Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 178

Fiction Reflecting Reality ~ Does It Always Happen?

Some folks say that, no matter how unusual the characters are in a fictional story, they’re just shadows of the author and people the author knows. Of course, there are other folks who don’t believe that last statement—plus, when you consider not just the characters of fiction but also the world those characters inhabit, fiction [...]

Do You Know Why DRM-free E-books Are The Best?

So, do you know what e-books with DRM are? DRM stands for “digital rights management” and has been touted as a method of protecting the rights of authors… Wikipedia says DRM is “a class of controversial access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyrightholders, and individuals with the intent to limit the [...]

How Can An Author Make Their Book Go Viral?

Writers want their books to be read and there’s a tsunami of advice flooding the ‘Net about how to get more readers… Most of it is Wrong. ??? Most of it’s wrong because the people giving it are motivated by two main drivers—Popularity & Money. I read The Tipping Point [a very famous book about [...]

How Do Self-Published Authors Get Reviews?

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth in the book-world-news about whether reviews have as much clout as they used to in promoting an author’s work… But then, there’s a bunch of back-and-forth for most any aspect of the writer’s realm—this is the Paradigm-Shift-Era. I’ve garnered a few reviews for Notes from An Alien, my short [...]

Amazon Buys GoodReads ~ Is This A Good Thing?

People certainly have strong opinions about Amazon—some very good, some very bad… Folks also have opinions about GoodReads—mostly not so polarized… So what might it mean that a powerful E-retailer buys a popular social site for readers? I can’t yet make up my mind about the deal—sensing it’s something BIG—hoping a few of my readers [...]

The Evolution of Fictional Worlds . . .

I thought I was going to explain more of the symbolism of my novel today but decided to give you more of the unpublished Behind The Scenes info :-) I’ll be returning to the major symbols in future Friday posts, as well as some revelations about one of the characters that a reader has asked [...]

“How Libraries Can Launch Community Publishing Initiatives with Self-Published Ebooks”

There are quite a few posts on this blog about libraries. But, today, I want to share an initiative by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, from an article with the same title as this post :-) Here are two paragraphs from that article: “With the rise of ebooks, public libraries are at a crossroads. Some [...]

#SocialEra ~ The New Model for Book Promotion

This post is about learning to innovate in the arena of book promotion. In fact, I urge you to compare it with my other posts about book promotion. If you’re a writer who is content to stay with the traditional model of getting your book into the hands and minds of readers, this post and [...]

Can You Talk Back To A Famous Author?

“You can’t teach people to write well.” I barely scratched the surface on this topic back in September in the post, The “Self”-Education of Writers . .. That quote about not being able to teach someone to write well is from an article by Kurt Vonnegut back in 1967—Teaching the Unteachable… I thought of putting [...]

Is Your Creative Genius Hiding ?

Not so many words from me today… ‘Cept to say I did a post back in January of 2012 called, Must Writers Suffer Melancholy, Anguish, andDepression? In that post, I said: “Being a creative writer seems to me to be one of the weirdest professions on the planet. “Catering to imaginary characters who may seem [...]