Gary D. Robson's Blog: Reading & Writing with Gary Robson, page 11

Finding buried treasure — that you buried!

It’s a rather surreal experience. Here I am, going through a bunch of my writing archives looking for a book proposal template, and I stumble upon an old proposal from 2005. I remember coming up with the book idea. I remember doing the research and sending out proposals. What I didn’t remember was actually writing [...]

Censorship Talk at the Forum for Provocative Issues

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seems very straightforward when it says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” That means in this country, we won’t be subjected to things like the book burnings of Hitler’s Germany or the death sentence imposed on Salman Rushdie (author [...]

BookLamp and the Book Genome Project

I was perusing BookRiot yesterday and came across a post entitled “12 Alternatives to Goodreads.” This is a hot topic since the announcement that Amazon is acquiring Goodreads, and I found it interesting that Amazon has a stake in the first two alternatives listed (they own Shelfari outright and have a minority interest in LibraryThing). [...]

Amazon buying Goodreads? Can’t we have anything nice?

The word is out. The biggest monopoly in the history of the book business is buying the biggest independent book review website. Most of what I’m reading about Amazon’s pending purchase of Goodreads is positive, but personally, it sends chills down my spine — and not in a good way. If a big retailer like [...]

Myths & Legends of Tea

Most writers don’t like to talk about their work in process. I guess I’m not most writers, because I like to talk about pretty much everything. I do usually hold back, though, until I’m really sure the book is going somewhere. At this point, I’m far enough along that I’m ready to let the cat [...]

Who Pooped in the Cascade Mountains?

A quick update: We are having some illustrator issues right now, and we’re not sure what the release date will be for my 18th poop book: Who Pooped in the Cascade Mountains? Personally, I’m still hoping for this fall, but there is no official date at this point, and I’m not setting up any events [...]

A few myths about banned books

I just listened to an episode of the “Stuff You Should Know” podcast from howstuffworks.com from September 13 of last year entitled, “How Book Banning Works.” The podcast was inspired by Banned Books Week, and it talks quite a bit about court cases and censorship in the United States. Unfortunately, they didn’t do their research [...]

The Wrong Way to Promote Your Book

I originally wrote this article for Writer’s Weekly back in 2003. It can be seen in its original form on their website. I’ve placed it here on my blog because of something that happened last month that got me thinking about it. See that story at the end of the article. Websites for writers and [...]

Oh, boy! My book is a textbook! That’s good news, right?

Overall, I suppose I can’t complain about my experiences with the last technical book I wrote, The Closed Captioning Handbook. I got an advance, the publisher subcontracted the layout and indexing back to me so I made a bit of extra money, and we’ve sold a few thousand copies. I’ve also learned a lot from [...]

A Square credit card update

Last April, I wrote about credit cards from an author/bookseller perspective. Since then, we’ve switched our credit card processing from a major bank to Square running on iPads, and invalidated much of what I said. To provide a bit of background, my bookstore and tea bar have been doing credit card processing through a special [...]