Authors Electric

It's Christmas Day, so I don't suppose anyone is reading this post. Which means Big Fat Lies by David Gillespie I won't be accused of  killing the joy.           On the other hand, Christmas is a traditional time for telling creepy stories - and I am here to make your flesh creep.              'Big Fat Lies - How the Diet Industry Makes You Sick, Fat and Poor' is by an Australian lawyer, David Gillespie. He was fat, and he wanted to be thinner, but found, like so many of us, that diets don't work. So he started researching the subject.           As he says, he may not be a doctor or nutritionist, but what lawyers are really good at is following the evidence - which he presents in Big Fat Lies.           The ghastly monsters which emerge from fridge and pantry, to gibber, mop and mow, are Sugar, High-Fructose Corn Syrup, and ...

As a small indie publisher trying to sell eBooks via Amazon I'm always open to new ideas on how to increase sales. So when a writing friend suggested I read ' Make A Killing on Kindle ' by Michael Alvear I decided to download it. This is the first book I've read that does not advocate using social media to sell books. Instead the author suggests using the tools available to the writer on Amazon. Realising the only thing I would lose would be the 18 hours he states it takes to implement his steps I decided to give it a go. So I picked one of my books I felt was under achieving and started to follow his suggested steps. I updated my author profile, tweaked my book, changed the title slightly and redesigned the front cover. I also spent time researching terms I could use in my book's search engine profile. I know SEO is important in ensuring your book shows up in searches but I hadn't realised that such small changes could make such huge dif...

Most writers realise reviews help sell books. Grief even the courses I teach via WOW have reviews attached to them (and before you ask they are real reviews written by real students). To demonstrate what I mean I pulled a few books from my shelf and discovered many had a review or two on the back cover: The Writers' and Artists' Year Book (a little dated 2010) The Writer's Handbook (again a little dated 2010) The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler The Penguin Guide to Punctuation How to Write a Children's Picture Book Volume 1: Structure by Eve Heidi Bine-Stock So what options do you as an author have for obtaining these reviews? Well you could follow the route traditional publishers have used for decades by sending out review copies and keeping fingers crossed the book is reviewed. You could perhaps offer a give-away as I did via Amazon with my children's picture eBook 'Clever Rabbit....