Mystery book reviewer Oline Cogdill spoke to the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America at the August meeting. Oline’s reviews have appeared nationwide as well as regularly in the Sun-Sentinel. Oline offered some useful tips for writers on repetitive elements to avoid in crime fiction. · Strippers as murder victims or confidential informants are … Read more
Fans of cozy mysteries set up a cry of outrage when Penguin Random House/Berkeley/NAL announced the cancellation of many favorite mystery series. Over two dozen authors took the hit. At the same time, Five Star declared the end of its entire mystery line as of March 2017. Yep, that includes Yours Truly. My last book … Read more
Halfway through the year, we should evaluate our status regarding the goals we’ve set for ourselves. Back in January, I listed these objectives for the year. I divided them into Writing Goals and Career Goals. Think about doing this if you’re an author. Let’s see how I’ve done in this progress report. If you’re wondering … Read more
We have seafaring pirates, and we have book pirates. Let’s talk about the former type first. Last weekend, my husband and I went to an exhibit at Plantation Historical Museum about Florida pirates. The seas off the coast of Florida have seen many shipwrecks along with pirates who’ve taken advantage of our broad coastline. I’ve … Read more
Writing a book these days has five stages. It used to be that you wrote the book, polished your work, and submitted it to a publisher. Then you were done, except for edits, proofreading your ARCs, and some promotion. Now you have many more choices in the publishing arena. Many of us face the challenges … Read more
Step 5 Production—Cover Design, Formatting, Uploads Cover Design Decide if you’re going to use stock cover art or hire a designer. I recommend hiring a professional cover artist. You’ll have many things to consider, such as: · Placement, size, and font for your book title and author name · Series logo · Text color · … Read more
Step 5 – Production—Front and Back Materials Continuing our series on reviving your backlist titles, you’ll want to add front and back materials to your manuscript. What should this include? Front Materials Minimize the front end of things so when the reader clicks on Look Inside at Amazon, he gets to see the text of … Read more
Continuing our series about reviving your backlist titles, consider how and where you want to publish these titles. Do you intend to put them into the Kindle Select program exclusive to Amazon? Do you wish to put them up yourself at the various vendors? Or will you use a company like Smashwords or Draft2Digital? It … Read more
You’d like to reissue your backlist titles now that you have the rights back, and you already have a complete digital file as in my previous post. So now what? Are you going to upload the file as is, or will you be revising the work? I wanted to fix my writing, since my mysteries … Read more
Once you get the rights back to your earlier titles, what do you do with them? Try to resell these books to a new publisher? Put them online as ebooks for sale? Offer them in a new trade paperback print edition? Go through an intermediary such as Draft2Digital or publish them yourself directly to vendors? … Read more