Reading, wRiting, and Roaming with Author Valerie Biel

Barnes & Noble Hardcover Shelving Controversy,

The Priority Parallax: What’s Truly Important,

Draft2Digital and Smashwords Merger Update

FEATURED ARTICLES

Barnes & Noble Stocking Policy Sparks Controversy Online (and why it didn't surprise me.)

I get it. At first read, the Twitter storm and ensuing speculative articles about Barnes and Noble’s new policy about ONLY carrying hardcovers for authors for whom there’s a guaranteed track record of good sales was panic worthy—particularly for authors who might fall outside of B&N’s favored hardcover author group and are close to release date. For those authors, a strategy shift to printing less hardcovers and more paperbacks (and paperbacks sooner) could prove difficult given... Continue Reading

The brouhaha about writers and their word counts, makes a dramatic entrance every so often. Probably more often than we think. We writers, we love our words. Every one of them, from And to Zed. In our writerly heads, each word is carefully handpicked and absolutely necessary to create our magical stories. Like Mozart, each note is essential for our readers to understand our masterpieces.

Guidelines? Preposterous!

As if any would dare! No one told Mozart to limit his notes…or did they? Too many notes? For Mozart? The child prodigy used a lot of notes as he attempted to complete—without success—five sections for his, Requiem, but these days writers have a lot less room for our creative... Continue Reading

Happy August. I hope your summer has been productive and pleasant.

How many of you turned to Pinterest for recipes or decorating ideas during the Independence Day holiday? The platform has become the go-to for sources of inspiration, connection, and search results. The site is different than other social platforms. It works as a search engine and focuses less on “likes” and more on specific outcomes for users.

In June, I began writing about social media for authors. For the next two months, I’ll offer tips about using... Continue Reading

Welcome to the July 2022 Author Series where published author Donna Rewolinski shares the advice she'd go back and tell her pre-published self. (And it’s something that nearly every author I talk to agrees with!)

Donna is the author of Novice Mystery series, which includes Novice Mystery -Ireland, Novice Mystery – Mexico, and Novice Mystery – France (to be released later this year) all from Ten|16 Press. She is a practicing social worker with a master’s degree in social work and is married to a veteran police detective. She belongs to the Red Oak Writer’s Critique Roundtable, Sisters of Crime, Blackbird Writers, and the Wisconsin Writer’s Association. She says this about her writing, “Some of the life I write about I’ve lived. Some I’d like to live. Maybe... Continue Reading