Kit Cole's Blog, page 3
September 23, 2013
Sometimes you have to change direction
screencap from ‘The Truth’ at the Anasazi ruins
Sometimes you gotta go with your gut, and this is one of those times.
It was the 20th anniversary of the X-Files last week, and that TV show was one of the seminal influences of my pre-teen and teenage life. I watched every episode for the first few years, and then less so as Mulder made less of an appearance, but I always had a soft-spot in my heart for the show.
Anyway, to commemorate the anniversary, I watched the first and last episodes on Netflix.
There is a scene in the final episode [called 'The Truth' ] where Mulder & Scully end up in the Anasazi Ruins in New Mexico, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that was the place I wanted to send Serena King. I know I had planned for her to be pulled into the past in the Neelum Valley between present-day India and Pakistan, but I am drawn to these ruins.
I am therefore going to follow my gut and move her storyline there. That means scrapping some of the story, and doing a whole bunch of research to start over, but I think it’s the right thing to do.
You with me guys?
September 22, 2013
Please stop tweeting your BOOK LINK! so much
This is an AWESOME comic from The Oatmeal – PLEASE GO LOOK at it there is much more: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes
This may just be a personal pet peeve, but writers, you have to stop inundating us with links on how we can buy your book. If every blog post is about how we should buy your book, and every tweet is how we should buy your book, and every facebook post is about how we should buy your book – we WILL stop following you.
You have to contribute to the conversation going on in social media, and your contribution can’t just be ‘Hey look at me!’ every 1.5 hours on your Buffer schedule.
It’s ok to post even one tweet a day or two about how I can buy your book, but no more!
I know someone in the comments is going to tell me off, or declare that they’ve sold a kajillion* books by tweeting the same message in caps every hour on the hour, but I’m begging you. Vary it up — even just for the sanity of the interwebs.
Ok, PSA over. Back to your regularly-scheduled lives people.
Related articles
Twitter Tweet Crimes… Just please don’t do it! (kellymshayes.wordpress.com)
7 Major Social Media Mistakes You May Be Making Without Knowing It (businessinsider.com)
9 Things an Author Should Never Do on Twitter (savvybookwriters.wordpress.com)
10 tweets that give book lovers the warm and fuzzies (geekybooksnob.wordpress.com)
Book Review at Shelf Full of Books
Shelf full of Books – a review!
A four-star review from the very kind Kathryn over at Shelf Full of Books! Woot!
September 21, 2013
The 6 Rules of Time Travel
Reblogged from The Secret of Aldwych Strand:
Google's a wonderful thing. It is, honest.
Like last week, when my mind was full of Avunculars, this week it was really helpful when I'm planning the conversation between Walter Nicolai, Valentin and Mengele ( eeuk). The focus of my study? Are any rules that people living in the 1940s would know from cinema and literature.
So to begin at the beginning.
A really nice article from 'The Secret of Adlwych Strand's blog that I really had to reblog; enjoy!
September 18, 2013
SEO Tips and Tricks (for authors)
I’ve been doing a bit of research today (prompted by an ad of all things!) on SEO and how to maximize my little Sci-Fi book actually being found in the massive databases of Amazon and Kobo.
In addition to picking out some very specific key words to tag my book with, there are some other ideas I wanted to share with all of you:
1. Take a spin through Google Insights. It takes a bit of work. but you can use it to hone your tags. So for example, I assumed the most powerful tags for my book Justice for all Time would be ‘Time Travel’ and ‘Sci-Fi.’ Here are Google Insight‘s findings for searches for those terms in the past 12 months:
What this told me is that Sci-Fi is a much more searched term, so for sure to include that, and also that books don’t even come up as sub-searches in either of those Insights.
My findings are that the following tags are most effective: Sci-fi, time-travel, time travel, back to the future (I know), romance-adventure, sci-fi-adventure and time-travel-romance — in that order.
2. Get reviews (do giveaways, as for help from Beta readers etc.)
There are lots of blog posts on the internet about how to do this, but my best piece of advice is to get your manuscript edited (by someone you can really trust) before sending it out to potential reviewers. When it works, it really works, and a good review can bump you up on Google and on Amazon. But a bad review can hurt you, so be ready.
3. Figure out which categories are most-popular and avoid them (at least at first)
The concept here is simple: if you publish your ebook as a ‘Sci-fi’ at Amazon, you will find out the hard way that your book is #837,932/837,932 in Sci-Fi books. Awesome. How the heck would anyone ever find that!? On the other hand, if your primary category is ‘Time-Travel’ at Amazon, suddenly, your book is #8.379/8.379 books. Wow. Much more find-able I’d say. Now categories change all the time, and there is no hard and fast rule between the different e-publishing softwares, but I will say iBooks for SURE works the same way. Check your categories and try to be more popular by being more popular in a less popular category.
Related articles
4 SEO Things Everybody Should Be Doing But Nobody Is (business2community.com)
5 SEO Strategies for Getting Found Online (business2community.com)
Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool Updated (seroundtable.com)
Five New Unrevealed Google Ranking Tips – the SEO Greece Algorithm (sbwire.com)
Understanding the Google+ Dashboard’s ‘Insights’ by @jeffchiarelli (searchenginejournal.com)
September 16, 2013
A Liebster Award? Aw, you shouldn’t have!
Whoah – got up this morning to find that I had been nominated for the Liebster Award by A Portia Adams Adventure!
11 Questions I must answer to accept this award
1. Cat person or Dog person? Cats but I like dogs…
2. Your favourite Poet? Langston Hughes
3. Your favourite Speech? Is it bad that is Aragorn’s speech at the black gates?
4. The colour of your front door (of your house): green. What does that mean?!
5. Bike or Car? Bike.
6. If you could travel through time, what(when) would be your first destination? The situation room wherein they decided to bomb Nagasaki.
7. If money were no object, where would you retire? Florence, Italy.
8. The number one thing we should dedicate our collective brains to as a human population is __________ Curing cancer.
9. Favourite meal: burritos.
10. Do you have an arch enemy? No, but then again, I’m beloved ; )
11. Who is your favourite villain of all time (fictional)? Moriarty or Dr. Evil.
Eleven Questions for bloggers I nominate
1. How many books do you read a year?
2. What is your favourite sci-fi series?
3. What is your favourite sci-fi movie?
4. Invisibility or Flight?
5. Batman or Superman?
6. Best meal you have ever made yourself?
7. The last grade in school you remember enjoying:
8. Your secret super power:
9. The colour of your eyes AND the colour you WISH they were:
10. The car you wish you owned:
11. What were you doing on Sept. 11, 2001?
Finally, the blogs I think deserve this very fancy award:
Xbox2121′s Random thoughts and ramblings
Clock Work Cog Bot
The Nerds of Colour
Breaking Blog
Becoming a Crazy Cat Lady
Sea of Dreams
Points of Interest Podcast Network
September 9, 2013
Imagining your book as a movie
A fun idea from Kathryn over at Shelf Full of Books: she asked me who would play the main characters in Justice for all Time?
I came up with Carrie Anne Moss (of The Matrix) and Timothy Olyphant (of Justified):
Detective Becker & Sheriff Taylor (in my head at least)
September 5, 2013
September 3, 2013
Learning and Changing: a new book cover
After downloading a whole bunch of new e-books, I decided my book cover for Justice of All Time was not interesting enough to be amongst all of these. Therefore, here is my new swing at a book cover, using a dreamstime.com image I bought (and that you can find here).
What do you guys think?
September 2, 2013
A bit about the Timurid Empire
Youth seeking his father’s advice on love From the Haft Awrang of Jami, in the story “A Father Advises his Son About Love”.
I am going to throw our King of Spades into the 1400′s in North-East India. At that time, Shahrukh Mirza was Emperor of the short-lived Timurid Empire. He ruled from about 1405-1447 AD or AH 807-850 (see an explanation of the Hirji calendar here).
My plan is to have her run into the poet Jami (also read more about him here) and make the journey from where she thought she was in Sopore, Kashmir to the capital city of this empire, Herat. He can be travelling with a convoy escorting the Emperor’s son Baysonqor.
