Dwayne’s Comments (group member since Apr 01, 2017)

Dwayne’s comments from the Support for Indie Authors group.

Jeffrey wrote: "My first book was..."

Bully for you. You wrote a book. That doesn't entitle you to break all the rules here. Guess what? Most everyone in this group has written books, too, Guess what? Most everyone in this group follows the rules.

* No links.
* No self-promotion.

I'm closing this topic, as it's another one that too many people fail to understand its intent.

Now... that has me thinking, M.L. I've thought about showing a sign for FairyTale Village or something like that. Maybe just a symbol that is used on their advertising / correspondence.

And I do feel the Jurassic Park influence on this story. (One character is very much inspired by Jeff Goldblum, in fact).

Publishers are swamped with manuscripts. They don't need to browse Amazon or Goodreads looking for books that have a few reviews in hopes that they can republish them. I am not positive, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but a few of your reviews came from your friends. Right? If so, then no. Publishers aren't going to come looking for you just because your friends liked your book. If you want to be published traditionally, you'll have to go to them.

What the heck. Let's be more like Facebook. Let's fill this place with memes! Any meme will do, as long as it's not self-promoting in any way.

I have one request: Don't just post your meme, give us a short paragraph about why you like it. We're writers, not memers...

I'm sharing this one 'cause I was drinking coffee at the time I first saw it and very nearly spit it out I found it so funny. I know that's a cliche, but it's true.

Removed the remaining link, closing it, and archived as there's nothing fun about. But, I'm leaving the typo in the title. It makes me giggle.

Team wrote: "It doesn't hurt to ask..."

It doesn't hurt to review the rules of a group before barging in and spamming, either.

No. We strongly discourage people from discussing reviews, so asking for them is flat out against the rules

Team Gopherballs, Spam is gross. I will delete this when I can

Team Goofball, take your spam elsewhere

Clearly you didn't read the rules before posting. I don't have my mod abilities from my phone or this post would be gone. If it's still here when I get back on my computer I will delete it for you. Not sure why you posted this in the Fun folder. It's not fun or fair to the other members when someone assumes this group is their own personal marketplace

B.A. wrote: "I still like #51. I'd be picking it up to see what the book was about."

Honestly, that's the one I'm likely going to go with, or a somewhat tweaked version. It definitely fits the book. As far as some of the comments above about it being too scary, if someone finds that picture to be scary, they won't want to read the book in the first place. There are some very creepy moments.

M.L. wrote: "They all have merit but #51 has the most umm . . . charisma! :-)"

Yeah, I keep coming back to that one. It's difficult to move on from it. To me it captures the story so completely without giving much away, if that makes sense.

Trana wrote: "Hello Tomas,."

No links, please. Thanks.

Of course you're not the only one. If we knew exactly what was doing to excite readers we'd all be best sellers. I gave up second guessing readers and write to my own taste. It's much easier that way.

Great points about asking friends and family to do reviews, Leah.

Think of it this way: The people you know, no doubt, talk to you about their children, their pets, their home projects, their vacations, their illnesses, and any other part of their lives they think you might find interesting. Why should we, as writers, be afraid to talk about this one aspect of our lives? We shouldn't. So, talk away, like you would about your job or any other hobby you have. After all, for most of us, writing is a job or a hobby or both.

Draw the line at mentioning your book is available on X_____ website and costs $_.__ and you can give them a free copy if they want and you really want them to leave a review, and so on. To me, that's where people get pushy. If anyone wants to know the details on how they can find your book, they'll ask.

I'm pretty casual about how I slip it into conversation. If a coworker asks, "What did you do this weekend?" I'll usually reply with something like, "Oh, I did some writing, took my wife out to eat, took a long drive, played with the dogs..." And their follow up questions will tell me if they want me to go on about the writing, or maybe they'd rather know where I ate and how good it was.

On Facebook I post bits of my writing once in a great while or maybe a cover concept I'm messing with or something, but rarely talk about where to go to buy my books. If people want to know, they'll ask.

Sherrie wrote: "Please let me know if this is not allowed..."

Really? Instead of taking five minutes (or less) to read the rules, you're going to leave it up to us to tell you if this is not allowed?

Seriously.

Okay, I guess that's how you want to play this.

1. You posted this in an area clearly marked for moderators only. Since you just joined the group and this is your first post and I've never heard of you, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no one has invited you to be a moderator yet.

2. You're bookwhacking. Don't know what that means? It means you didn't read the rules. If you had, you'd know what bookwhacking is and you'd know we don't allow it here.

3. We don't allow discussion of reviews here (sometimes, yes, if the subject is treaded upon lightly). Blatantly begging for reviews is totally against the rules.

4. You put links in there. Oh, why bother even telling you what the rules are and what you're not supposed to do. It's clear you don't care at this point.

I could go on and try to explain what this group is really for, but clearly you think it's here as a marketplace for your book.

Wrong.

I'm deleting your post. From now on, when you join a group on Goodreads, learn a little about it before trashing it up with unwanted, rude self-promoting posts.

P.S. The addition of your "first review" was good for a belly laugh. You gave yourself a five star review? And you're proud of it?

P.P.S. Upon further investigation, I see I was mistaken. You joined the group back in January of 2017. So, that means in all this time you haven't been paying any attention to what the group is about, and now that you have a book to peddle and reviews to beg for, you think this is the place to do it. Wow.

You can upload your pictures to Goodreads. Once that is done, right click on the picture. A menu will come up. Click on "copy image address." Then go to the comment you want to embed the photo in. Type [][<]img src[=]["]["][/][>] without the brackets. You can paste the url of your image between the quotation marks.

Julia wrote: "Hi Dwayne, I like these much better so far! I also think they fit pretty much your genre and descriptions about the book. They have definitely something fairytale like but at the same time their atmosphere is dark.
The left one is my favourite because it pulls the viewer's eye in better with the plants around the model. They frame her very well.
The colours could be made more bright and slightly more contrasty. It's a bit low lit like this.
And especially the text could be worked on with the placement.

I hope you don't mind, I have quickly overworked the left cover for some corrections that you could use as a guide if you liked. I don't know the best way to upload any images here so I uploaded two versions (one mirrored and one original direction) to wetransfer.com
Here is the download link to see the images:

They will delete themselves after few days.
I didn't use the same font as you of course since I don't have that one but I looked for a similar one.
I think the title and author's name should be in a different font so you can distinguish it better from the title.
"

I deleted your comment due to the link. I did try to follow the link before deleting and when I saw I had to agree to some terms and conditions to see whatever it is you wanted me to see, I backed out. I don't like signing up for web sites I'm not familiar with.

If you have images to share here, it is better to embed them in your message. We don't allow links of any kind here.

Closing this thread. Discussing reviews is actually against our policy here, but I allow discussions if they don't get sketchy. Yesterday someone suggested asking friends and family to do reviews for you. I consider that sketchy. Today someone was soliciting for reviews on this very list. That is a definite no no. We're here to help one another, yes, but not in that way.