I know some of you are thinking “What the heck? Your Kickstarter funded and you are complaining? I would kill for $2,000 on a project!” I hear your concerns, but we expected to raise about $5,000 on this campaign and I’ve successfully run three before. Besides, we can always get better. This is me trying
This month I’m in Japan and I’ve taken up smoking the pipe. Partly, I enjoy the taste and the ritual. I’ve never gotten into smoking cigarettes and don’t plan to start. And while I understand smoking can be addictive, I’ve not experienced it yet. If you’ve followed Creativindie for awhile, you’ll know...
The short version: Grammarly finds more typos and actual mistakes. In a full manuscript, it found 7 while ProWritingAid only caught 1. However, ProWritingAid sometimes catches things that Grammarly misses, and has very useful more advanced features that can help improve your writing by flagging slow passages, complex paragraphs, or repetition...
We first came to Bali last year and spent two months. I enjoyed it, my wife didn’t. That was mostly my fault, for booking hotel rooms instead of villas so she could have a kitchen and her own space (living on a bed kind of sucks for weeks on end). I convinced her to come The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a haunted castle tour...
I’ve never put much thought into personal branding – I had a bunch of stuff I liked, but I couldn’t put them all together in way that made sense. My first header logo was a dumpster fire. I’ve had to learn to withhold enthusiasm, and add more space, because less is more. I’ve always focused The 3 secrets to book...
This is a post about authenticity and craft vs. fraud and plagiarism, but it’s not a moral tirade. You can look elsewhere for that. The reason I don’t want to point fingers or make ultimatums is because ethical concerns often ignore market conditions. As we dig deeper into this subject, you’ll find I’m skeptical about...
Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw is a fun horror flick based on a nearly universally accepted belief about art: that “real art” is done for the passion, not the money. In this particular version, a dead artist’s paintings come to live and brutally murder his critiques. More than that, Jake Gyllenhaal as a snobby art critique...
Recently someone in one of my Facebook groups wrote how frustrated she was that her books weren’t selling, and she had no idea why. This is almost always because the book isn’t designed to sell to the right audience. What genre is it? Scifi? Fantasy? Contemporary? This has to be immediately clear from the cover The 3 secrets to...
This is a long article on author marketing, but if you just want a quick PR boost or author marketing service, scroll to the bottom and click “Launch My Book!”…A common question I get in my private facebook group goes like this: “my book is published but I have zero sales and no visibility, and I The 3 secrets to book...
I made this video in the last few days of Thailand, while in the process of reviewing several dozen applications to write with me – to be fair, none of the samples we received “sucked” … some were infuriatingly “good”, but didn’t hold my attention, were too wordy, trying too hard, overwritten and...
EDIT: This is an older post so the dates will be wrong; but you can still click the links to see if these projects have upcoming events. I won’t be renting more castles any time soon. With the new year comes a new set of writing workshops to participate in! If you’ve joined a workshop The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a...
When I first started writing fiction, I needed someone to believe in me. I was ecstatic to get my first BookBub deal – a deal that helped me get 20,000 downloads for book one in my series and earn $8,297 in the same month. I thought I’d made it. Together, we were unbeatable. But now The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a haunted...
