Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 177

Water As A Symbol In A Novel ~ Many Uses, Many Meanings

This is the first special Friday Behind The Scenes post that will have “severe” spoilers—excerpts from the novel. Grab a free copy—to read before your read this post and to use to find the excerpts in the novel. If you’re the kind of reader not bothered by spoilers, this post can serve as an introduction [...]

The Virtual Book World ~ More Real Than You May Imagine :-)

Some of you know I’m the Events Manager on Book Island in the virtual world Second Life. And, I’ve often related experiences from my activities on Book Island on this blog… I also had the privilege of guest posting on Joel Friedlander‘s blog—Second Life: Virtual Book Promotion and Word of Mouth. Briefly, you can do [...]

Top Ten Posts About Writing & Writers . . .

After more than two years of faithful blogging—attempting to provide solid information and valuable resources—this blog has become a deep mine of knowledge—a web of posts that refer to each other—a Space that deserves exploration… The Top Posts & Pages, in the left side-bar is a guide to the most visited posts but for only [...]

“…well-written and well-argued book reviews, essays, and other articles in the realm of ideas.”

Writers are usually open to nearly anything that will feed them new ideas—seems to be one of the few traits that could be attributed to most writers… The title of this post is a quote from the Wikipedia article about Denis Dutton; it refers to a site he founded called Arts & Letters Daily. Here’s [...]

The U. S. Authors Guild President vs Reality

If you read the recent New York Times op-ed piece by Scott Turow, Authors Guild president, entitled The Slow Death of the American Author, you might think he’d made some valid points… First let me refer you back to a previous post on this blog, Authors/Readers vs Publishers vs the U.S. Dept. of Justice, and [...]

Should Religion Be Prominent In A Novel? ~~~ Oh, My God !

It’s rare to find discussions of religion that embrace a scientific attitude. In today’s Behind The Scenes post about Notes from An Alien, I’m going to discuss why I chose Religion as one of the prominent Symbolisms. There will be a few Spoilers so you may want to grab a free copy and read it [...]

Is FastPencil The “Best Way” to Self-Publish?

These days, it’s difficult to say any particular method of self-publishing is the best—things are changing so fast—better ways may be just around the corner… Still… Of all the methods I know about—this is a very personal evaluation—FastPencil is the Best. This post will be the 17th that mentions FastPencil on this blog and, in [...]

Need Some ENERGY To Get Busy On Book Promotion? ~ Meet Jonah Berger :-)

On April 3rd I published a post called, How Can An Author Make Their Book GoViral? It had a 40 minute video of Jonah Berger, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has a new book out that gives the simple yet powerful results of his years of research [...]

Has Self-Publishing Really Changed The Book World Forever?

This will be the 80th post I’ve written on self-publishing for this blog. While most of them are rather reportorial—sharing others’ ideas—many are about my own experience with self-publishing. One of the most important of those posts, to me, was Publishing DayThoughts…, written the day I self-published my latest book, Notes from An Alien ( [...]

More On Why Google Plus Is Important for Writers . . .

Did you know that only 7% of word-of-mouth buzz happens on Social Networks? Check out the video on my post called, How Can An Author Make Their Book GoViral?, for the facts :-) But, even if that’s true, wouldn’t you want to use a social network that gave you the most bang for your buck? [...]