Broaden Your Book’s Horizons with IAM’s Guide to Convincing Bilingual Characters
So you want to include a character in your story that’s part of a culture you’re unfamiliar with or who knows a language you cannot speak. From a diversity standpoint, it’s an important endeavor. But what can you do as a writer to ensure that it’s a realistic portrayal that enriches the narrative instead of […]
Mix Up Your Writing Methods with These Typing Alternatives
We love being authors, but sometimes we can’t or don’t want to be click-clacking on keys for hours day after day. It could be for health and mobility issues or the desire to be more productive during your commute or while waiting at the doctor’s office. If you’re like me, it could be that you […]
Getting Started with StoryOrigin: A Basic Overview
Released: 2018 Operating System: Online at https://storyoriginapp.com/ Price: Basic: Free (Limited access) Standard: $10/month or $100/year (Full access) Guided Setup is available for a fee StoryOrigin is, by all measures, a wealth of resources for an author first starting out or trying to organize and build their publishing business. This online web app boasts three […]
What the Indie Author can Learn from the Sanderson Kickstarter
My dear friends greeted me at the door of their home, sat me down, placed a tablet in my hands, and pressed play. I got the e-book A Year of Sanderson. Bill, my husband, saw it later that night. He rolled his eyes at Sanderson’s heart-wrenching words of regret and declared that he wrote another […]
Growth in the Indie Author Industry
I’m about to give the editors of this fine journal a headache. When they gave me the assignment of writing about growth in the Indie Publishing industry, my first thought was “this is a massive subject.” The second thought was “I’m gonna need to put ‘growth’ in quotation marks.” Indie authors didn’t just appear on […]
Va-Va-Vellum
Fast, Polished Formatting Chrishaun Keller-Hanna Released: 2013 Operating System: Apple/Mac Price: Vellum eBook $199.99 (can produce interiors for eBooks only) Vellum Press $249.99 (can produce interiors for eBook and Print) What is it? Simply put, Vellum is an interior book layout software that offers authors a high-end formatting experience without the price or the learning […]
Letting Your Cover Do the Talking
How Color Mapping and Psychology Can Help Your Cover Stand Out In the May issue, we talked about how authors generate trust by having their covers reflect the story within. We pulled several bold and rather red action adventure covers together to compare and contrast the elements to illustrate how the bold designs, font, and […]
Tackling the First Draft One Day at a Time
You have committed to writing a book, worked out the characters, what’s going to happen to them. The world is verdant and fleshed out in your head and you’re ready to write. But fifty thousand words feels like too much. You have a fulltime job, kids to feed and nurture so they don’t go feral, […]