If I see one more decade-in-retrospective listicle, I’m going to shred my calendar. Entering the 2020s doesn’t necessarily mark the portentous turn of some cosmic page. January 1 has no more inherent significance than December 31, or any other planetary spin cycle. Silly humans, inflating the importance of our own arbitrary frameworks (ironic in this... Continue Reading →
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Print Design: Three Book Formatting Flaws and How Indie Authors Can Avoid Them
My Sunday long runs often take me past the local Little Free Library (LFL), and I can never resist a peek inside the charming hutch. Two new additions the other weekend immediately caught my eye. Once was a phased-out library hardcover of Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which I immediately snatched... Continue Reading →
Self-Publishing With IngramSpark: An Indie Author’s First Impressions
After four years of purely digital publishing, I’m taking the plunge into print. Hundreds of blog posts compare the two dominant print-on-demand (POD) services, Amazon's KDP Print and IngramSpark (IS), so I won’t attempt to recreate any arguments here. Suffice to say that I chose IS because of its greater exposure. Libraries and bookstores, unlikely to... Continue Reading →
Thoreau In The Snow: A Writer’s Interlude at Walden Pond
Ice gleamed along the barrier islands thousands of feet below, and I grimaced at my leather dress boots, jammed under the airplane seat. Dispatched on a business trip to the western suburbs of Boston, I’d taken the precaution of wearing my New York Yankees underwear as protection against enemy baseball juju, but hadn’t prepared for... Continue Reading →
Three (Surprisingly Simple) Steps to Registering a Writing Business
Write story. Distribute e-book. Earn royalties. Boom! You're a professional writer...right? If you’ve got only one or two books in mind, this is a fine approach. Starting and managing a writing business probably isn’t worth the hassle for a single memoir or how-to manual. But for independent authors planning numerous titles, a formal business has two... Continue Reading →
Decaying Dreams: When Fiction-Writing and Reality Collide
If you’re one of my regular crew, you may have noticed that I’ve been AWOL for the past few weeks. I could, with some measure of truthfulness, attribute it to natural causes like being busy at my Day Job or taking a vacation. But to borrow from Jane Austen, "disguise of every sort is my... Continue Reading →