Category: Guest Posts

If There Was a Board Game About Life as an Author #MondayBlogs #BoardGames #WritersLife

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I found this post very amusing, particularly since I’m at the getting-ready-to-publish end of the author cycle once again. It would be fun to take my kids Life game and change it according to Lucy’s vision, but somehow I think that would be frowned upon. 🙂

One of my favourite board games is ‘The Game of Life’ by Hasbro. You spin the wheel and start down the road of life in your little plastic car, taking exams, getting a job, making money, getting married, having babies, acquiring pets, losing money and going on adventures.

The other day, whilst playing ‘The Game of Life’ with one of my children I had the idea of a ‘Game of Life’board game version for authors.

Nearly everyone nowadays wants to be an author so this unique game would make you feel like an author, without doing the hard bit – writing a book. It could be called ‘The Game of Author Life’. 

In the ‘Game of Life’ your plastic car counter has little holes for your husband, wife, children and pets.

In the ‘Game of Author Life’ you would have little holes for your literary agent and your publisher if you decide to go traditional. If you decide to go self published, you would have little holes for your editor and book cover designer.

You would spin the wheel and start down the road towards publication. *Sigh*

Keep reading at the source:  If There Was a Board Game About Life as an Author #MondayBlogs #BoardGames #WritersLife

Character Actions: Should There Be a Reason Why? by Andrea Lundgren

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Characters do all kinds of things in fiction. Their actions make up the stories we write, and if they did nothing…it’d be pretty boring.

But how much motivation should there be in what they do? Do you, as the author, need to always know why they’re doing it, or can they just “do something for doing it”?

Let’s take a look at a scene and see how it works.

She walked over to the glass. On the other side was a habitat, all sand and rocks with only a few scaly plants, the surface of their stems mirroring that of the creature who should’ve been inside.

Slowly, she touched the glass. Her hand stayed there for a long moment, not moving, in firm but gentle contact against the clear silica-based partition until it slowly began to warm to her touch.

Then she backed away.

Now, we, as readers, don’t need to know why she touched the glass at this point in the story. It can be something we’re left to speculate about, wondering if she misses the creature or if she is trying to see whether, perhaps, it’s still hiding somewhere in there. Or we could later learn that she touches the glass out of solidarity with the creature, feeling like her own life is encased in glass and she longs to break free, to escape like the lizard or snake did.

Keep reading via Character Actions: Should There Be a Reason Why?

World Building: Creating a Mountain Setting

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World building is a lot of fun for me as a writer. It is also important to readers, since a well or poorly written world can make or break a book. I found this post especially interesting, maybe because Ancient Voices takes place entirely in a mountain village. Mine is more an alpine setting, but there are many different types of ranges and associated cultures. Take a look at this article posted on the Mythcreants blog–it’s a good one!

Creating a Mountain Setting

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Of all the possibilities for building worlds, the same few types appear over and over again: desert worlds, grasslands, globe-encompassing seas. Despite being passed over, mountainous biomes, whether old and eroded like the Blue Ridge range or “new” and towering like the Himalayas, have a lot to offer. So what makes a makes a mountainous region unique for worldbuilding? What kind of people live there and what kind of environments do they inhabit?
Click to read the rest on the Mythcreants blog

Great News for Indie Authors!

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It’s always good to get encouraging news when you’re an indie author, and I found a whole lot of encouragement in this article so I thought I’d pass it on. Not all that long ago there was a huge stigma associated with self-publishing, but not so much any more. Hard work and perseverance does pay off! Special thanks goes to all you readers out there who are helping to change the trends. It wouldn’t be happening without your support.

Traditional publishers’ ebook sales drop as indie authors and Amazon take off – By Frank Catalano (published in GeekWire)

 

Ebook sales are dying. Ebooks are insanely popular. If the short definition of cognitive dissonance is holding two contradictory ideas to be true, ebooks are about as dissonant as digital content gets.

Yet ebooks may also represent a chapter in the still-being-written story of how keeping track of what’s happening with content hasn’t always kept pace with the technology that’s transformed it.

Let’s start with the bad news. Two new sets of numbers covering 2017 show ebook sales are on the decline, both in terms of unit and dollar sales.

The first, released in April by market research firm NPD’s PubTrack Digital, saw the unit sales of ebooks fall 10 percent in 2017 compared to 2016. In absolute numbers, that meant the roughly 450 publishers represented saw ebook sales drop from 180 million units to 162 million over a year’s time.

The second, just released by the American Association of Publishers, reported a decline in overall revenue for ebooks, a year-to-year decrease of 4.7 percent in 2017. AAP tracks sales data from more than 1,200 publishers.

This ebook decline occurred in an overall publisher revenue environment that AAP said was essentially flat in 2017. So some other kinds of book formats that AAP watches, like hardback books, went up as ebooks went down. For its part, NPD says when combining print and ebook unit sales, ebooks’ percentage of the total dropped from 21 percent in 2016 to 19 percent in 2017.

It turns out this downward ebook trend isn’t new. It may actually be an improvement, of sorts. “The pace of ebook decline appears to be cooling,” AAP’s Marisa Bluestone said, noting 2017’s drop was, “significantly less than the double-digit declines experienced in 2015 and 2016.”

Among the categories showing a decline in both NPD’s and AAP’s figures were kids’ ebooks. Children’s ebooks had the most dramatic decline in unit sales, and children’s/young adult ebooks have suffered double-digital revenue drops every since year 2015.

And yet, NPD reports, even though it’s also declining, adult fiction remains the most popular ebook category, with 44 percent of all adult fiction sales in digital form.

On the surface it would seem like all of this is going to come as a surprise to boosters who thought ebooks would replace traditional paper book publishing completely.

But there are three key words to keep in mind: “traditional book publishing.” And that’s the good ebook news. Because the very same technology that allowed traditional publishers to create and sell ebooks also allowed authors to do the same — directly to readers.

NPD and AAP don’t measure those indie sales. Centralized reporting of direct-from-author sales is tougher to come by, but by all anecdotal measures the independent market has taken off, notably in the also-still-large category of adult fiction.

Click to read the rest of this “good ebook news” on GeekWire

 

Here’s a Fun Trick to Make Your Writing Time More Fulfilling (and More Productive)

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As a writer who has done a fair share of gaming over the years, I can totally relate to this post! Gaming analogies aside, the points made are excellent ones, and I have successfully used them all, so even if you don’t play video games, keep reading anyway. 🙂 (Shared from Don Massenzio’s blog)

Meg Dowell's avatarMeg Dowell Writes

What do you do to motivate yourself to write when you don’t “feel like it”?

Chances are, you found this blog not because you have an answer to this question personally, but because you’re desperate for someone else to give you one.

I never claim to have all the answers. Everyone’s writing experience is different, so any advice I give may or may not apply to everyone in the same way, or at all.

But what I can do is tell you what works for me. And that’s turning work into a game.

It’s time to level up your writing. It’s time to play a new game, and embark on the path to “winning.”

First, you have to know the endgame. Every game has an end goal, or a point in which you know you’re about to reach the finish line. What is your personal endgame? Where do you want…

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New Release: Monster Huntress by David Wiley

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Track down Your New Favorite Fantasy Heroine today!

Do you love saucy red-headed fantasy heroines? Then you will absolutely adore Ava Evenstar of David Wiley’s Monster Huntress, book one in the Young Huntress Series which released April 21st.

The world tells Ava she’s just a little girl who should know her place, but Ava wants a sword not a crown.

Ava and her father are following in her mother’s footsteps, hunting monsters in the 13 Kingdoms, seeking revenge for her mother’s untimely death. Little do they know that the monster responsible is building up a dangerous force. When The King requests the help of Ava’s father in exchange for her becoming a princess, Ava is not pleased. Can Ava escape her fate and the obnoxious prince of Harborg to live the life she’s always known, or will the dark plans of the monster catch her in his trap.

David Wiley combines the action of Tomb Raider with the fantastical elements of The Witcher to create the exciting world of The Young Huntress high fantasy series.

Track down Monster Huntress today and slay your need for good fantasy.

Want a sneak peek into the story? Here you go!

Ava woke up a few hours before dawn. She already had a horse loaded up and saddled. She slipped into the traveling clothes her father had bought for her, a green tunic and brown breeches. She strapped Seraphina to her back and grabbed a light brown cloak before heading out the door.

The whole village was still asleep as she mounted up. Ava’s mind raced as she thought about all of the adventures she had heard about. She imagined all of the exciting quests that were waiting for her outside these village walls. It was a new day, a new start to the next chapter in her life. Even though she would miss this old life, she knew she was ready to become an apprentice monster hunter. She had dreamed of this day for years and she knew her father would finally agree to train her when she caught up to him. He had to.

She urged her horse into a slow walk, not wanting to wake anyone with her departure. She reached the western edge of the village and stared out at the vast expanse of desert ahead of her. And then Ava heard a shout behind her. She turned in the saddle and spotted Edgar a little ways back, leaning heavily on a thick staff, waving. She smiled and waved back. She was going to miss that boy but she had a feeling they would meet again someday. Ava urged her horse into a trot and rode off into the distance knowing that Edgar would still be standing there, in spite of the pain, waving until he couldn’t see her anymore.

Join the Monster Huntress tour for more of the adventure!