writing

Coping with your Critique

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rockville_8Editors.

As the saying goes, you can’t live without ’em…and you can’t live without ’em.

A good editor can make all the difference between an amateur manuscript that goes nowhere and a highly polished gem that you can be proud of. But the process of working through the criticisms of an editor’s letter can often be a soul-smushing experience, one that often drains your energy to even work on the manuscript.

Fear not! There are ways to keep from taking your critique to heart. Check out this guest blog post I wrote for The Rockville Eight on strategies for coping with your editor’s letter, and maybe even getting more mileage out of it than you had previously.

Not so funny

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After less than scintillating results on, well, every e-book retail outlet except Amazon, I was inspired to create what is quite possibly the worst drawn cartoon in the world.

I would be more charitable to Amazon’s competition if:

  • Smashwords could assure me that they’d actually ship the e-books I ask them to.
  • Barnes & Noble wouldn’t blame Smashword’s staff for not having my books on their site.
  • Apple actually acted like books were sold online.
  • Kobo improved a search engine that displays a search of “iden, matthew” on Page 2 and Page 3 of the results. And created some sort of system whereby indies could compete with Trad Pub titles.

Until then, it’s probably back to Select for me, like every other indie author except Bob Mayer.

Click for bigger version.

Read Some Blog, Get Some Book

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Some interesting things afoot here in Matt Iden Land. To wit:

I’m guest blogging on Omnimystery News today about the inspiration for my protagonist, Marty Singer. If you said Spenser, Reacher, or Pike…you’re way off. Check out the blog to find out why!

Omnimystery is also kindly holding a contest for Blueblood, the second in my Marty Singer series. Three copies (paper or electrons, your choice) being given away. Head on over, read the blog post (you’ll need a code found in my guest post), and enter the contest. Ends October 25! Enter now or be forever cursed!

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A Reason to Live is being featured on the Bawdy Book blog tomorrow, October 19. While ARTL isn’t the steamy norm for this corner of the internet, blogger Jennifer Adams was kind enough to make an exception in my case (hey, there aren’t one but TWO sex scenes in the novel). Please swing by and give her a vote, a comment, or at least one tick upward in her site metrics.

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Kindle Nation Daily is set to run a sponsored excerpt of A Reason to Live on October 23. Their “Free Kindle Nation Shorts Excerpt – Email Blast” goes out to “over 32,000 opt-in email or Kindle edition subscribers.” They’ll be running a 20,000 word excerpt from A Reason to Live that I hope will wow a whole new raft of consumers in time for…well, it’s a little early for Christmas, but never too late to read a book!

This is the last of three recent attempts to buy love on the internet, the other two being ads on Ereader News Today and Goodreads. When all the numbers are in, I hope to do a wrap up on the return on investment (and effort).

Sign up for the KND newsletter at http://kindlenationdaily.com/22447-2/.

Tip Tuesday: Three Great Goodreads Tips

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As an indie author, I’ve increasingly found Goodreads to be one of the best places to reach readers but–maybe even better–I’ve found it to be a great place to relax and just be a reader, as well. But since the focus of this blog is writing and the indie life, I’d like to share three Goodreads tips for writers (I may do a blog someday about being a great Goodreads reader).

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