Here’s a short poem I wrote in participation of WeWriWa:

There is a book

An old Arab trader warned me of

that takes your whole life to read.

Whole worlds are contained within.

And when you finish

you have just one day

to think it over and decide

if it was worth it after all.

Whenever a new self-published author asks where they should be promoting their work, the immediate responses are fairly standard:

• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Google+, Tumblr, etc.)
• Personal website
• Local independent bookstores
• Library book readings

I submit to you a new avenue for book sales — summer festivals! Rent a vendor space, buy a folding table, print a few dozen copies of your book, and go wild!

In my home town — London, Ontario — we have a handful of festivals that take place all over the city every summer. There are big festivals, like the Home County Music and Art festival, and little festivals, like the For the Love of Arts festival. The big festivals are more expensive — $400 per vendor space seems to be the standard — while the smaller festivals can be anywhere from $50 per vendor space to totally free.

Now, festival vendors are usually…

I love sappy romances and space operas, so I wrote a book about them.

It’s unabashedly ridiculous, and involves alien abduction, a heart-throb mercenary prince, laser guns, six-armed lizard men with a curious predilection for the colour blue, and an out-of-her-depth high school girl trying to find her way back home. 

Imminent Danger: And How to Fly Straight Into It

by Michelle Proulx

High school junior Eris Miller thinks she’s having a bad day when her roommate’s boyfriend catches her stepping out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel.

Then she gets abducted by scaly six-armed aliens with a strange fondness for the color blue, and her day suddenly gets a whole lot worse.

Trapped on a spaceship bound for the slave markets of Sirius B, Eris fears she’ll never see her home again.

But then fate whisks her away from her reptilian captors and into the arms of…

Formatting your book isn’t just about correct use of grammar and spelling. Here are some tips and pointers to making your book look like it’s been set by a professional.

• Search-and-replace is your friend – but use it wisely. Always check that your search query is set up properly and never ‘change all’ unless you are absolutely sure you really want to ‘change all’.
• Search and replace multiple spaces. In the past if you used a typewriter you would type a double space at the end of every sentence to create a clear sentence break in the monospaced typewritten text. Many authors still do this – particularly those who were brought up using typewriters. It’s not necessary anymore and can create weird spacing. This is one of the first things I do when I’m setting text.
• Change double dashes – – to n – or m — dashes. Again this…

No, the movie of Imminent Danger by Michelle Proulx has not yet been produced but if it was to be shot in the near future here is who I’d like to see become involved:

We had no idea what to expect when we attended this year’s L.A. Festival of Books.  As the ever so enthusiastic intellectuals we (Daniel at Blackbird and I) can sometimes be, we researched blogs from attendees from years past.  We tried to gain wisdom and insight as well as learn from their mistakes.  Some numbers–and we do love our numbers–came back that on average an independent or self-published author sold three books a day and gave away about three hundred promotional items over two days.  That came as a surprise since over 200,00 people attend, but we also learned that big named authors were the reason many people flocked to the event and us indies were more of a “filler space” as one blogger wrote about the 2012 event.

With that in mind, Blackbird LSD, whom I partnered with for the event, and I decided this was more of a…

By Eric Ralph

When people hear that I wrote a novel and published it, they often say that they would like to write a novel someday too. This infographic is for those aspiring novelists out there.

For today’s A-Z Challenge entry, Pete asked me to share with you all my thoughts on Plotting vs. Pantsing. And thus, I shall.

In the eternal battle between Plotting and Pantsing, I come down firmly … somewhere in the middle. I keep trying to ally with one side or the other, but they inevitably reject me due to my mutinous tendencies. I shall now elaborate on this concept. Prepare yourself.

Planning has never really been my thing. In fact, probably my least favourite sentence to hear from another person is, “So, what’s your plan for today?” Argh! I always have a vague idea of what I want to do, of course, but if I formalize my plans verbally or on paper, I feel trapped, like I’ve suddenly lost the freedom to be spontaneous. And the instant I feel that way, I immediately begin to come up with ways to avoid…