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Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 89
February 6, 2018
The death of imagination…
Social media is addictive. Computer games are addictive. Streaming video is addictive. Writers can be addicted to these technologies as well as readers. Or should I say ex-writers and ex-readers? As a consequence, the number of readers dwindles, and writers will stop writing books.
The ultimate casualty in this depressing scenario is human imagination. When someone reads a book, s/he turns words into real scenes, real people’s dialogue, and real action, especially while reading fiction. Writi...
February 1, 2018
Steve’s shorts: Skeleton Crew…
Skeleton Crew
Copyright 2017, Steven M. Moore
Mandy Wang was the first of the six to awake. Others soon followed her from their cryosleep tanks to the shower stalls.
“I feel like shit,” said Guillermo Rivera, the Chilean, sitting on a bench while waiting his turn.
“The shower helps,” said Mandy. “I’ll soon be done.”
When she exited and started toweling off, she smiled at Guillermo. “Don’t get any ideas. We have work to do.”
He shrugged. “In those tanks, it’s like being under anesthesia. You c...
January 30, 2018
Storytelling…
Readers of this blog know I’ve recently doubled my storytelling power. I’ve entered a collaboration with A. B. Carolan. He is rumored to be a descendant of the great Irish harpist and troubadour Turlough O’Carolan. Whether true or not, he was a child who was stolen and raised by leprechauns, who either taught him or honed his skills at storytelling. He now lives in Donegal, Ireland, where he communicates frequently with me, as all good collaborators do. We don’t always agree and argue about t...
January 25, 2018
Book review of M. J. Neary’s Wynfield’s Kingdom…
(M. J. Neary, Wynfield’s Kingdom, Crossroad Press, ASIN B01LM3QZT8, ISBN 978-1519020086)
Novels should have more than good plots. They should have meaningful themes interweaved reflecting on problems humanity faces. I don’t read fluffy romances or cat mysteries. Thank you, author Neary, for writing an excellent one that is more than fluff…a lot more!
The British aristocracy and government never historically promoted slavery per se, but they exploited other ethnic groups in their colonies a...
January 23, 2018
Make a fast start…
In my blog post “The End Game,” I discussed what back material should be at the end of an author’s books. While Big Five authors in their arrogance mostly ignore this, indie authors and authors published by indie publishers (small presses) shouldn’t. I was imagining a reader who had just finished a book, a complete entree, but still wanted some dessert.
The front material is more likely to get the reader to read the book, so it’s more important in that sense. It represents the appetizer. Here...
January 18, 2018
Why Amazon is anti-indie: Part Two…
Why Amazon is anti-indie: Part Two…
Now that I have your attention, in Part Two, I’ll belabor the point that Amazon is anti-indie. We can see that right away when we compare how the retailer compares to Smashwords. Let’s forget how negative Amazon’s KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited are for indie authors for the moment. Amazon has many other problems that work against indies.
They restrict the author to the propriety Kindle .mobi format for ebooks. They always try to create monopolies, of cou...
January 17, 2018
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #154…
Books as gifts. I’m probably preaching to the choir here because you all know books make excellent gifts, whether print versions, ebooks, or audiobooks. I made out very well over the holidays. I received Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci (even if there’s an ebook version, I’d recommend print because of the excellent art reproductions that accompany the text describing Leonardo’s development), Mark Weir’s Artemis (see my review on my blog), and Orwell’s Why I Write. There are no better gifts for a...
January 16, 2018
Why Amazon is anti-indie: Part One…
I’ve been analyzing why my book sales on Amazon are so low. They never were great, but now they’re terrible. Yeah, I don’t play the review game very well, but almost all my reviews are serious 4- and 5-star ones and not the short product endorsements that Amazon encourages. I don’t have endorsements by V.I.P. authors; I don’t know many Big Five authors—I’m not sure I’d want their endorsements anyway. And I can’t afford much PR and marketing, not that it seems to matter.
When I first started...
January 11, 2018
Does the NY Times know books?
As readers of this blog know, when it comes to news, I often bash the Times. They put their slant on everything, just like the Wall Street Journal, but the Times v. WSJ story isn’t as bad as the MSNBC v. Fox News one (if anyone’s interested, I ignore both Hannity’s and Madow’s rants and listen to Jake on CNN). One can argue that any media outlet will have a slant–in this polarized political state, that’s become the new norm. However, it’s the Times’ book biases that bother me.
Newspapers ar...
January 9, 2018
Steve’s shorts: Prequel to Chaos…
[While many of my books lead up to Survivors of the Chaos in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” and are on the same long timeline—in particular, the “Clones and Mutants Series” and the bridge novel, Soldiers of God—I decided that, considering the current political situation in the U.S. right now, a short-story prequel to The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, just recently released, was in order. Consider it a funeral dirge for democracy treating how fast my warnings about fascist capitalism a...
