Alan Baxter's Blog, page 135
June 16, 2009
Great tips to get indie books into bookstores
I came across this post recently at the Publishers Weekly website.
It’s written by a lady that owns an independent bookstore and she talks about all the Dos and Don’ts with regard to getting your indie or self-published book into independent brick and mortar bookstores. She gives great advice, so pay close attention.
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Editor Unleashed Flash Fiction 40 – I need some help
Editor Unleashed is a great website run by Maria Schneider, a freelance writer and the former editor-in-chief of Writer’s Digest magazine. She recently teamed up with Next Chapter Communications and my favourite ebook site, Smashwords, to bring us a writing competition. The idea is simple, yet excellent.
On the Editor Unleashed forums Maria set up a contest where people could post flash fiction entries of no more than 1,000 words. At the end of each day the topics were locked so no more edits cou
June 15, 2009
This is a little too true
My wife would be the first to nod knowingly when I say this, but today’s strip from XKCD seems to be written about me:
*sigh*
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Free books and ebooks and promos, Oh my!
My first full post for Publishing Renaissance is up now. It’s all about the nature of ebooks, free books and giving away books for promotional purposes – all good marketing stuff like that. I’ve even cleverly shoehorned in a special two week promo in the post where you can get an ebook version of RealmShift for only a dollar.
Head on over there and read the post to learn more.
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June 13, 2009
Publishing Renaissance
I was recently invited to become a contributing writer over at the group blog, Publishing Renaissance. To give you an idea of what they’re all about, there’s this from the site:
We are a group of indie writers putting our work out into the world and trying to navigate the web, social media, and all the new opportunities available. Each of us has a different perspective on what it means to be indie, why we’re indie, and the unique challenges that indie publishers face.
What we share in common is a
June 11, 2009
Millionth word scam exposed
Remember at the end of May I posted about the Global Language Monitor celebrating the immient arrival of the one millionth word in the English language? At the time I questioned the accuracy of their studies. In fact, my exact words were, “Personally, I think it’s all bollocks.” As the comments in that thread show, it was indeed a complete and utter load of rubbish.
However, the whole concept got a real thrashing recently, which is actually very funny. The Language Log site points out that Paul P
June 10, 2009
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Day June 23rd
As a sci fi and fantasy writer I’m a big fan of this idea. I picked it up from the blog of my friend, author David B Coe who directed his readers to this LiveJournal post by Sharon Lee.
(Yeah, the apostrophe bothers me too - I’ve mentioned it on the Facebook page where this image came from!)
The basic premise is a day to celebrate writers of science fiction and fantasy - for readers, you can talk about your favourite writers or those that influenced you the most, and read some quality sf/f. If you
RealmShift contest - the winner
Thanks to everyone that entered the contest to win a signed copy of RealmShift. Here’s the original post about it.
The response was great with entries coming in from all over the world. The majority of entries were from the US, but there were also entries from Australia, the UK, Canada, Italy, Denmark, Chile and Montenegro. It was very gratifying that so many entrants made a point of telling me how much they enjoyed the sample chapters that they had read in order to enter. I’m glad some new reade
June 8, 2009
Last chance to win a signed copy of RealmShift
Just a quick reminder that the contest to win a signed copy of RealmShift ends at midnight tomorrow, Australia EST. That’s about 36 hours from right now for those international readers. Still time to have a read, find the answer and email it to me. There’s been a great response so far, but every entry has an equal chance of winning, so hop to it.
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2009 Ditmar Award winners
As announced at Horrorscope, the 2009 Ditmar Awards for Australian SF, fantasy and horror have been awarded at Conjecture in Adelaide.
The Ditmar Awards have been awarded annually since 1969 at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention (the “Natcon”) to recognise achievement in Australian science fiction (including fantasy and horror) and science fiction fandom. The award is similar to the Hugo Award but on a national rather than international scale.
The award is named after Martin James
