Author-Zone

A short, dark tale of the future, one that comes to us by way of a quantum-computing simulation, the most advanced such simulation yet attempted. This is the complete story. It also appears on Wattpad. ☙ ❧  Once again, Hartley and I were hunched over my kitchen table at oh-dark-hundred hours, sipping the day-old acorn juice that passes for coffee in my humble dungeon, trying to figure out what…

It’s Time to Break Some Rules

The other day, I was poking around online looking for examples of novelists who have broken all the rules. Google brought me to a forum where someone had asked just such a question, namely: “What are some great examples where authors of novels successfully break the ‘rules’ for writing?” Unfortunately, there was no thread attached (just one person’s reply) because a moderator had closed the…

Can Writing Make You Healthier?

Could it be that the benefits of writing go far beyond building your vocabulary and improving your command of grammar? Could it be that writing is actually demonstrably therapeutic? Not just psychologically, but physically?

If you’re a writer, you already know the answer.

Studies increasingly show that the act of writing brings long-term improvements in mood, stress levels, and depressive…

Seamlessly integrate bad writing into your marketing

Are you as tired as I am of lazy marketing pitches?

The Travesty of the Day comes from http://www.cometchat.com/features/seamless-integration:

CometChat integrates seamlessly into your existing website. Using our ready integration, anyone with virtually zero programming knowledge can install CometChat on their site within 5 minutes!

“Integrates seamlessly” is overused (and when I see it, I think…

I recently heard a story, which may be apocryphal, but has the ring of truth to it: A pottery class was divided up into two groups. One group of students was told to concentrate not on quantity, but quality. The other group was told the opposite. At the end of the session, students were asked to present their best work for judging.

The students who concentrated on quantity (that’s right, quantity

What Does a Good Book Cover Look Like?

Adages to the contrary, people do often judge books based on their cover. A book’s cover is an important bit of packaging and marketing. Get it wrong, and you’re sure to see sales suffer. Get it right, and you’ll stand out from the crowd, in every way.

It’s interesting to see what kinds of cover designs people are using. The following examples come from NoiseTrade.com, which is a site where you…

A Defence of Nonsense, by G.K. Chesterton

Note: Gilbert Keith Chesterton published the following essay in 1901, as part of a collection called The Defendant.

There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not…

Most people (including many professional writers) consider writing difficult. In fact, it’s probably the most frighteningly difficult thing most people do in their professional lives, second only to public speaking.

Part of the reason for this is that people acknowledge, I think, on a gut level, that writing is a form of artistic expression, and yet most of us (for whatever reason) are convinced…

Indie Authors Gain Ground in Unit Sales but Not Dollars

The latest figures from authorearnings.com show that while indie authors now command a bigger share of Amazon’s (and Barnes & Noble’s) pie than ever, their share of the cash pie is not growing very fast.

Interestingly, 33% of all paid ebook unit sales on Amazon.com are indie self-published ebooks.

However, if you look at dollar amounts coming from those pie slices, the picture is quite a bit…

Are You Making These Common Mistakes?

I want to talk about some tips for streamlining your writing and giving it more impact (as well as making it more “correct,” grammatically). These tips address problems that even competent writers have. I catch myself making some of these mistakes. But afterward, I always discipline myself appropriately, for example by withholding extra servings of gruel.

Subject-pronoun agreementis a problem for…

What If Your Book Had a Better Title?

Here’s a scary thought for you: What if you had three possible titles for your book, and you tested their popularity (in terms of their ability to send clicks to Amazon), and you found that the most popular title outperformed the least popular title by 3-to-1?

Now here’s the really scary part: What if you didn’t do the test, and took your book to market using (unbeknownst to you) the leastpopular…

Is One of Your Story’s Characters Bipolar?

You need to do your homework on mental illness before giving a character a disorder of some kind, particularly something as complex as bipolar disorder.

It’s easy to get the idea from modern media that bipolar illness is common, when it’s not (the prevalence rate of 2% makes it only a little more common than schizophrenia). So first realize, you’re dealing with something that’s actually fairly…

How to Depict Crazy People in Fiction

You should use care in how you depict mentally disturbed people in your fiction. It’s not often done properly.

This is not the way to do it.

Hollywood has accustomed us (via movies like Psycho, Halloween, Fight Club, and American Psycho) to think of psychopathic individuals as having split personalities or being violent, but in fact most schizophrenic people are non-violent, and split personality…

Want to Reach Your Goal? Stay Focused

This post was originally going to be a big long piece about brand management: Taking your brand (which is your byline) seriously. But really, the single most important thing about managing a brand, arguably, is focus.

Think about the companies that are really successful. Most have a strong brand and a “story” that’s easily summarized. Apple has just a few product lines; those products are…

16 Great Free Font Tools

You can never have too many font resources. Especially free ones.

On that basis, today we’re listing 16 of the most powerful free font tools we could find. Most are web-based, but a couple are downloadable apps. Use all at your own risk, of course. If you like this list, bookmark and share it.

Beautiful Web Type: Best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.

WhatTheFont: Determine the font…

The Book Launch Stuff You Might Forget

Your launch isn’t going to go 100% according to plan. (Or maybe it will. If so, you’re lucky.) There’ll be things you’ll wish you’d attended to, that somehow fell through the cracks.

For example, I forgot, when launching Of Two Minds, that there’s a 5-day delay between the time you add the book to your Author Page on Amazon and the time it actually displayson your page. Amazon, for whatever…

Be Careful Picking Fonts

A few days ago, I wrote about why Times New Roman is not such a good typeface for a book. Richard Bilkey (at FictionEtal.com) goes a step further and says flat-out: “Using Times New Roman or Arial will instantly mark you as unprofessional as these fonts are simply not designed for the body text of books and should be avoided even when submitting manuscripts to publishers.”

You should plan on…