Malasz

While stumbling around the internet today, I came across this . In essence, it was an author bemoaning a rejection letter he received from us. He was having a bad day and chose to rant on his blog about it. I've copied the pertinent part below, but you can click on that link to read the whole thing and verify that I'm not misquoting him. My magnum opus received a rejection today, not for publication, but rather, that it was not qualified for a review by any “reviewers” on the website “The New Podler Review of Books: Small Press and self-published books worth reading”. Now I don’t remember ever submitting a review request to this site, although it’s possible. I don’t normally ask for reviews except when I am just putting a book out there and need a few ARC reviews posted so that the almighty ad sites will consider my money worth spending (and then I normally impose shamelessly on fellow authors). Now the facts that the aforementioned review site is built on the most hideous of t...

Last week I received an email from a reputable indie publishing blogger inviting me to a webinar where I could learn how to double my sales from a successful indie author. It sounded too good to be true, but since this was a reputable indie publishing blogger, I decided to give it a shot. The webinar was packed full of writers, and many went around introducing themselves and where they were from. Judging from the introductions, many were either new writers working on their first book or veterans struggling with limited sales of their first book or two. You can put me in the latter category. The successful indie author hosted the webinar and (surprise) primarily spent his time plugging his new book, which featured ways that indie authors everywhere could double their sales. He started off relating what he did and gave case studies demonstrating how so-and-so applied the techniques from the book and saw their sales blossom. But every example he gave involved a non-fiction author. And our...

el·lip·sis – noun \i-ˈlip-səs, e-\ a : the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete;  b : a sudden leap from one topic to another : marks or a mark (as …) indicating an omission (as of words) or a pause The above definition is taken from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Since I’ve begun to read indie author works, I’ve noticed that writers seem to be in love with these three little dots. So much so that they misuse them all the time. At first, I thought it was just one book or author but after ten plus books where 75% of them misuse the ellipsis, I feel the need to step in. The main use of an ellipsis is to shorten a quotation or to show a trailing off in speech. Here is an example of each. For the quotation, let’s take a simple quote from Cicero: Original – “A friend is, as it were, a second self.” Ellipsisfied – “A friend is... a second self.” Notice that is replaces an unnecessary po...

Our email address has been snatched up by an email marketing company. No real surprise there. This is the Internet Age after all. We don't mind having our site listed on indie book reviewer lists. Most of them are courteous to both author and reviewer. They list the reviewer's likes and dislikes and other submission guidelines, and even provide a link to the reviewer's site. This is the right way to go about it. They save the author time in their hunt for reviews and the reviewers from having to deal with books they're not interested in. But that's not how this marketing company operates. Authors pay a fee to generate an email marketing campaign . Judging by the format of these emails, they fill out a form listing pertinent info about themselves and their book. Upon completion, it gets shot out to every book reviewer in their database, regardless of the reviewer's book preferences. We're tired of this. There's a reason why we have submission guidelines ....