Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 12

Finely Aged Whine: Over Two Decades of Selling Stories

This September 30th, The Whine Seller turns 10 years old! Yes, I know there are posts older than that on the site but that’s because I shamelessly moved them here from my other, older blog when I first started to separate my seller life from my fiction writer life. It was September 30th, 2008 when I started this sometimes angry, usually funny and always ranting little blog about selling, publishing, eBay and everything in between and I still can’t believe it’s lasted as long as it has or that...

Fun facts & trivia about the history of Amazon.com

In today’s guest post, we’re looking into the history and trivia and everyone’s problematic fav, the ultimate e-commerce elephant in every room, Amazon.

-The Whine Seller

Amazon’s Basic History

When Amazon first launched in July 1994, Jeff Bezos already had a vision for its domination in the ecommerce market. Although it only began as a bookseller, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. From the very beginning, he intended to make Amazon an ‘everything’ solution for consumers and, at the mom...

Break into YA writing by starting with the stage before the page

If you’re a YA writer having trouble breaking in, you might be better off getting started with writing YA plays first. I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for ages but then this question came in from the mailbag which gave me the perfect opportunity to discuss it. I came across your website because I am just getting into playwriting, in addition to plugging along in writing YA fiction. Right now, I do have a finished one-act play.… Read more

The post Break into YA writing by starting...

The Future of E-Commerce: 60 Trends to watch

It’s hard to imagine a world without e-commerce. For sellers like us, it’s our job and source of income, yes, but buying online is such a huge part of how we live these days that it’s easy to forget just how much it’s grown and changed in the last few decades. We’ve gone from e-commerce being something people were initially suspicious of, wary of their identity and financial information being stolen, to ordering something from our phones while on the toilet without a second thought.

But in an...

Kanban for writers: organize book releases, revisions & more with project management boards

Kanban for Writers

My writing life is a many headed beast. I write fiction, non-fiction, freelance articles, stage plays and more under a variety of pen names. I’m always looking for better ways to prioritize and manage all these different project so I’m not running around like the proverbial headless chicken. When I learned about the Kanban system of project management, I was incredibly excited because I realized it was perfectly adaptable to the writing life (and specifically my genre hoppi...

Camp NaNoWriMo July 2018 debrief

I went into Camp NaNoWriMo’s July session with low expectations. My only word count goal was to try to hit 50,000 words as that would make it my highest word count month for this laid back, low goal year and be good practice for NaNoWriMo proper. As for what I was going to write, my focus was to try to write a bunch of blog posts I’d been meaning to do for a while and then spend the rest of the month writing down random stories from my two decades of selling online, a project I’ve nicknamed m...

Behold The Whine Seller’s new author photo!

I have something cool to show you! I’ve struggled for a while with what to use as an author photo here on The Whine Seller. I wanted it to be something immediately visually different than the author photo I use for writing plays and fiction but still recognizable as my real human face so I could use it on my business card for when I met people in person at talks and events.

Add to this that I’ve had a heck of a time finding a designer who can represent the concept of e-commerce and capture th...

A Writer’s Guide to Resistance: how to keep writing in a world gone mad

No, it’s not just you. It is really freaking hard to write right now. The world has gone mad, everything is terrible and all that continuous fear and rage and stress makes it really hard to focus on anything, much less fiction.

Creatives, like writers, are particularly hit by this because that same empathy that makes us able to get into the skin of a character or the hearts of our readers makes digesting everything happening right now especially hard. Empathy is a very good thing, especially...

Ah, the old password porn extortion video scam spam. Classic.

I pop into the old spam bin every now and again to make sure a real email didn’t get eaten by mistake and today I found a real gem. Let me show it to you…

It reads:

I know [PASSWORD] is your pass word. Lets get right to the point. You do not know me and you’re probably wondering why you’re getting this email? There is no one who has compensated me to investigate you.

actually, I actually installed a software on the xxx videos (porn) website and there’s more, you visited this website to exper...

4TheWords Pricing: How much does the writing app 4 The Words actually cost?

How much does 4TheWords cost?

Answer in a hurry: While the official line is that it costs “only $4 a month,” the actual cost per month for 4TheWords varies. The game is filled with micro-transactions that cost in game core or c-crystals that you purchase with real money, meaning the maximum cost per month has no limit to how high it can go. On the other hand, purchasing c-crystals in bulk or by using coupon codes (such as the excellent annual NaNoWriMo ones that give participants 25% off, win...