen weeks of struggling through increasingly difficult reading and writing assignments. Some of them come up to me at the end of the exam to thank me for being an “awesome” teacher–which I have my doubts…
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Like a lot of people, when I jumped into the world of indie publishing, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I knew how to write and edit, and I’d gotten a lot of positive feedback from people who knew what they were talking about. Publishing an e-book through Amazon’s KDP program and setting…
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