Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 188

Does Loving Their Kindle Make A Writer A Traitor? ~or~ Does Liking Amazon Make An Author A Saboteur?

Amazon is huge—most everything you can think of is or could be sold there… Many people, bookstores, and publishers are mad as hell about Amazon. How dare they sell books for less than they pay for them? How dare they sell their reading devices at cost? How dare they do business better than many other [...]

Twitter Hashtags for Writers & Authors

I tried for about a year to incorporate Twitter into my book promotion activities. I decided to leave it alone… Now, I’m using it “sparingly”—posting titles and links to my blog posts. Still, this doesn’t mean that authors/writers shouldn’t use twitter for maximum engagement with readers and other writers (not to mention editors and publishers). [...]

Bay Area Bloggers Hangout with Jane Friedman ~ Refreshingly Original !

There are many things about the shake-up frenzy in publishing that are becoming absolutely boring. One example is these dueling articles (read at your own risk…): Why Book Publishers Hate Authors Why Publishers Hate Authors: A Response to an Article that Doesn’t Deserve a Response Then there’s Jane Friedman. And, the Bay Area Bloggers Society. [...]

The E-Book Wars & Your Public Library . . .

Concerning the fight between legacy publishers and Amazon over what seems to be the dominance of e-books over print, I feel the real battleground is at the libraries. You can track this battle with the links I provided in the previous post, More on E-Books & Libraries . .. Admittedly, my coverage is limited to [...]

The “Right” Way To Write ~ Writing Advice for The Brave . . .

These days, writing advice is cheap—even free on the Web—cheap, also, in the sense “of little worth because achieved in a discreditable way requiring little effort”. If you want “writing advice” from this blog, use the Top Tags widget; or, use this link >>> Writing Advice… If you go there, you’ll see this post first [...]

The Art of Creative Reading . . .

As you can see from the subtitle of this blog, it’s about Reading, Writing, and Publishing. Because of an on-going survey of reader desires, writing gets most of the attention. But, checking the Top Tags widget in the left side-bar shows “read” = 20 posts, “reader” = 40 posts, “readers” = 16 posts, and “reading” [...]

The Top 5 Goals for A Book Cover + A Great Course of Study In Self-Publishing . . .

You may know I’m in the class of poor writers. My military pension is quite small so, when I got to considering a cover for the book I published back in May of 2011, I needed to get real resourceful… Luckily NASA’s Hubble Telescope Image Site had just what I wanted and adding the words [...]

Writers Resources ~ Galore !

This is our 45th post about “writers resources”. To peruse them all, you can click on those words in the Top Tags widget in the left side-bar or just… Click this link > Writers Resources But what I have to share today could well dwarf the resources already in this blog. There’s a space called [...]

Brain & Mind ~ Writers Need Both . . .

Aren’t Brain and Mind just two words for the same thing? Not in my world :-) My world has physics and metaphysics… Very simply, physics deals with the physical world. And, in my dictionary, metaphysics means: “the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, [...]

Did Maurice Sendak Call The Publishing World “Outrageously Stupid” ?

Blog posts are traditionally not long—the World is getting shorter and so must be brains. Still, I have kept most of the posts here short and actually enjoy working within the format. But I found an online publication called Believer that says about itself: “The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. [...]