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Kindleboards: The Best Resource Around

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For many indie authors (and Kindle aficionados), this post will fall into the “water is wet” category of late-breaking news, but I’ve found it’s foolish to make assumptions about what others know and don’t, especially when it comes to the rapidly-changing face of digital publishing and the internet.

The Best Resource Out There
Kindleboards (www.kindleboards.com) is a site that has to be at the top of every digital self-publisher’s bookmarks list. It is a supremely helpful site that, in digital publishing terms, has been around since the Stone Age (about 3 years) providing a forum space for budding digital authors, Kindle book lovers, and geek and gadget people in general.

The forum section boasts around 55,000 registered users and several thousand are online at any one time. A subset of those are writers (detailed below), but many more thousands are readers interested in one thing: digital books.

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Feeling Free

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If I had any doubts about the power of promotion, they were laid to rest this past weekend.

My crime fiction short story collection Three Shorts has been free since about the first week of February. In a month, it had been downloaded a respectable–if unspectacular–500 times. I had heard of other indie authors garnering thousands of downloads, but I’m a relatively unknown new-comer and I was more than happy to see hundreds of downloads fueled by little more than a change in price…I didn’t do any specific promotion beyond Twitter, Facebook, and a blog post.

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Where’s the Party? Crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries

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There’s a Crime Fiction Writers group on LinkedIn that I belong to. Recently, this question was posed: what’s the difference between crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries? I thought about it and responded:

Crime fiction: the party’s going to happen
Thrillers: the party’s happening
Mystery: the party’s over. Who drank all the beer?

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Writer’s Block: Help Is a Penstroke Away

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he letter began with a simple statement.

“If you’re reading this,” it said, “I’m probably dead.“

A sick feeling ran from the pit of my stomach to the back of my throat as I read that sentence. I wanted to put the letter down, bury it under a stack of papers, burn it, but you don’t just stop reading something like that and pretend you never got it. I kept reading.

You think you know everything that happened—all those days, months, weeks that went by—but you don’t. You don’t have a crystal ball. You aren’t psychic. You can’t know all the reasons I had for doing what I did. And since you’re the one that killed me, it’s only fair that I set you straight.

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Buck Up: The Importance of Little Wins for Your Writing Morale, Part II

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(This is part II of a two-part series about keeping up your writing morale. Find Part I here.)

Critique Groups
Critique groups are certainly double-edged swords: you can feel relentlessly beat down if the criticism is destructive rather than constructive. Even when the critiques are useful, honest, and diplomatically couched, you can feel irritated and depressed that you haven’t “nailed it” on your novel or poem.

Your first duty to yourself in this regard is to find and cultivate a critique group that is helpful and not abusive (and your duty to your fellow critiquers is to be helpful and not abusive…don’t be the problem). After that, put your big boy britches on and accept the criticism. If it’s substantial, honest, and thoughtfully expressed, it’s going to do one thing: help you grow as a writer.

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