My friend Lucinda Elliot has nominated me for the Loyal Reader Award, a singular blessing bestowed for being a good boy and showing up to read her blog posts on a regular basis. I should have asked for Air Miles! 🙂 This is the award where other bloggers get to lay their claim on you!…
Liebster Blog Award
Opening Remarks Back in January, the gothic-horror writer Lucinda Elliot nominated me for the Liebster Blog Award. I thank her sincerely for the honour. The long delay in putting up the acceptance post stems in part from a breakdown in my defences against manic-depressive illness. Things have been a bit rocky this year and the…
Silver Quill Blogger Award
Katherine Givens has nominated me for the Silver Quill Blogger Award! It is a genuine pleasure to be so honoured by a young up-and-coming author and poet. Thank you, Katherine. Honours always come with obligations so I will take care of these right away. As per the award’s rules, I have answered the following questions:…
Ebook Pricing Strategies for Indie Authors
Please note that material such as this is time sensitive and may vary somewhat from one genre to another. I offer what is here as a framework for your own research and thinking. Do your homework. Confusion abounds when deciding the best price for ebooks. (Image: public domain.) Many fairy tales surround pricing for indie ebooks.…
Do Indie Writers Need a Pen Name?
Some indie writers operate under a carefully chosen pen name. Is there an advantage to this? Does it increase the author's ability to sell his or her works? When I set out to become an indie, I thought the strategy had some merit. Subsequently, I had cause to reconsider. Mark Twain is probably the most…
Ebook Covers for Indie Writers
After finding the public domain artwork, I made this cover in fifteen minutes using a donationware application called PhotoScape. As an indie writer who has not yet made his fortune it does not pay me to have ebook covers made by professionals. This is especially true for short stories. That being the case, I learned…
Indie Writers Are Artists Too
Fantasy author Brian S. Pratt is an excellent example of an indie writer who has achieved remarkable success. All writing is a kind of art. The most popular forms (fantasy, for instance, or horror and vampire novels) are examples of folk art. They are to literature what country music is to classical. (That is, unless…
How to Do a Messy Blog Startup and Be Happy
This blog is now three weeks old. In the beginning, I took some advice from a slick how-to-blog website and just plunged right in, opting for WordPress as the blog host and choosing the 2011 theme used to illustrate the article. Definitely a monkey see, monkey do scenario. As it happened, the advice was pretty…
Indie Writers Need Critical Feedback
The thing indie writers lack more than anything else is honest feedback. In the traditional publishing industry, all but the biggest-selling authors are subject to the opinions of their publisher’s various editors. Stories deemed too long or excessively rambling earn requests for cuts and rewrites before publication. Poorly drawn characters must be made more vivid.…
Should Indie Writers Choose Print or Digital?
A lot of struggling writers are still hoping to break into print. They see self-publishing as a humble temporary stop on a journey towards grander things. Their ebooks are merely practice runs as they whip themselves into shape for their real careers as print authors. It is easy to see why they might have this attitude.…
Thomas Cotterill 