After quite a long gap, I’ve decided to self-publish a few books. I thought it might be interesting to write up my journey, because perhaps the research I undertake will be beneficial to others.
Today, I’m clarifying what the term self-publishing means because, unfortunately, it’s not as obvious as you might think.
Starting tomorrow, a new series of occasional posts about my research into self-publishing.
The first two articles are:
There are lots of books about writing – so many, in fact, that you could comfortably avoid doing any writing at all simply by setting out to read them all. There does come a point where you need to actually sit down and write. But if there is one book that is worth taking time out to read, and use as a reference, it's Business for Authors.
It's important to be published by a traditional publisher
Image by Terry Freedman via Flickr
In this day and age, in which anyone can publish and distribute their books electronically, or self-publish them by going down several routes (none of which need include the traditional vanity publisher), why should anyone bother approaching a traditional publisher? After all, very few of the thousands of manuscripts that publishers receive find their way into book form, and of those that do, very few hit the big time. There are, in fact, at least 4 reasons to try to get published by the age-old process of going to publishers.
The History and Art of Comic Books is a course at the City Lit college in London. There are several courses on graphic design, and even one for learning how to create cartoons and comics. This one, however, is not so much hands on, but a romp through several decades of comic book art in four weeks.
People say “It’s all a matter of context”. But I think that it’s when you take ideas, styles or objects out of context, or juxtapose them with apparently incongruent other ideas, styles or objects , that things start to look interesting and exciting.
Like many people I suppose, when I have written about the effects of the new rule on value-added tax, I’ve done so from the point of view of myself, as a seller of ebooks. But what of the costs to readers?I would love to be able to write blog posts or conduct my social media affairs in such a way that I became an overnight sensation, as verified by an astronomical rise in my bank balance.
That’s why I tend to read a lot of adverts that say things like “How I turned my blog into a licence to print money in just three months!”
It’s a good idea to keep backups of your day-to-day documents, so it makes sense to back up your blog too. In this short series I’m looking at ways to do that. Last time I covered how to back up your blog if you use Blogger, in the article Backing up your Blogger blog. Today, I’ll take you through the process of backing up a blog if you use Wordpress.
Ever wondered how to win the Booker Prize? Well, thanks to the Slow Journalism company’s data-crunching, the secret is revealed. Hint: it helps if you are a 50 year-old man working on his fourth novel, apparently!
Here’s the data.
What can be worse than losing your beautifully-crafted prose that you’ve published as blog posts? In this short series I’m looking at how you you can try to guard against the inconceivable happening. Today, I’m looking at Blogger. If you have a blog using the Blogger platform, then here’s how to back it up.The word “paranoid” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as
“exhibiting unnecessary or extreme fear; characterized by unreasonable or excessive suspicion of others.”
Well, you know the old joke: Just because you're paranoid i doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!
In a similar sort of way, I don’t think there is anything “unreasonable” in being paranoid about losing the content on your website.
So, you have a Word document or a text file, and you want to convert it into various ebook formats. There are formats for Kindles, Apple, the Nook and several others, so where do you start?
Willow and his family would like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Writer Beware is a blog that alerts writers to scams, and possible scams. In some respects it is like a consumer organisation for writers.
While I was writing the blog post entitled Handwriting on the Web, I was quite surprised that the typeface appeared as it was intended to: I’d assumed I’d have to take a screenshot of it to make it appear properly in a web browser. As it turns out, my original instincts were correct.
So, you’d like to use a handwriting font on your website or blog? It’s pretty easy, but you ought to think about the impression you want to create. And perhaps use it sparingly, unlke in this article.
Victorian humour? A contradiction in terms, surely? Not according to Bob Nicholson, a lecturer in history who is on a mission to make Victorian jokes funny again (which presupposes they were funny in the first place, of course, but one assumes they were!).
Now, you may think this has nothing to do with writing, but it has. Bob is using a computing technique known as “text mining” to trawl through loads of Victorian publications held by the British Library, and extract jokes.
I love books that you can dip into, and I am always interested in what writers have to say about their craft. Jurgen Wolff’s Your Creative Writing Masterclass has proved to be highly rewarding on both counts.