Karen’s Comments (group member since Dec 15, 2017)

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

I'm in Seattle, where traffic hasn't been this light since the Great Recession and my hands have rarely been so clean. We're working to "flatten the curve," which means a lot of events have been cancelled, including church services, Comic Con, library events, and college classes. Those who can are working from home. People are mostly being cooperative, but hand sanitizer is hard to come by.

Did that reviewer review your book anywhere else (like here on Goodreads, or their own blog)? You could copy the text and add it as an "editorial review" on Amazon, through your author page.

I have one of these, too. Not the same "reviewer" but seems similar. 1-star, no text review, has over 1000 ratings but only 2 reviews, a "top 10" reviewer. Yours is "top 25." I wonder if they spam ratings just to move up the ranks.

Dale wrote: "Theodore wrote: "He walked into the sunlit room, sat, and picked up his saxophone, bending over to pick up the metal canister of reeds from which he picked one that he put in his mouth. Then, sitti..."

I take up the challenge to do it in present:

"Morning sunlight and birdsong fill my room, and I must play. Bending to select a reed from the metal canister on the floor, I place one into my mouth, then lean back, eyes closed, and soak up the warmth streaming through the window. I need no inspiration this morning. The song flows within me. A clean kill in the dark of midnight. A melody played in the pure light of day. Some would brand me a contradiction, this musician-assassin, but I hear the music of death, just as I hear the poetry of song, and here, now, in the brilliant morning, I play with feeling the dark deeds of the night now past."

I recommend looking at other authors' sites to get a sense of the kind of layout and information you like. Think about how easy it is to navigate and how intuitive to find what you're looking for. Draw it on paper so you know what kind of menus you want, where things should appear, what things should be called ...

I initially purchased a domain from register.com, sat on it for almost a year, then finally built a free Wordpress site. I found it easy to use and maintain. Their tech support has been excellent.

At first I used domain mapping, so people could enter my domain name and it would redirect to the Worpress site. I recently upgraded to a paid Wordpress site and transferred my domain registry to them so I could get rid of the domain mapping and have a more professional looking URL. Everything I'd already built stayed the same. I've been using my site for a little over 2 years and I still like it.

Good luck!

The Wishing Shelf Book Awards is open to all indie and small-press books that meet their guidelines. My YA novel The Gospel According to St Rage was a 2016 finalist in the teen category. In addition to a medallion image to add to my book cover, I received feedback from multiple readers in the target age group and a "catchy quote" for my website. It was an encouraging enough experience that I plan to enter my 2018 release, as well. Entry fee is $69 (or $39 if you don't want the feedback.)
All the details are here: http://www.thewsa.co.uk/

That may have been me. Will try again.

I will be traveling to Oregon at least once and maybe more for book signing events with other Not a Pipe authors. I'm planning a reading locally for late July. I have a Kindle full of promised reads (beta and otherwise) so I suspect I'll be writing a lot of reviews. And I hope to actually start writing a book I've been thinking about and planning for more than 2 years!

I'm 54, and I say keep going! There's nothing new under the sun, so just look for your own take on whatever it is that has been done before. If your characters are interesting and readers feel for them, this plot can definitely work.

The best naming story I have: a new character had entered my story and did not have a name yet. I asked my then-teenaged son, "What's a good name for the captain of the boys' basketball team who is secretly in love with the main character's gay best friend?" Without missing a beat, he said, "Justin Hornbaker." We don't know where it came from, but it was perfect.

The MC of my urban fantasy is a young millennial/gen z girl. I deliberately gave her a name that would be familiar and ordinary but uncommon in that age group (but not in a cool way). She's called Barbara. Most of her friends have names that seemed to come up a lot when my kids were in school: Travis, Whitney, Jackson, Storm, Justin, Zach. In my wizard fantasy, I derived a handful of names from a name generator in a game my kids were playing a lot at the time, then made up similar style names going forward. The naming scheme is that people have names made of pieces of their parents' or other relatives' or friends' names, so I reassemble the syllables till it sounds like a new name (or backwards engineer the parents' names from the child's). My current MC, Luskell, is named for her grandmothers, Stell and Lukett. Sometimes I end up with too many similar names and have to change something I've been working with for years. Argh! Mostly it works, but I always hate it when I have to name a new character. It never ends.

My books usually don't have a title until I've written the whole thing, but for Daughter of Magic, I had the title first. I had been writing for years about a family with a lot of magic users. At the end of the fourth manuscript, the main couple had just learned they were expecting a child. A few years later, I decided to write about her, and that title seemed perfect. It has made it all the way through to publication! In contrast, my first book didn't have a title until it was all written and in editing. In the shower one morning, it came to me: The Gospel According to St Rage. From that the publisher designed an awesome cover that wouldn't have worked with any other title.

Daughter of Magic

Luskell walked at twilight on a country road she didn’t know. She wasn’t lost; she was on her way to Deep River. It was the town that was lost, and she had to find it.

Crystal Dawn wrote: "I wanted to open a discussion on the process of making maps for our books.

Our own story started because my husband's first book convention was decided upon last year, and to proceed with such we..."

Thank you for sharing this! It is encouraging to see the various drafts, as I am in the middle of a similar process myself. I have been writing in the setting for 18 years but avoided making the map until now, when one book is finally coming out. It was an ordeal just to make a passable sketch I could pass on to a more skilled artist. I'm hoping I'll get more than one book's use out of the map.

Nice looking website, too. I'd be interested to read and review the books.

M.J. wrote: "Hello! For me as an Indie (especially one at this under 2 years), I'm still getting over the fear of 'bothering' people. People tell me all the time they like my work, some of them review. But I ha..."
If it helps at all, I wrote my first blurb when I was even more nobody than I am now. I think I had one published story to my name. I had given Benjamin positive feedback on an early version of his first novel and he invited me to write a blurb when he published it. Meanwhile, my second story was being published as a Kindle single, so we used that as my credit in the blurb. By the time his second novel needed a blurb, I had one of my own coming out, so he referenced that. And so on to now, when I've written blurbs for 4 Not a Pipe books. I've discovered it's a lot of fun to write a review, then mine it for a blurb another author can use; or mine reviews of my work for blurbs to post on my website. Even if you think you're nobody, So-and-So, author of Such-and-Such sounds like somebody.

Alexis wrote: "Thank you Karen and CL. Not to sound too sentimental but man, did you guys inspire me. I’m following your advice and writing again!!"

Wonderful! May your writing time be fruitful.

Alexis wrote: "Oh, it felt so good to type that. I NEED HELP. :D

In the last few years I’ve started four books and finished zero.
I know I have talent.
I just.. there’s a mental block there that makes me doubt m..."

Early drafts are supposed to be crap! That's what the good stuff grows out of. What you write at first is only for you, to get it out of your head. You don't even have to write it in order! You can jump to a "fun part" if you're stuck. Once it's out, then you futz with it till it seems like something someone else might read. THEN you find readers you trust to give it to you straight, but kindly (other writers, editors, sometimes even family!) Then you keep working on it. You have to really like your story because you'll be reading it a lot.