Dale’s Comments (group member since Sep 15, 2017)

Dale’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Justin wrote: "Sounds good and I love the covers. Great job Dale!"

Thank you! I found out last week that my cover artist (who has done the covers for all 5 of my released books and just did one for the 6th) lives in Siberia. That's why I get such a good price from him. ;-)

The Fibonacci Murders was my first published novel and the first book in my Howard County Mystery series. (The other two are True Death and Ice on the Bay. I'm writing HCM #4 now.) It deals with a series of murders based on the Fibonacci series, a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the preceding two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...

I'll let you click on it and read the blurb yourself. The ebook is just $2.99 while the economic disruption of the pandemic lasts (normally it's $4.99), so it's fairly painless to buy.

If you do read it, I'd be grateful for an honest review, regardless of what you think. For one thing, it helps me write better stories. For another, I'm very close to the magic number of reviews required for a certain promo I want to run. ;-)

Thank you!

Okay, my turn again. Here's my proposed blurb for my forthcoming short story collection, The Realm of Tiny Giants. Any and all comments and suggestions appreciated!

-----
Tales of mirth, imagination, and mayhem.

Nothing is quite what it seems in this realm. Partners cross each other, intentionally or otherwise. Late-night visitors appear from nowhere and linger long after they’re gone. Mountain lakes, forests, and caves harbor secrets best not revealed. And every day, curious encounters change lives.

In this eclectic gathering of thirty-one short tales, including award-winning flash fiction and longer stories, you’ll encounter crimes gone wrong, one-way journeys to other worlds, and ordinary people entangled with extraordinary circumstance. Some will chill you, some will get you thinking, and some will have you laughing out loud.

Because in The Realm of Tiny Giants, something unexpected is always just around the bend.

Anna wrote: "Yes, the first. I like the second too but, as others have said, it depends on what's on the inside or what you want to convey."

Thanks, Anna. The prevailing opinion seems to indicate that the red one would be appropriate for dark/horror stories, but that's not what's inside. There is some of that, but it's very mixed.

Thanks Margaret and Valerie.

Looks like we're going with the first one. That was our choice, too.

I have two new fiction pieces on Medium:

From The Creative Cafe, "All Backwards," a story I wrote for a Reedsy prompt calling for a story that stars at the end and ends at the beginning.

From Lit Up, The Noise, about an event currently playing out in my part of the world.

Enjoy!

Scott wrote: "Hello Everyone,
I just found this thread though I see some of you have been posting regularly for quite some time. I'm curious what sort of payments any of you have received from Medium. If not in ..."

Over the time I have been publishing there, I've typically made between $15 and $75 per month, but as Carole said, recent changes to the pay structure seem to have driven payments down for a lot of authors. I'm also not publishing there anywhere near as frequently as I once did, so my monthly income is not somewhere between $5 and $15 per month. It would be higher if I published more frequently. Also, I primarily write fiction, and nonfiction gets more attention on Medium. Having said all that, I have maintained my membership, in part because all I need to make to cover it is $5/month. (Actually a little less, since it's $5/month if paid monthly but only $50/year if paid annually.)

Michael wrote: "I like the lighter one better.

The red one is pretty dark. Also, the colors feel a lot like Christmas.
Or if not Christmas, them maybe a bloody forest.

Just my two cents. I personally think you m..."

Thanks Michael. We actually did have a third option, but we didn't like it as much as these two.

Although it's not obvious without reading the material, the title of the collection is sort of drawn from one of the stories, "Forest of Giants." Thus the forest theme. There are also several stories dealing with passages between worlds, so I rather like the split colors of the first cover, which suggest that.

Sam (Rescue Dog Mom, Writer, Hugger) wrote: "For me, it depends on the mood of the story. I pick the top one for happy and lofty tales and the bottom cover for dark and sinister tales. Both are great covers. Hugs"

Thanks, Sam. This is a collection of stories that are kind of all over the place. There are some that are dark and some that are light, some that are a bit of both, some that are dead serious and others that are flat-out jokes. Given that, I suspect you'd say the first one.

Our artist has delivered us cover concepts for my forthcoming short story collection, The Realm of Tiny Giants. Here are our two favorites. (The byline hasn't been added to them yet.) What do you think? Thanks!

Justin wrote: "I just use my phone or tablet. I use Restreamio which allows me to record on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all at the same time."

Interesting. Thanks!

Couldn't find a bigger venues for this one, so I dropped it into my own Red Tales publication: COVID Lassos the Lone Ranger.

I am a big fan of StoryOrigin. I joined when it was free and paid for a subscription once it became commercial. When I started using it, my mailing list had about 150 subscribers. A year later, it has around 550 and is constantly growing. I haven't seen a great increase in sales yet, but I figure just being able to reach people will eventually have a good effect.

I should say that my use of StoryOrigin coincided with some other changes I made to my platform, which you can read about in my article Revamp Your Author Platform.

I haven't directly used Rafflecopter, but it was part of a couple of blog tours I purchased. I gave away copies of my books through it, but I have no way of knowing if that led to additional sales or even interest in my books. I probably wouldn't use it on my own.

Justin wrote: "I just received an email from Page Turner Awards a few days ago and asked about how legitimate they are. I've received a few emails lately out of no where from random sites so this seemed suspiciou..."

Don't know anything about them, but I've heard of them. A lot of these award programs are there to sell entries into award programs. :-P I guess they probably award somebody something, but I've always felt that if I had to pay for it, it probably wasn't a "real" award.

I've read one or two books that won such awards, and honestly I wouldn't have published them without a lot of editing, much less granted them an award.

When my wife and I were running our publishing house, we submitted one of our books to a couple of legit award programs for children's literature. They didn't charge anything. We also never heard back from them, which probably means the book didn't win. But then, programs like that no doubt get a lot of high-quality entries, too.

Having said all that, my experience is pretty limited, so I might not know what I'm talking about.

I've thought of doing something more than fox videos, but haven't had time to pursue it. I don't even know what equipment or environment I should set up for doing recordings.

Apparently, that wasn't available until it went live today. Check again and you'll see it right by the book cover in the header. Thanks!

Okay, folks, I need your help! Weasel Words goes live on Reedsy Discovery tomorrow, 5/29/2021. Upvotes and comments will help me make it into their weekly newsletter, so please go here and upvote/comment. If you've read the book, you can also post reviews there. Thank you!

Lee Gutkind is a writer with over 30 books to his credit, plus an editor, plus a writing instructor. I ran across his article, The 5 R's of Creative Nonfiction today. It's a superb article for both nonfiction and fiction writers.

By way of promoting both Andrew and myself, I'll be on his MtA show this Saturday, 5/29/2021. It will be live at 1:00 PM U.S. Eastern time (10:00 AM U.S. Pacific time). We'll also be joined by Daniel Martin, author of a new short story collection, Althea's Dreams. Daniel and I exchanged a few emails in advance of the show. It seems we have somewhat different approaches to stories, which should make for some interesting discussion. Also, audience members will be able to ask us questions. I hope you can join, but if not, you can catch the recording on Andrew's website. Here's the Zoom info for the live show:

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Here's a new flash fiction piece, published in my own Medium publication Red Tales: Hiking Trip.

I wrote this at my writing workshop using a prompt consisting of synonyms and near-synonyms for "waterfall." We all had some fun with it.