Smart, good kids correlated with reading… This is not a particularly nice picture of a bookcase, but it’s just one of many in my house. Certainly the number of books my immediate family has acquired and read since my spouse and I started this household decades ago numbers in the thousands upon thousands. And…
by Paula McClain A superb read! I don’t give a lot of five-star ratings, but the writing itself is enough to warrant 5 here. This is a story that does a fantastic job of transporting you to another place and time (what many of us want out of fiction, especially historical fiction). McLain’s descriptions are…
Note: If you missed part 1, it is here. Nearly a thousand books sold and 31 reviews on my first book (out of four). By my calculations, it takes roughly 32 books sold for me to garner a single Amazon review. In comparison, I glanced at Dan Brown’s 2017 novel Origin. If it sold…
It’s been four years since I first published The Redemption. I thought I might sell a few copies. It’s up to around a thousand. The Switch, which I thought was actually a better book, sold in the low hundreds. Great, you say! So I pressed on and wrote Five O’clock Follies with Dick Brundage….
Well, it’s finished! I stopped work on The Connection, my first book still unpublished, to co-author a novel called The Five O’clock Follies with Richard Brundage. The ideas behind this book have been in Dick’s head for 50 years! So after much research and late night emails between the two of us (plus one…
This is a followup to my previous post you can read here. I gave away about 700 copies of The Redemption a few months ago as an experiment. Never been too fond of the idea, but thought that if I could get it into a few hundred sets of hands, maybe that would spread…
My personal bestseller, The Redemption, has been out for a couple of years. Through a myriad of advertising (Amazon ads, Facebook boosts on my author page, Twitter posts, and FB posts on my personal page, I’d cracked just under 500 sales and 22 Amazon reviews (17 on Goodreads). Tons of effort but still not…
Free. (Get The Redemption for free on Kindle download, 9/28-9/30 here. Won’t show free till this weekend.) It’s something I said I’d not do. Yet when you have only attracted a few hundred readers in a couple of years and only a handful of reviews, you have to decide to: (1) Stop writing –…
What are my expectations? As a fledgling writer, this question is much more difficult to answer than one might think. Rationally, the odds of “breaking out” as a self-published author are pretty bad (more on that). But what about success? Really depends on my definition. For Vegas, the odds of winning at the chairs…
Why write fiction? There are so many quotes about the “misery” of being a writer. My favorite is my own which goes something like this: Writing a first novel is a great achievement. Writing a second novel is insanity. The insanity is that you (I) suffered through the first one and then did it…