Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
Today starts the first day of the new Kindle Unlimited royalty program. As with so many things in life, there will be winners and losers. I gave my thoughts on the biggest KU losers last week and now I have the winners. Remember, this is just my prediction for the books that will fare the …
Continue reading “3 Book Categories that Should Benefit Under the New KU”
As I build my outline, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good scene, and that led to these posts: Test That Scene – Is It Essential or Filler? and Test That Scene – Cut or Revise? But what about stringing those scenes together? Is there a test for that? Serendipitously I came …
Continue reading “Test Those Scene Connections – But, Therefore & Then”
Last week I wrote about the royalty restructuring of the Kindle Unlimited program. The new system goes into effect July 1, 2015 and it’s going to drastically change how authors are paid when a program subscriber borrows their participating book. This new system only affects writers in the Kindle Unlimited program and authors are given …
Continue reading “4 Book Categories that may Suffer under Restructured KU”
Right now I am buried under a game script that is due today. (Note to bosses: not actual script in photo. Don’t worry!) It’s the first thing I’ve ever written that requires nodes and opcodes. I am not a computer programmer, so the learning curve is steep and thus it’s taking me longer than anticipated. …
Continue reading “Reblog: The Starving Artist Lifestyle”
Monday morning, June 15th, the self publishing world absorbed the shock wave from the latest Amazon announcement. In case you haven’t heard, Amazon revealed a major monetary restructuring of the royalty calculations on their Kindle Unlimited program. Unlimited is the program that allows Amazon shoppers to pay a subscription fee to borrow an unlimited number …
Continue reading “The New Kindle Unlimited Royalty Scale”
A month ago I wrote a post called Test That Scene – Is It Essential or Filler? The basics of it are this: No Filler Test Question #1 – If deleted, will the reader still be able to follow the story? If yes, you’ve got filler! Question #2 – What is different by the end …
Continue reading “Test That Scene – Cut or Revise?”
If we were having coffee, I’d meet up with you in the afternoon. This is unusual since I’ve always scheduled our coffee dates in the late morning so I can spend the afternoon/evening with my WIP because that’s when I write best. But do I really? I’ve been pondering that this week as I experiment with my writing …
Continue reading “Weekend Coffee Share – On Being a Vampire-Turtle Hybrid Writer”
First person POV has its advantages and its drawbacks. If you love it, and many writers do, you know one of the biggest issues is the overuse of personal pronouns. If you’re not paying attention, you can end up with long passages where every other sentence starts with the same word. In those rare instances …
Continue reading “Writing Tips for 1st Person POV”
A work crisis, a funeral and a deadline have made this week rather chaotic for me, so it is time for a roundup post! I created the Reading for Writers 101 series because I believe reading critically is an essential component of learning writing craft. Plus the series gives me an outlet to not only …
Continue reading “Reading for Writers 101 Roundup”
If we were having coffee, I would confess it’s been a crazy, exhausting week. We would grab seats in my garden, since I just refinished some lawn furniture for the occasion. I have some interesting news to share; I took part in PitMad this week. I suspect some of my friends don’t know about this …
Continue reading “If We Were Having Coffee: PitMad Edition”