Columns

25 Book Marketing Ideas for the Desperate and Shameless: Field Test

August 20th, 2015

I have a few books up in the Kindle store. Like a lot of writers, I assume. And like a lot of writers, mine cover topics such as pre-adolescent boy ninjas and masturbating in a tiny house. I make a lot of assumptions. They are often false.  At the risk of force-feeding the snake its own tale, if you will, I read a column here at LitReactor called "25 Book Marketing Ideas for the Desperate and Shameless" by Max Booth III.

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5 Public Domain Works of Classic Horror You Can Read For Free

August 20th, 2015

Growing up in Greece in the early 90s, horror fiction was in limited supply. It took ages for books to get translated (if they ever did) and it was always the best sellers: S. King, D. Koontz, Clive Barker and so on. I read faster than they were publishing. So I taught myself English the brute force way; by reading English horror paperbacks way above my reading level (Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy at age twelve did some things to my psyche).

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6 Women Who Changed the Face of Publishing

August 19th, 2015

Photo by Jill Krementz You might have read this article recently from the author Catherine Nicols who discovered that interest in her queries to agents increased eight fold when she pretended to be a man instead of a woman.

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The Butler Did It: Why We Always Blame the Servants

August 19th, 2015

When someone insinuates that “the butler did it” in a crime fiction novel, it’s a way of pointing out the most obvious suspect. But why is that? Upon further analysis, the guilty butler trope appears to damn servants by their employment status alone. After all, they know everything about the victim’s daily routine, and they’re always suspiciously nearby.

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The Age of the Unoriginal Idea

August 18th, 2015

It happens to the best of us: we spend painstaking hours typing away at a keyboard, finishing a first draft drenched in our blood, sweat, and tears; then, with trembling hands, we pass the story onto the first of our beta readers. All is going well—they gasp at all the right moments, laugh accordingly, cry when necessary—until they pause halfway down a page, look you dead in the eyes, and say those dreaded words: “This reminds me a lot of [INSERT RANDOM BESTSELLER HERE].”

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5 Strategies for Enriching Your Character Arcs

August 14th, 2015

What drives a story? It would be pleasant if a single right answer existed, but I fear the truth is complicated. A story can be driven forward by many things—by characters or ideas, by plot or language. While some of us may prefer a given central aspect (I myself prefer character-driven stories), there's no doubt that many options can be used.

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An Ode to Middle Grade Authors

August 14th, 2015

“What’s Middle Grade?” My friend’s question makes me grimace. It’s all I can do not to shout at her across the café table. I bite my tongue and think of all the times I’ve been asked that question—even by those in the writing game. Middle Grade is so often overlooked or lumped into other categories, like Early Reader or Young Adult. “Ages eight through twelve,” I reply, but it’s not what I really want to say.

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David Thomson's 'Suspects' and the Questionable Validity of Fan Fiction

August 13th, 2015

First of all, let’s get out of the way what fan fiction is not: it is not commissioned or embraced by the official owners of an intellectual property, whether that’s corporate entity or creator. This is a necessary definition because it is an evolving concept, what with the Internet providing a platform for the proliferation of material that in the past would have sat on someone’s desktop or, more than likely, stayed in the back of their brain.

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Product Review: Her Story

August 13th, 2015

images courtesy herstorygame.com We're in an era where the distinctions between games, films and prose fiction are blurred, creating environments that are both engaging and immersive for the player/viewer/reader—satiating, simultaneously, a critical need for quality entertainment, and more subconscious, vicarious and perhaps even voyeuristic desires.

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Post-Apocelliptical: The New Old Face of the Post-Apocalypse

August 12th, 2015

I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic fiction, which is probably why my first novel ended up squarely in the genre. And while I grew up with tales of irradiated wastelands, post-apocalyptic stories these days tend to stick to more familiar topics like pandemics and zombies. My own novel, Falling Sky, uses disease as a catalyst. It makes sense — diseases, pandemics scare us. They are a present threat whereas nuclear war, well, it’s a lot further down the list. When Falling Sky came out, Ebola was all over the news.

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