Robyn Paterson's Blog, page 55

Fonts for Book Covers

I've been studying up on Book Design recently in anticipation of prepping my upcoming novels, and while Ive still got a lot to learn, one of the things I've slowly been catching onto is the importance of choosing the right fonts for your book- and especially for your cover! The right use of fonts can often be the difference between an amateur looking cover that people pass over, and an eye-catching cover that instills confidence that this is a story worth reading.

On the cover Font issue, I...

CTV News | Nice guys make less than 'highly disagreeable' men

Men who score on personality tests as highly disagreeable tend to earn more than 18 per cent more – an average of $9,700 more a year – than men who were scored as most agreeable. Agreeableness made less of a difference in women, but it still meant an average 5-per-cent salary gap for nice gals.

 

Wow, not only do the jerks get more girls when they're young, they actually make more than the nice guys later in life too. Being nice is seriously not an advantage in human society for males.

via CTV...

Quote of the Day from Machiavelli

 

"All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer." — Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

The Live Action Star Wars Series Gets a Working Title

"It's underneath what's going on," he reiterated about the series' focus, "It's the criminals and the gangs. The guys who are running Wall Street, basically. The guys who are running the United States."

Not quite, that would be a series about the Banking Clans and the people actually running the Empire. This should be more like Goodfellas.

Even if the series is a few more years away, McCallum says there's no risk in the scripts become dating and that the delay can only make the show...

Memories of Gamma World

1st Edition Rules Cover

Back when I was a teenager, there was were only a couple of pen and paper RPGs. Dungeons and Dragons was the most popular, but there was another game spoken of in semi-reverant tones that few played- Gamma World.

Why did people speak of it in semi-reverent tones? Well, D&D was heroic, but Gamma World was, well….THIS!

Really. It was that lethal, which is probably why it was the game that everyone knew, but few played on a regular basis. Everything in the game was designed ...

The 10% Solution to Editing Your Books

Yesterday, I was doing a bit of research on editing as it's a dragon I will soon need to face with pen in hand. While looking for tips I came across references to a book on self editing called The 10% Solution by Ken Rand. Intrigued, I began to look into it and soon found that the secret to the book really can be summed up by the title.

Simply put, his technique is simply to take what you've written and cut out 10% of it.

Now, there's more to it than that, and he apparently goes into fair...

Samurai Horses

As someone into Japanese history, I always wondered something- why didn't the Japanese make more extensive use of horses during their wars? I knew they made some use of them, but nowhere near as much as people from other countries did.

Since there's a horse element to this week's part (and the coming parts) of my story "The Inuyama Rebellion" I thought I'd look up something on Japanese horses of the Sengoku (Warring States) period.

What I didn't expect to find was the reason why Horses weren't ...

Merry Christmas one and all!

I'd just like to wish all my friends and readers a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope the year 2012 is a great one for all of you, and brings you good fortune and pleasant surprises. It better be a good one, since the world ends next December after all! ^_-  So party on, and enjoy that holiday cheer!

Rob

This post is from my blog at robynpaterson.com.

Is 50,000 the magic number for e-books?

I was talking with a friend this afternoon who is something of an industry watcher in the publishing industry, and we were discussing e-book length. Now I've thought about the length of e-books for a while, so it was a familiar discussion, but he brought some interesting ideas to the table.

His take on things is that thinking of e-books in terms of the conventional publishing market is wrong, because they simply aren't paper books and don't follow the same psychological rules as books. Size...

Manga- Liar Game – Who do you trust?

For those who love thrillers with a psychological bent, Liar Game is a unique story along the lines of the manga Death Note. It's a story about trust, deceit and human nature filled with mind games and twists and turns. I highly recommend checking it out if you have the chance, the creator took a 1.5 year break for his health and has just returned to it, so now is a great time to catch up!

From wikipedia-

At the start of the manga, the lead protagonist – a scrupulously honest college student...