Beth Martin's Blog, page 15

Announcing My Next Novel: At Fault

Believe it or not, but I had set up a pretty strict release schedule for my books: one new title every six months. It took me a while to realize, I’m self-publishing—I can launch books whenever I want! Having novels come out more or less frequently probably isn’t going to hurt me. Heck, a lot of indie authors make books available for preorder before the book has even been formatted/edited/written

Show, Don't Tell

One of my goals for the posts I make on this site is not to have three book reviews in a row. This is actually really hard for me. First of all, I read a lot. Second, book reviews are easy content to create. And, finally, they tend to draw a lot of people to my website.

I know this last fact thanks to Google Analytics. I can see which searches land on this site, so I know what you’re looking

Book Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

This time, I decided to pick up a novel that had the backing of a large publisher in order to ensure that I would be reading something of higher quality. I had run across a few promos for the The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation on Hulu, and was intrigued by the story—but not enough to subscribe to Hulu. In retrospect, a month of Hulu would have been cheaper than purchasing the eBook. But enough about

Book Review: Secondborn by Amy A Bartol

I picked up Secondborn because every time I browsed Amazon, the site was like, “BUY THIS BOOK!” Since I read a lot of dystopian-fiction-with-strong-female-lead novels, it seems that this one would be a natural recommendation. And Amazon published it, thus the not so subtle promotions.





Secondborn by Amy Bartol
My rating: ★★★☆☆

In Secondborn, the first child is a member of elite society,

Selling Books in Person: What to Bring

I had an absolute blast at Four State Comic Con this past weekend! Since I’m a planner, I had done a test set-up for my table and packed everything way in advance. I thought I’d share all the items I brought to give you an idea of what’s involved in setting up a table to sell books at an event.

Keep in mind that not all conventions and fairs provide vendors with the same setup. Some give you

Today is Release Day for Mental Contact

Writers get inspiration from all kinds of places, and when I was trying to come up with an idea for a novel, I thought, I’ll write a book with aliens! The result of that inspiration is Mental Contact, which (not really a spoiler) is a story with absolutely no aliens.



I crafted a world in the far future where warp travel is possible, but not commonplace. I wanted to have a flawed protagonist

Game Review: Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective

I’ve only written up product reviews of books for this site, since I figure people who follow an author’s website like books. I also read a good bit, so reviews are fairly easy content to create. Aside from devouring novels, I also play a lot of board games.

Since I have small children—and good babysitters are hard to come by—I’ve never had the opportunity to do an escape room. So I was really

Book Review: Silent Victim by Caroline Mitchell

I’ve decided to branch out a little bit and read some non-dystopian fiction, so I was happy to find a psychological thriller with a cool premise.





Silent Victim by Caroline Mitchell
My rating: ★★★★★

When Emma’s husband receives a new job opportunity, her family decides to finally sell their home, the one Emma grew up in and inherited from her father, and move to the city. However, there’s a

Bestselling Books: What the Rankings Mean

I was going to post a book review this week, but it’s going to have to wait.

Being an indie author, I try to read and review a lot of books written by other indie authors. I do this to help fellow authors out (reviews can be hard to get), to show readers that there are tons of high-quality indie books, and also to hopefully attract some of other author’s fans to my work. Since traditional

Save the Library

I’ve lived in several different areas of the US in my life, and this is particularly evident when I check in with friends using Facebook. Recently, some people I went to high school with shared a lovely news article concerning the county I grew up in. See, the (thankfully ex) chairman decided to fund a massive sports stadium that the city couldn’t afford and to make up for the deficit, the