Lise McClendon's Blog, page 8
February 14, 2016
Happy
May you feel the love from me across the miles today, wherever you are.
I think Valentine’s Day is a bit of a Hallmark holiday, and all I got my husband was a non-Hallmark card, but I am completely in favor of love. Love your mother, love your father. Love your siblings, your children, your spouse. If you’re in a relationship, tell that person how much they mean to you. You can never do that too much.
Just to show you how crass Valentine’s Day is I’m participating in a sale! Yes, grabbing the furry coattails of love! How mercenary. Just like the flower people, the chocolate folks, and Hallmark. I do apologize.
Fortunately many of these books are free. If you like chick lit or contemporary romance, you should be able to find something among these thirty-plus titles that tickles your fancy. My college romance, All Your Pretty Dreams, is in here, just 99 cents this week.
Lots of love
Tagged: book, chick lit, college romance, contemporary romance, ebook, ebook sale, kindle, kindle free, Kindle sale, new adult, new adult romance, Romance, Valentine, Valentine's Day
Happy
May you feel the love from me across the miles today, wherever you are.
I think Valentine’s Day is a bit of a Hallmark holiday, and all I got my husband was a non-Hallmark card, but I am completely in favor of love. Love your mother, love your father. Love your siblings, your children, your spouse. If you’re in a relationship, tell that person how much they mean to you. You can never do that too much.
Just to show you how crass Valentine’s Day is I’m participating in a sale! Yes, grabbing the furry coattails of love! How mercenary. Just like the flower people, the chocolate folks, and Hallmark. I do apologize.
Fortunately many of these books are free. If you like chick lit or contemporary romance, you should be able to find something among these thirty-plus titles that tickles your fancy. My college romance, All Your Pretty Dreams, is in here, just 99 cents this week.
Lots of love
Tagged: book, chick lit, college romance, contemporary romance, ebook, ebook sale, kindle, kindle free, Kindle sale, new adult, new adult romance, Romance, Valentine, Valentine's Day
Happy
May you feel the love from me across the miles today, wherever you are.
I think Valentine’s Day is a bit of a Hallmark holiday, and all I got my husband was a non-Hallmark card, but I am completely in favor of love. Love your mother, love your father. Love your siblings, your children, your spouse. If you’re in a relationship, tell that person how much they mean to you. You can never do that too much.
Just to show you how crass Valentine’s Day is I’m participating in a sale! Yes, grabbing the furry coattails of love! How mercenary. Just like the flower people, the chocolate folks, and Hallmark. I do apologize.
Fortunately many of these books are free. If you like chick lit or contemporary romance, you should be able to find something among these thirty-plus titles that tickles your fancy. My college romance, All Your Pretty Dreams, is in here, just 99 cents this week.
Lots of love
Tagged: book, chick lit, college romance, contemporary romance, ebook, ebook sale, kindle, kindle free, Kindle sale, new adult, new adult romance, Romance, Valentine, Valentine's Day
Happy
May you feel the love from me across the miles today, wherever you are.
I think Valentine’s Day is a bit of a Hallmark holiday, and all I got my husband was a non-Hallmark card, but I am completely in favor of love. Love your mother, love your father. Love your siblings, your children, your spouse. If you’re in a relationship, tell that person how much they mean to you. You can never do that too much.
Just to show you how crass Valentine’s Day is I’m participating in a sale! Yes, grabbing the furry coattails of love! How mercenary. Just like the flower people, the chocolate folks, and Hallmark. I do apologize.
Fortunately many of these books are free. If you like chick lit or contemporary romance, you should be able to find something among these thirty-plus titles that tickles your fancy. My college romance, All Your Pretty Dreams, is in here, just 99 cents this week.
Lots of love
Tagged: book, chick lit, college romance, contemporary romance, ebook, ebook sale, kindle, kindle free, Kindle sale, new adult, new adult romance, Romance, Valentine, Valentine's Day
Happy
May you feel the love from me across the miles today, wherever you are.
I think Valentine’s Day is a bit of a Hallmark holiday, and all I got my husband was a non-Hallmark card, but I am completely in favor of love. Love your mother, love your father. Love your siblings, your children, your spouse. If you’re in a relationship, tell that person how much they mean to you. You can never do that too much.
Just to show you how crass Valentine’s Day is I’m participating in a sale! Yes, grabbing the furry coattails of love! How mercenary. Just like the flower people, the chocolate folks, and Hallmark. I do apologize.
Fortunately many of these books are free. If you like chick lit or contemporary romance, you should be able to find something among these thirty-plus titles that tickles your fancy. My college romance, All Your Pretty Dreams, is in here, just 99 cents this week.
Lots of love
Tagged: book, chick lit, college romance, contemporary romance, ebook, ebook sale, kindle, kindle free, Kindle sale, new adult, new adult romance, Romance, Valentine, Valentine's Day
February 8, 2016
Only 40 Self-Published Authors are a Success, says Amazon
What’s happening in self publishing in 2016? A lot if you are one of the 40 successful indie writers. Read on
Claude Forthomme - Nougat's Blog
The cat is out of the bag, finally we know exactly how many self-published authors make it big: 40.
Yes, that’s not a typo.
40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t. This interesting statistic, recently revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that self-published authors are not doing any better elsewhere.
“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that, and have even gone on to establishing their own publishing house, like Meredith Wild. Her story is fully reported in the New York Times, here, and well worth pondering over.
That story reveals some further nuggets about the current…
View original post 730 more words
January 12, 2016
Less than a buck
Delicious over-the-top fun!
The five mystery writers who put together the rollicking dark comedy, Beat Slay Love, have discounted the novel for the first time.
It’s now just 99 cents. But don’t delay.
Look for it on most platforms – Kindle • Nook • KOBO
Leave a review if you can! Much appreciated.
“You’ll never watch the Food Network shows the same way after reading Beat Slay Love. . . a heady mixture of reality television, misbehaving foodies, murder most-creatively-foul, and determined sleuths. Delicious over-the-top fun!“— Mysterious Galaxy
Tagged: 99cents, dark comic, Eat Pray Love, foodie, foodie mysteries, kindle, KOBO, mystery, Nook, Nookbooks, Sale, thriller
January 3, 2016
I Resolve: Failure & Success
Oh, those pesky resolutions.
Does anyone even care what a person resolves to do in the new year, or how they are (or likely not) accomplished? I doubt it. If you want to lose ten pounds or run a marathon or write a novel go forth and do it. Like so much in the world no one cares about your ambitions like you do. And that’s the way it should be.
When I first started writing, sending off work and getting back rejections, I learned to toughen myself to inevitable failure. Being a writer is failing, generally. The novel is never as good as it seemed in your head. The reviews are never quite as glowing as you’d like, and often a lot less glowing. The money is never what you dreamed. The loneliness is crushing at times. And these are just side issues.
The work itself is harder, less satisfying, and relentless in a way that you are never actually done. Writing, editing, rewriting, publishing: that’s the beginning. Now, in the indie publishing world especially, the blogging, the marketing, the tweeting, the schmoozing goes on indefinitely. There’s some good to that, with the “long tail” — your books can be discovered by new readers forever — but there’s also the onus of endless salesmanship.
So what is failure then? Because, for an artist, the only measure of success is inside of you. That’s probably the hardest thing to accept. When you choose a creative career your output, the quality of it, the quantity of it, the starting, the quitting, the starting over, is all up to you. The world may beat you down or praise you to the heights you don’t feel you deserve. Your head may explode with ego; your heart may shrivel with rejection. But the bottom line is, if you feel you have succeeded, there you are: you have succeeded. Not by the world’s measure perhaps, not by your mother’s measure, or your teacher’s, or your friend’s. But those measures are false. Your only measure of success is in your own heart and head.
Getting to this point can be an emotional roller coaster. But hey, that’s life: ups, downs, highs, lows, and if you’re lucky, a measure of self-acceptance. A small measure? Perhaps, but knowing you are not a failure, knowing it deep down in your gut, knowing you have given it everything you had, is worth the struggle. That small knowing is golden.
My resolution was simple last year: review every book I read, online somewhere. I fell behind in the summer so yesterday I reviewed six books. I didn’t review every book — if I didn’t finish it I don’t consider it “read.” I left a few books unreviewed anyway so I guess I failed. I’m getting good at this. :-)
This year I resolve something different. Small goals, hopefully doable.
Write every day.
Eat yogurt every day.
Walk every day.
Laugh every day.
I foresee the last one being the hardest. So I will check in here once in awhile with a laugh video and let you know how it’s going.
Ha-ha-happy new year!
December 31, 2015
New Nobody Cares Year!
It’s not as cynical as it sounds. Really. There’s something so freeing about the holiday we call New Year, New Year’s Eve, or just The End of That Wicked Year.
The expectations for New Year’s Eve are so minimal. Drink, possibly-fireworks-probably-just-on-television, a smack on the lips perhaps. Not so much that you can’t just go to bed early and say “Happy New Year” and make pancakes in the morning.
After the hectic days of the religious and semi-pagan holidays, Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanza if you will, family visits, babies and dogs and snow and travel and disruptions of schedules to the point that you welcome going back to work, the mini blip of New Year’s Eve is, well, a mini blip of light and champagne.
Some people are going out for big blow-out parties, I suppose. Good on ya! I haven’t been to one for years, being of a certain staid nature by now. (I’m actually reading a novel set in rural England in the ’30s where they have big parties and skating and merriment, along with vicious family intrigue. Oh, those were the days. Except for sexual repression. And Nazis.)
Do you go out and celebrate? For years now we’ve done home parties; if we’re skiing we watch fireworks and have a toddy but mostly it’s very low-key. The food extravaganza is hopefully over. The new year drink is a little champagne, and a nap.
So my wish for you this New Year’s Eve — a moment of light and love as the year ends, and a new one begins. May the best of times be on your horizon and a smile on your sweet lips. ❤️
Tagged: new year, New Year's Eve, writing
