August 20, 2025
Recently I’ve been reading emails from long-time writers who are stepping back from writing. Their reasons vary. Some, like me, simply haven’t come up with a new idea that makes them want to spend hours/days/sometimes years writing a story. Some have health problems that are preventing them from sitting at a computer for hours. Some […]
August 6, 2025
I’ve become a mini-publisher. It started when I received the rights back for all but two of my romances and all five of my mysteries (with the exception of one ebook). I created new paperbacks and ebooks for several of my romances and fourof my mysteries. Having published those books, when a long-time friend, Linda […]
July 16, 2025
SMASHWORDS https://www.smashwords.com Smashwords FAQ for Authors and Publishers Mark Coker came up with the idea for Smashwords in 2015 after co-writing the novel, Boob Tube, with his wife Lesleyann. Major publishing houses weren’t interested. They felt there too many other books like it, and those books had sold poorly. In 2018, Smashwords launched with the […]
July 14, 2021
Wonder why you’re having a difficult time getting your book noticed? I’ve been going through some of my old files (time to update and throw away) and came across a sheet showing 2006 Publishing Statistics as reported by Nielsen Bookscan. I’m not going to post all of the statistics in that report, but here are […]
March 17, 2021
In a previous blog I talked about vanity presses and why I think a writer should avoid them. This week the Writers Beware® blog highlighted a bogus company that offers self-published and wanna-be-published writers ways to get their books or unpublished stories looked at by TV and movie companies and/or republished by traditional publishers. I […]
March 3, 2021
Recently I was asked by another writer if I thought she should use a vanity book publisher. With self-publishing so popular nowadays, I didn’t even realize vanity publishers were still out there, but sure enough she had one in mind. I gave her my thoughts, but you may feel different, and if so, I welcome […]
February 3, 2021
Nowadays, most writers can’t simply write a story, send it off to an agent or publisher and sit back and wait for the praise and money. Of course, it’s always been true for most writers that once the story has been written, they must take off their writer’s hat and put on their editor’s hat. […]
January 13, 2021
I truly have something to crow about. The 4th book in the P.J. Benson Mystery series now has an actual release date: February 10, 2021. It has a beautiful cover, designed by Chris of http://highpinescreative.com. They did the covers for the first three “Crow” books (The Crows, As the Crow Flies, and Eat Crow and […]
November 18, 2020
I’ve never really had to deal with back material other than supplying an acknowledgment page, if it was appropriate, and a bio. Anything else that was added after the end of the story was supplied by my publisher. With Harlequin and Silhouette, that material often included snippets of other books available that month, how to […]