Category Writing

July 20, 2012 ・ Writing

The value of a thorough copy edit

If you pay a visit to Grammerly’s Facebook page today, you’ll notice that their cover image is a tribute to the Grammarly community’s biggest pet peeve: Your constant use of “your” instead of “you’re” makes me wonder whether your keyboard is missing some keys. It seems I am not the only one who gets a little annoyed when someone misuses the language.

Yet, I also know that I am not the only person who can be completely turned off of a book if the grammar is faulty. And even if the occasional subject-verb agreement is fine with you,

July 12, 2012 ・ Writing

Best practice tips for formatting your eBook

As an editor at Free-eBooks.net, one of the things I do is to make sure that our eBooks meet certain standards. I have come across a few customer complaints and reviews that criticised the way the eBook looked in a particular format. And as we work to continually improve our services to our community, I wanted to research this thoroughly so that we can be confident that we offer the best quality to our readers as possible.

Publishing houses normally have a style guide that has explicit instructions on how to format a book for publication. One of

May 30, 2012 ・ Writing

The difference between a good book review and a bad book review

As editor at Free-eBooks.net, book reviews come across my desk daily. Sometimes there are such good reviews that our authors respond to them personally. Sometimes there are some really bad ones and our authors end up asking us to remove them because they detract from the overall experience. It got me thinking about what makes a review good, or bad.

You may not be a writer yourself, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go with me on this journey.

Creating is something we can all relate to. We all do a little creating every day within our daily

May 10, 2012 ・ Writing

Social Media Buzz Marketing for authors

Today, I had the unexpected opportunity to speak to two indie authors about using social media to build buzz for their latest titles. I realized this morning that I had this conversation before and here I was having it again. It is no surprise that a lot of independent authors want to know how they can use social media to market their eBook[s].

Independent authors need to feel empowered and be knowledgeable when it comes to social media and how to use it. Self-publishing demands that you wear a lot of hats; one of those hats is marketing

April 26, 2012 ・ Writing

Permission to Write

“If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it.” ~ Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of detective novels and a screenplay writer. He created one of the most well-known fictional detectives of the 30’s, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

Hammett gave himself permission to write. He believed in himself, his creativity and his story enough to tell it. The questions is, do you believe in yourself, your creativity and your story? If you do,