Friday, June 30, 2017

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz

"Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz": I wrote for this fun show last year. It just started airing on Boomerang's streaming service so check it out! #otherwriting

Sunday, June 25, 2017

DRAGONFRIEND: indieBRAG 2017 Cover Contest Finalist!

The cover for Dragonfriend was nominated as a finalist in the first annual "indieBRAG 2017 Cover Contest." Yay! You may recall this is the same organization that awarded their medallion to Dragonfriend a few years back. So this is pretty cool. Contest voting will be open to fans and readers starting on July 1st. I'll post a link to the indieBRAG site on that date. Then, if you are so inclined, you can go and vote for my book's cover!

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Sci-Fi Novel Update

After receiving some wise counsel from several of my author pals, I've decided to go the Kindle Scout route with my space opera novel. As my friends pointed out, the concern about "having to do a lot of promotion" to get people to nominate my book is a hollow one. I was reminded that even traditionally-published authors have to self-promote like crazy these days (unless they're already big name authors or celebrities) and self-published authors definitely have to do that. The consensus: if I was fortunate enough to get a publishing contract with Kindle Press, it wouldn't be so bad to have Amazon as a marketing ally. In other words, worth the effort.

So...

Sci-Fi Wallpaper from Fond Décran (not my cover art, but cool nonetheless)
To get things just right, I'm in the middle of a heavy-duty polish edit of the manuscript. I lopped off the first chapter to get things moving right away and am currently involved in the somewhat tricky process of seeding anything of importance from the former Chapter One into the rest of the book. Somewhat tricky, but also fun in a jigsaw puzzle kind of way. I'm also doing a chapter-by-chapter edit for continuity and overall readability. At the end of the above edit I'll go through everything one more time by having MS Word read my words back to me in its quirky Text To Speech voice (I use "David" because he sounds like an authoritative robot 😉).

Then...

I'll get everything together--manuscript, cover, logline, brief summary, etc.--and submit it to the folks at Kindle Press. At this point, the self-promoting (begging) will begin in earnest, and for thirty days I'll be promoting  the link to my "Kindle Scout campaign page" and asking friends, family, and interested parties to go there and nominate my book for publication (free and easy, all you need is an Amazon account). Expect this to happen within the next week or so.

On a related note: I commissioned a super-cool cover for my book and I'm very much looking forward to showing it to everyone when my campaign launches. See ya soon!

Sunday, June 4, 2017

10000 chickens vs. 20 T-Rexes

Not sure if authentic physical and behavioral species characteristics are at play here (I'm pretty sure chickens don't explode, right?), but this does serve as an amusing exercise in "what if" theory.

Eater of the Dead: A Dragon Friend Excerpt

Just in time for Halloween! Check out a featured Dragon Friend excerpt on the BestSelling Reads blog: "The spooky season is upon us! H...