I have reached my $100 monthly goal on Patreon!
It's actually $139 now. As a perk I promised you, my patrons, to write a blog post about anything you wanted. The next perk, by the way, will be at the $500 goal's completion—a short story about anything you want. (Won't that be fun?)
So here we go. Below are your questions and my answers. If you have more questions, go ahead and ask in the comments here or on Patreon. I will answer them with all the truth I can muster.
Read MoreFor the past several days I couldn't beat this thought out of my head: how to get around the copyright issue I ran into with Corners? What to do? What to do? WHAT TO DO? Now, I could've lashed my brain to the inside of my skull with barbed wire and lynched it and turned it into some gibbous amoeba and roped it with steel hawsers and hacked it apart and...well, what I'm describing here is what typically happens inside any writer's head. The endless internal monologue, or dialogue, or whatever. This can drive one nuts. Actually, I suspect that's why most writers are nuts. It's enough for us to swivel a pair of blank fusty eyes at anyone who happens to be passing by our writing cave for that poor person to scream bloody murder and, jinking wildly, run full pelt to somewhere safe. Because, you know. Ever looked a mad writer in the eyes? Yeah, it's not pretty. Very scary, I must say. And every time something in our lives happens, we are tempted to stew in it without telling anyone. Well, the whole purpose of this blog post to show you what happens when you DO share, contrary to your innate resistance.
Read MoreI feel so much right now, my heart is bursting. You lovely loving human beings, you have donated a total of $1183.45 to help my daughter recover the things she had lost to a burglary. She told me that all those shoes that were taken, she won't be replacing, but instead will buy a new laptop, since her old one is dying, to she can make more art and more beautiful covers for me. She asked me to give you this message (and she drew the picture you're seeing above):
Read MoreA book summary is basically a hook. To hook the reader. And this is the only thing I know about it. YOU CAN LAUGH NOW. I keep telling you that I have no clue what I'm doing. No clue how to write books, how to market them, how to anything. Well, this post is the scariest of them all for me to write. Because I have no bloody clue how to write a good book summary. I will attempt to dissect it here, and, in writing it out, hopefully get a better idea.
You might want to peck my eyes out now like scuffling kestrels or something.
DO IT.
Still here? Wow. Amazing. Okay, let's tackle this beast together. Because a book summary as as important as your book cover. First, your readers see your book summarized as an image. The cover. The pictures on the cover. The colors. The words. That will either compel them to pick it up, or will make them want to pass. The simpler you make it, the better, the easier job it will do in standing out from the crowd and in being memorable. We humans, sadly, don't have good memories. We grasp about three main things about each object, and later can recall only one. If at all.
Read MoreI got this email from Christopher Garry, a fellow writer: "I am an editor and a writer. I have two quick questions for you...you use "Share Alike" license inside your books. Does that mean that people can modify your writing and then re-distribute it? Do you see any of your fans doing this? What is your favorite way to interact with your reader community? Clearly you are highly visible on Twitter but do you have maybe a newsgroup forum or any other way for readers to discuss your work? A wiki? A guide to the worlds you have built? That sort of thing?"
Well, it's 7 questions total, but hey, I'll answer them all! So here you go. (Also, if you read this whole post, you will convalesce from your all your illnesses. That, or I owe you a cookie.)
Let me begin with the official name for the beast. The license I self-publish my books under is called "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported". The full text about it, including the lengthy legalese, can be found here. What does this mean? It means that you can do these things to my books:
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