books

Telling Your Tale: A Beginner’s Guide to Novel Writing

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Click to buy on Amazon! Just 99 cents!

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of a side-project of mine, Telling Your Tale: A Beginner’s Guide to Novel Writing, available on this site through Oronjo.com (all formats supported, see below) and Amazon.com for the Kindle.

I was inspired to write my first e-article after reading a great post on fantasy author Lindsay Burocker’s blog. Subsequently, I read e-article guru Kate Harper’s amazing guest blog, bought her $.99 e-article on writing e-articles (how post-modern is that?), and then went for it on the thing I know the best: writing!

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My sister, consummate reader, gets angry at Penguin

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My sister is a voracious reader and book-aholic. I have her and my mother to thank for the reading–and, later, the writing–bug that bit me early.

Reading, along with horses and dogs, is an absolute passion for her. She routinely buys whole series of authors she likes, often multiple times (her dogs think of them as chew toys), often in hard cover, often in the Kindle edition.

One of the authors she would follow anywhere on the planet, if asked, is Charlaine Harris. She specifically loves the Sookie Stackhouse series and would trade pints of blood for them if that were the going currency.

But not this time. When the latest Sookie Stackhouse book came out in Kindle format just 16 cents less than the hard cover, she lost it.

I’ll let her tell the story in her blog post, Hey Penguin, Bite Me.

Using the Kindle to Edit

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When the manuscript for my novel A Reason to Live was ready to move from critique groups to professional editing, I was lucky enough to land the wonderful Alison Dasho (nee Janssen), a former editor for Bleak House Books and Tyrus Books [visit her at http://www.alisonedits.com/].

She’s in Wisconsin, I’m in Virginia; obviously, this was going to be a digital relationship. But there are a million ways to exchange documents online. How best to get my 90,000 words to you? I asked. Just send the Word document, she said, I’ll put it on my Kindle.

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Printing Your Book With CreateSpace: Part I

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This is Part I of a two-part series on my experiences printing my short story collection one bad twelve. This initial post covers the reason for printing my title, why I went with CreateSpace, and some beginning knowledge you might need if you want to do so yourself.

Why Print?
In a recent blog post, writer and publisher Dean Wesley Smith talked about the importance of making sure your writing is available in print as well as digitally. E-readers, he points out, are the wave of the future, but,

“…electronic publishing is hovering around 20% of all books sold. Higher in some genres, lower in others, higher in some months, lower in others. That means in general that 80% of all books sold are paper, through either online bookstores like Amazon or indie bookstores or box stores.”

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