Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 180

Earth-like Issues In An Alien Story . . .

This post is part of the new Friday series: Behind The Scenes of the story Notes from An Alien. If you want to avoid having “spoilers” intrude on your enjoyment of the book, just grab a free copy and read it before you dive deeply into this series of posts—the book is short… and, deep… [...]

How Do Words Get Into A Dictionary?

I subscribe to the Oxford Dictionary Pro but their free online edition of the Oxford Dictionary is good, too. Naturally, the dictionary is managed by the University of Oxford—”It is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and the second-oldest surviving university in the world.” Oxford actually has 58 different services you can subscribe to… [...]

What Are A Writer’s Odds of “Success”?

“Pollsters report more than 80 percent of Americans would like to be an author, and in 2011 statisticians counted 329,259 books published in the United States, and 2.2 million books published in the world. Google estimates 130 million books have been published in human history.” That quote is from an article by author William Dietrich [...]

Don’t “Make” People Pay ~ “Let” Them Pay . . .

I’m hoping it’s fairly obvious that a writer can “easily” transfer ideas that work for a singer/performer to the realm of attracting a readership… I know it’s totally obvious that this is the shortest blog post I’ve ever done :-) Comments? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Our Comment Link Is At The Top of The Post :-) For Private [...]

“Read An Ebook Week” Means *Lots* of Free Ebooks :-)

“Smashwords is the world’s largest distributor of indie ebooks. “ That last sentence is from the Smashwords site. The next sentence is from the Smashwords blog: “Read an Ebook Week, the world’s largest global celebration of ebooks, kicks off this Sunday at Smashwords.” “this Sunday” was yesterday :-) Just two more excerpts from the blog: [...]

What Made You Write That Book?

This post is part of the new Friday series: Behind The Scenes of the story Notes from An Alien. If you want to avoid having spoilers intrude on your enjoyment of the book, just grab a free copy and read it before you dive deeply into this series of posts—the book is short… and, deep… [...]

How Do You Begin A Novel?

Ever written a novel? Ever started to write a novel? Ever thought about starting a novel? Do you plan-out the plot first? Do you decide on who the characters are first? Do you do all the research first? Do you do some of all those things first? Like many things about writing, it all depends [...]

Google Plus and The Author Platform

For folks new to this blog, I’m a self-published author who’s a maverick when it comes to promoting my work. The most obvious example is in the side-bar—my novel is for sale but I still give it away :-) I’ve written here, many times, about how I’ve dealt with the need to let folks know [...]

So, How Much Writing Does An Author Have To Do Before They’re “Good”?

I hear a few of my readers shouting, “It depends on the Author!! “ Some of you may be thinking the word “author” up there “should” be “writer”… Why? Well, some folks think “writers” are still trying to be “authors” and “authors” have “made it”. And, for more thoughts on whether you must be published [...]

So, Do Libraries “Steal” Money from Authors?

Some folks seem to think that just because libraries buy a couple copies of a book then loan them out to a multitude of patrons that they’re causing authors to lose out on royalties… We have quite a few posts about libraries on this blog and you may want to take that link and see, [...]