Keeping Warm

The weather has turned cold down here in the Southern Hemisphere and all the writers I know are scrambling for heaters, blankets, fingerless gloves and other warming devices that can be plugged in and set to run under their desks.

In the blogosphere some writers are keeping warm with rants on the duplicity and underhandedness of other ‘writers.’

Take a well known writer’s name. Add a middle initial. Put that on your same genre self pubbed book. Market...
Galley Cat alerted everyone to the digital duplicity.

You could see it as a blatent marketing ploy...but it is probably lower than that as Sarah from SmartBitchesTrashyBooks explains. Why did the writer target the Romance community?

For those who follow Jane Friedman you will know that she is moving into the literary community combining her social media knowledge, publishing and Uni teaching while working for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Jane was recently interviewed by one of the founders of the Alliance of Independent Authors and it is a great interview. Jane’s tips for author websites as being their hot hub for all things is especially good...chock full of good advice.

Joel Friedlander revisits the best fonts for your P O D book this week. Joel is a great resource and he has a website stuffed with hot tips.

Chuck Sambuchino has a great guest post by Emmy Laybourne on his 7 things I have learned so far series. (7 ways to keep warm, doing some of these.)

Madison Woods gives the floor to Kath Meis, the founder of Bublish which had a lot of word of mouth at last weeks Book Expo America Convention.  Writers, it’s a free tool...and an interesting marketing idea...

Alan Rinzler, erudite observer of the business has spent an entire post looking at Barry Eisler and what writers can learn from what Barry is doing.... Alan has been a solid note of warning for the last few years about digital publishing but this year the speed of change in publishing community has got him almost spinning...and if Alan, with his long view, is spinning where are the rest of us in the centrifuge.... ( I could stuff another hot word in here but I won’t.)

The Guardian tells us all about the new release of dot suffixes in the internet domain world and what it will mean for us...dot book anyone?

 PaidContent has an overview on a ground breaking move by Google into epublishing in Europe...this may have flow on effects for us down here and is a smack for Amazon.

In the craft section,

What are your characters thinking while waiting for the story to get going. This is a good post on the importance of fleshing out your characters.

K M Weiland has a nice little post on antagonist P.O.V. Should they even have one?

Larry Brooks’ Storyfix series on the Hunger Games has been compeling reading over the last couple of months but this post nails the novel and how you can nail your own work down to nine sentences. Just Brilliant.

My fingers are seizing up with cold...every sentence is finishing with me rubbing warmth into my hands...Ah winter...I so missed you...NOT.