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Writing Starters
Available now on Amazon in paperback or e-book. New from Touchwood Press, Writing Starters: Appetizers for Your Brain gives you 52 prompts to inspire your writing. Organized into four 13-Starter volumes, the Writing Starters series probes your Memories, Experiences, Opinions, and Self-Perceptions to help generate new ideas for your novel, memoir, biography, or poetry. The…
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Where do I start?
Start with the end in mind is the second habit of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Take time to imagine your finished book—in your hands, handing “thanks for your support” copies to relatives and friends, on the book shelf of someone you’ve just met, in your favorite book store and library, on an…
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Adding illustrations
Can I start by uploading a text-only version of an eBook—to KDP, most likely—and later update the book to include the illustrations? This would let me get the story “out there” more quickly. I should only need one more revision pass to get the text ready. Yes, you can do this, but do you really want to?…
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Self-publishing reads
Get some help and learning from the folks who track with the latest in self-publishing news about people, tools, and technologies. How much time is enough to stay current? You need to be selective. I follow these experts:
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Myths and Truths About Book Editing
Of all the parts of self-publishing that authors should get help with, editing will be your first priority. You don’t have to pay a professional editor, but you do need your book looked at by someone who can be dispassionate and knows their way around a style guide such as the Chicago Manual of Style…
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A life with books
Is it the story, or the characters, or the setting, or the dialogue? What about a book stays with us, shapes us, inspires us to action, or growth, or happiness, or serenity?
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MountainVision: Lessons Beyond the Summit
March 1, 2016 — Touchwood Press is pleased to announce the publication of its latest title, MountainVision: Lessons Beyond the Summit, 2nd Edition, by Jeff Evans. This updated and expanded edition of MountainVision has been published through an agreement between Touchwood Press and Mountain Vision, Inc. of Boulder, Colorado. MountainVision is both a memoir and adventure…
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The 5 Do’s and Don’ts of Digital Publishing | Joomag Blog
Lists like this (at least the good ones) are really helpful for internalizing the key principles about some new technology or process or behavior. This one is very good, although its emphasis on data-driven marketing has me thinking that while I accept that the information age we live in has given us an unprecented power to…
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Can I use the word processing program that came with my Mac?
Sure. It’s just sort of a Microsoft Word “Lite” product. In the end, assuming your book is straight text, you’ll want to save your manuscript as a Word .doc or .docx file or as a PDF file before submission. And remember, no extra lines, no extra spaces after periods and no tabs for indenting. If…
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Is there a poetry template available somewhere for Word?
I haven’t come across one. Poetry, by its nature, lends itself to create structure and layout, that would defy templatizing. If your poetry is relatively simple and straightforward, break the lines where it feels good to break them. Don’t agonize over punctuation, but use it to give the reader the pacing you think the poem…
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Can I continue to edit, improve or add to content I’ve already published?
Yes, you can. Whatever is your creation is yours, that is, yours to copyright. You can continue to add to it, improve and change it indefinitely without impacting your ownership of the work. However, as a practical matter, if readers are buying one version, you risk frustrating them if a week later, there’s a new, improved…
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How do I find a niche market to write for?
What’s hot in the publishing marketplace? Try the Writer’s Digest website for starters. This is the successor to the decades-old publication which helped budding writer find agents, publishers, and marketing.
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Copy editting…don’t publish without it.
Effective copy editing removes verbal noise from your manuscript. Great copy editing is invisible and makes you look like a better author. Here’s a good article self-publishers on the promise and pitfalls of doing your own copy editing. Summary? Proceed with caution.
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Navigating the Changing World of Self-Publishing
From KQED San Francisco, a KQED Forum podcast update on self-publishing featuring Ted Weinstein, literary agent, and the leaders of Smashwords and Laura Fraser on Amanzon, SheBooks. It pays to stay in touch…. Navigating the Changing World of Self-Publishing (audio)
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Another KDP success story: Addison Moore
I’ve said elsewhere that Amazon is the best game in town for self-publishing. And I don’t mind giving them a free plug because they can help me and you publish our work in the simplest, least expensive way. Here’s another great story from fiction writer Addison Moore. (Click PLAYLIST and then Addison Moore.) I find…
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Ten Reasons for Authors to Blog
Elsewhere here, I suggest blogging is a great thing for a writer/self-publisher, both before and after your book is out. This blog post, Anne R. Allen’s Blog: Ten Reasons for Authors to Blog, goes deeper. Your blog is your sketch book, note pad, diary (of sorts), op/ed column. Take advantage of the free and easy opportunity…
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How do I avoid that self-published look?
A self-published look may result from your selections of fonts, margins, justification, and other simple look-and-feel variables. Your objective is not to try and improve several hundred years of book formatting tradition, unless that is your objective. 🙂 Your deviations from what readers have come to expect will just be noise, loud or subtle, but…
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Are there book-writing and self-publishing groups I should be joining or following?
There are many websites and services that self-publishers should know about. Here are my favorites:
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Do I need a new ISBN for every version of my e-book?
No. E-books don’t need ISBN’s at all. Remember that ISBN’s are essentially universal (at least in the bookseller world) stock numbers. E-books won’t ever be inventoried or accounted by the copy, so no ISBN number is needed. Whoever you publish with, such as Kindle, will have their own internal project numbering system or other method…
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How often can I or should I make changes to my book?
Here’s an example of something authors can do now that was nearly unthinkable before digitization. E-books can turn on a dime, so authors can revise and re-publish as often as they like…up to the point where readers are annoyed if they must buy the update. For most books, it’s probably worth thinking ahead before pulling…
Got any book recommendations?