Month: August 2016

Noelle Granger

So I visited Noelle’s lovely and interesting blog and in About, she sounded intriguing and like a kindred soul. She also mentioned that you could google her to find out more about her career in academia, and coming from a “sister field” myself, I did. Google her, that is. And this is what I found. A life well-lived. Namaste, Noelle, namaste.

http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/books/article12479504.html

Oh, the part about Noelle greeting her daughter with, “Play dead for me?” was hilarious!  It may not sound like the typical motherly greeting, but Noelle is not your typical mother. 🙂

 

How NOT to write #Dystopian #BookReview ARGENTERRA by @DonnaMHanson #TuesdayBookBlog

Ms Barb hits it out of the park–as usual!

Barb Taub

Public service announcement to authors: Why I will probably reject your review request for your latest YA Dystopian masterpiece:

[Image credit: Relatably.com] http://www.relatably.com/m/hunger-games-memes [Image credit: Relatably.com]

With The Hunger Games as the trope definer, YA-dystopian books/films/fanfic/you-name-it owns its own genre. Since I’m going to turn down most of your review requests anyway, it might be useful to list a few guidelines that will save time for both of us.

So, dear review-requesters, if your heroine’s actions include three or more of the following (or number 9), I will be sending your book back with a suggestion that there might be other twelve-year-olds reviewers out there without a life of their own better suited to slogging through the 100-thousand words of your story only to find a f**king cliffhanger at the end reviewing your book. **(Unless I really like it, or it has a cute dog, or were-badgers. Definitely taking all the ones with were-badgers.)

Does…

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Zoe, Art Critic (Sort Of)…

Gotta do it…..

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

Zoe, Art Critic (Sort Of)

Profile Pic_My Name Is Zoe

Greetings to all my friends of the feline, canine, and humanine persuasion. As most of you know and others will now learn, I usually write about my own adventures. Sometimes I slip in a little something about my human, but mostly, my stories are about moi. However, this story is about my human. Still, it is MY adventure, too, and I hope you will enjoy my perspective on this subject. Which is art . . . sort of.

My name is Zoe. I’m a Fabulous Feline who lives with a human named Emily, who fancies herself an artist. Of sorts. This is a story about her latest creation, which was inspired by a photo taken of an abandoned railroad track by a lake, under a starry night, way up there somewhere in Maine. I’ve seen the photo and it is beautiful! Her rendition of it?…

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Closed for business: Two big things that could penalize your Amazon author account (and how to prevent them)

Great insight, the details are valuable for everyone.

Make no mistake. If you have heard me speak before almost anywhere or read anything I have to say about writing, I emphasize one thing above all else:

“You can be as artsy as you want to be while you are writing your book, but once it is finished, it is a product. A product you must distribute and market in order for it to sell.”

There’s another part to this reality of writing as a business: the number one distributor of ebooks remains Amazon, and for most authors about 80% of their sales would disappear, should the online giant refuse to sell their work. Discoverability on Amazon is the number one trick authors, publishers, and book marketers are trying to crack. Of course, if it works on Amazon, the same method will likely increase sales on iBooks and Nook as well, provided an author even offers their books for…

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Rotten Reviews and Terrible Trolls

Best advice ever…..on both book reviewer ytrolls and marketing vs writing time.

Lit World Interviews

You will get bad reviews. It’s inevitable, I promise you. Take comfort in the fact that it’s a rite of passage all writers go through. Every – single – one of them, and after the first one has you on the floor, bawling your eyes out, and inexplicably trying to chew your own foot off for a while, they’re not so hard to deal with. Some are pretty funny, and some are just to be ignored. There are people out there who delight in trashing books, and sometimes the authors of books too, for reasons unknown to most decent humans. Sometimes it’s jealousy, and sometimes it’s just because they’re mean. Sometimes also these one star stabs to the soul are perfectly legitimate in their author’s hearts and minds, because they really didn’t enjoy what you wrote for reasons that do or don’t make sense to you. Whatever the reasons are…

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