Iconic mountain with un-iconic writer in foreground
Have you ever soldiered on with something because you started it and you were determined to finish it, even though it ended up giving you little pleasure and the final outcome wasn’t really what you wanted? I certainly have. I’m persistent to a fault. But I learned something while hiking up a beautiful mountain, and it might help you too, so here we go. Continue Reading…
So, I haven’t blogged since October. I have been in the grip of Blog Paralysis, and I’ve finally diagnosed the cause: Multiple Topic Disorder (MTD). My blog didn’t know what it wanted to be when it grew up. Like a lot of youngsters, it dabbled in a few things, took a ‘gap year’, and is finally starting to figure out what it wants to do with its life. Continue Reading…
This is the story of an old dressing gown, nothing special, in fact rather frayed and thin in places. It’s a dressing gown that taught me something valuable about how the human heart heals from grief.
To read the story, click here.
It’s official. Book trailers CAN sell books. At least, a book trailer sold a book to me just a couple of days ago.
Or perhaps in this case, a book trailer sold me an author.
The book was MACHINE MAN and the author was Max Barry. To find out the way it all happened, click here.
A Kindle now lurks close at hand
A year or two ago I was never going to read a book that wasn’t on paper. Now there is a Kindle in the drawer beside my bed. What happened?
I’ve always been a deliberate Late Adopter of new technologies. I don’t need the kudos of being First with newfangled thingies, and I find that patience is rewarded when they iron out a lot of bugs, and the price comes down too.
But there was a lot more than this behind my reluctance to get an e-reader. I love a book with paper pages. Scoff if you like, but I just do.
But the fear of missing out on great books plus some solid financial incentives finally drove me to take the leap into Kindle-land. To find out the details, click here.
How can visitors to your blog find your fabulous old posts without having to navigate a dusty labyrinth of categories and tags? There is a way! And, what’s more, you can get WordPress and Feedburner to do all the work for you!
Welcome to a new system I call Outside the Box Blogging. Click here to read more…
I was reading a blog today that had some great advice for authors and writers, but I kept getting distracted by the fact that the writer didn’t know the difference between your and you’re, or there, they’re and their. And it became clear these weren’t just typos, but consistent spelling errors. If he’d been writing about rocket engines or raising rabbits, it wouldn’t have mattered much, but it was darned awkward in a publishing post.
As part of my change of topics on this blog, I’ve moved this article to my writing & publishing blog at www.smallbluedog.com. You can still read it here
What is it about us writers, that we find so many reasons not to write? I’ve heard people say “a writer writes” – we just have to, like it’s a medical condition or something. Well, yes, I guess that’s true in a way, and yet it’s also true that “a writer procrastinates”. No one who hasn’t been there can entirely understand the tyranny of the blank page the way we do. Every writer I speak to – and I speak to a lot of them – seems to find that even though they love writing their book above all things, they would really just rather, um, clean the house.
Well, cleaning the house is for sissies. You can do a lot better. I’ve decided to share my seven top tips for writerly procrastination. Number 6 even kept my current thriller-in-progress POISON BAY to just one page for a whole decade, it’s that good. Click here to find out more.
Book trailers are all the rage these days, the latest marketing tool for the multi-media age. If you haven’t seen one yet, they are essentially like the movie trailers you see at the cinema before the feature… a 3-4 minute summary of themes or plot, designed to pique the curiosity of an audience.
Some are highly professional. Some are really low budget. Usually you won’t see the author in a really professional book trailer, and there are good reasons for that. But sometimes, it’s exactly the right thing to do!
To find out why, click here.
Twitter has just turned 5, which means I spent almost five years being Bah Humbug about the whole thing. “What a waste of my time,” said I. “Who cares what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast?”
But I was wrong. Oh so wrong. On two counts.
It’s not a waste of time if you use it the right way. And it’s not about celebrities – not for me anyway. Continue Reading…
