The Distracted Writer

The Book Market’s Glutted. Why Bother?

posted on 09/18/2012

Ahhh… After a long day of chasing the kids and ignoring the growing piles of laundry, I sit down to do a little writing. Not, of course, without stopping to browse online for a while. The trouble with doing this before I write is that if I follow the wrong link down a rabbit-hole, not […]

Inaugural Writer’s Challenge

posted on 09/12/2012

Front Matter’s Writing Challenge: No contests. No time limits. Just inspiration, motivation, and a friendly kick in the pants! Respond on your own blog or website and share – or not – at your leisure. For the sanity of all, please read guidelines before posting a comment linking to your response – thanks! A. Fiction […]

Self-Promotion: Getting Past the Ooginess

posted on 09/12/2012

For many of us, the idea of self-promotion is about as appealing as eating dinner in a train station bathroom stall. But if you are a burgeoning writer – self-published, small press or even big press – one of your tasks in this book-flooded age is to market yourself. This is true whether you’re the […]

Sock Puppets and Ethics

posted on 09/06/2012

It’s funny how things collide sometimes. Lately I’ve been giving a good bit of thought not just to writing, but to the business of being a writer. I’ve realized (get ready to point and laugh at someone with too much education and too little common sense) that if I want my books to be really […]

‘A’ is for ‘Arrogance’: Legacy Authors and Ivory Towers

posted on 08/09/2012

So I was doing my nightly Twittering and I came across this article in which traditional/legacy author Sue Grafton refers to those of us who self-publish as “lazy” and “wannabes,” among other uncharitable characterizations. Remarkably ungracious for such an esteemed author, though I guess since she added “I’m sorry,” to one of the lines and […]

Hubby vs. Mean Reviews, Touched by an Email

posted on 06/01/2012

I’ll be very honest with you, blog reader friends. Just between us, negative reviews about a book you’ve written can suck. Even though every book gets them, even though you can always learn something from feedback, even though it’s part of what you signed up for when you decided to take the self-important step of […]

Procrastination: a Poem

posted on 05/04/2012

This haiku is forNational Poetry Month,which was in April. Happy May! 🙂

A Word About Ethics and Title Confusion

posted on 04/17/2012

I remember distinctly how I heard about Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Marriage Plot. I was in Target with my boys last fall, probably trying to keep one of them from destroying a rack of clothing and the other from screaming his newborn head off while we finished our shopping. We rounded the corner […]

Recapping My Free Promotion Experience on KDP Select

posted on 04/11/2012

Whew! It was just over a week ago that I decided to try the experiment of putting my first novel The Marriage Pact on a free promotion through amazon’s new KDP Select program. I’d just read this blog post by Will Entrekin, and it got me thinking about whether a free promo might be a […]

And Our Kindles Shall Grow Fat on Freebies

posted on 04/04/2012

Well, my experiment with amazon’s new KDP Select program is going gangbusters. At this writing, it’s been a little over 24 hours since I put The Marriage Pact on free promotion. There have been 15,279 downloads so far, and TMP is at the top of the Kindle Contemporary Fiction List. It’s Number 6 on the […]

Posts Categorized: The Distracted Writer