Renamed One Third of a Wheel, the novel’s going to be released on the 1st of July 2013. That’s it, more or less.

Oh! Yeah. You can read a sample of the novel here.

When I first started blogging a year and a few months ago I couldn’t possibly imagine that so many people would like my writing. To be frank, I didn’t even know what I wanted to write about, or if I had anything to say. I knew that I wanted to become a self-published writer, and I knew that I wouldn’t give up. I made myself this promise: that I would be relentless in this pursuit, no matter what. And I’d just keep blogging and writing.

A lot of indie writers ask themselves if blogging can help their careers. Today I’m going to answer this question.

Yes. In my opinion, blogging can only help you reach people you wouldn’t have otherwise. The way I see it, a blog acts like a sort of mothership: it’s the central hub of all your social media profiles, it’s a place for your readers (and a lot of potential readers) to gather and get to know you.

It adds a personal touch to an otherwise pretty insensitive marketplace. Selling books is more than letting people know you’ve got something for sale, it’s more than just uploading your files on KDP and Smashwords. You need to convince people that they need to read that book.

So blogging helps in this pursuit, but it’s in now way required. If you simply hate blogging, if you just don’t feel like writing posts or simply sharing stuff on the web, that’s fine, I guess. You can still reach an audience via different mediums. After all, you can be very successful at this without relying on social media at all.

But for those of you who just started out, for those of you who are still considering if it’s worth it or not, I have this to say: blogging is not that easy as some people make it seem. And it’s not all about gaining followers.

I get asked this question a lot: how do I gain more followers?

It kind of makes it all feel like a race, a competition. I imagine a blogger screaming at his laptop: “more, more… I want more. Give me more.”

If you’re lucky, you’ll get more, but you should keep in mind that probably the biggest tragedy of this century is the fact that people tend to become numbers very quickly. And we’ve stopped caring about numbers a long time ago. Statistics always offer a cold perspective. It’s how we’re programmed, I suppose.

Maybe you’ll accuse me that this is easy for me to say, but I’ll say it anyway: have fun. Enjoy the early moments of starting out a blog while it lasts. Even if no one seems to read you, write great stuff. Try your very best. It’s the only way there is.

So the question every “aspiring” blogger should ask himself is this: how do I write a great blog post?

How do I create content that matters to people?

Writing about what matters to you is a great place to start. Writing about what you love or hate or are afraid of. Something you’re passionate about, something you’d want to tell the whole world about.

Whenever you feel angry because you don’t have enough followers as you’d want you should take a deep breath, relax, and tell yourself this: people, not numbers.

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Reblogged from irevuo:

The muse does not wait for you to get ready. The muse does not appear when you want it to appear.

This is what we like to say to ourselves whenever we don't feel like writing. When we're too hungry, too tired, too cold to write. When we've got other things to think about. When the world seems out-of-balance in such a way that you writing would simply cause the Universe to implode.

Read more… 116 more words

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

Whether you believe in God or karma or simply fate odds are that at least once in your life you’ll feel as if the entire Universe is working against a specific desire of yours. And you will think about giving up.

I began writing without knowing what I was getting myself into. The sad truth of the publishing world in Romania is that there is no publishing world. Writers are lucky to earn enough for a decent living. And in order to get a book published you need to know someone…

But I just didn’t care. And I didn’t listen to all the people who kept telling me that writing should be just a hobby.

I’m stubborn like that.

And, truth be told, it’s easy to believe in a dream when you don’t have to really stand up for that dream, when you’re living a comfortable life. But when things change, that’s when your dream either withers away or becomes the only thing that defines you.

I won’t bother you with specific details, but in a few months I ended up surviving. A meal a day, many sleepless nights worrying about money, no idea of what the future held. When you end up weighing 110 pounds with your clothes on… you kind of start asking yourself if what you’re doing is right or not.

The thing is, I’m not particularly ambitious as a person. I just had this dream ever since I first began writing in my early teens that what I was doing was far more important than my own life. I believed in my writing, and my writing meant more to me than it could ever mean to someone else.

It’s difficult to explain. I just wrote. Whenever I could, I’d sit down at my desk and write. I had no real plan, no strategy. I tried to self-publish a novel, and after selling 4 copies in 4 months, I gave up. But I kept writing, out of this stupid conviction that writing was what I had been born to do.

In April 2012 I decided to try self-publishing again. And I made this blog.

Statistically speaking, I’ve defeated some of the worst odds imaginable. I can now say that my words have an impact. Right now, quite a lot of people from all over the world are reading these words. Right now, I can write knowing that at least one person will read what I write.

This is freedom. Doing what you love, no matter what. And even when you’re starving, when you’re cold, when you just don’t want to go out because you’ll undoubtedly feel as if everyone else is much happier than you are, when you sit down at a desk and do your thing, that’s freedom, a kind of freedom that no one can grant you; you’ve got to take it, you’ve got to fight for it with all you’ve got.

If I would have given writing, right now I’d be working some meager job somewhere, earning just enough to go by. And I’d feel as if there’s something slipping away from me, that somehow life is actually more than what I’m doing, more than what I have.

Now try to imagine all the artists who give up simply because no one cares, and they’re just not strong enough or crazy enough to go all the way, no matter what. Just keep counting one tragedy after another until everything becomes a statistic. Numbers and nothing more.

Try to imagine their frustration. Try to imagine my frustration when I didn’t know if what I was doing was right or wrong because people simply didn’t bother to read my stuff. Try to imagine my anger, my disappointment. All the lonely nights, all that bitter exhaustion that comes after you’ve finished writing a story without knowing if someone is going to care or not.

Believe it or not, I’ve lived all that, and I sincerely do no wish it upon anyone, whether their good artists or bad artists, whether they’ve just discovered their talents at the age of 45 or have been doing it ever since they could hold a pen in their hands.

That’s why I founded irevuo, that’s why I tried to do more than I could. It’s a great feeling to find a great artist and help them reach an audience they normally wouldn’t be able to reach. I can only imagine how the people I’ve “reblogged” felt when they saw hundreds of people read their stuff.

Sadly, I’m in no position to entirely fund the project by myself. That’s why irevuo needs your help. So artists can reach people, so art can find an audience. You can help out here. Every contribution helps, gets us closer to reaching our goal. If you can’t contribute, don’t worry, don’t feel guilty or something. You can still help with a like or share or tweet or simply by telling your friends about what we want to do.

And, last but not least, if you’re an artist and you’d like us to interview you or showcase your work, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

There’s probably one aspect I can be truly helpful. All that stuff that has to do with getting your book ready for publication on Createspace, KDP, and Smashwords. You know, interior formatting for e-books, book covers, and the overall process of making your product available for the public.

So I’m offering a 2 week course on exactly this. It’s going to be highly interactive, meaning that there are only 10 spots available. The course itself is going to be as specific as possible, covering topics such as:

• Interior formatting for e-books (KDP and Smashwords)
• Interior formatting for paperbacks (Createspace)
• Book covers (free resources for book covers, inspiration for books covers, using stock photography for book covers, and genre specific book covers, etc.)
• The process of submitting your files to Createspace, KDP, and Smashwords. Tags, Categories, Blurbs, and all that jazz.

This is going to be fun, I say. There are only ten spots available because I want everyone to really get to understand how things work, and how they can really make the most out of the information I’m offering.

And the price is ridiculously low: $9.99. It’s not joke. I’m serious. I’m asking this out of principle. Offering this much info and resources (which took an awful lot of time and work and sleepless nights to acquire) for free when others are charging hundreds of dollars wouldn’t be fair. Well, charging $9.99 isn’t fair either, but, well, I live in Romania and life’s not that expensive around here anyway.

You can buy the online course here. You need to use a valid e-mail address, which I can then use to send you the courses. Being that there are four main topics, you’ll receive 2 e-mails a week during these 2 weeks.

The course will start on the 20th of June, so you’d better hurry.

The idea is that you’re supposed to get some exposure from this, mostly because the electronic format will be made available for free. Of course, inclusion in this showcase is free.

What do you need do to in order to get your work showcased?

Well, it’s simple actually. All you have to do is send images of your favorite works (no more than 10), a short bio, an artist statement (something like why I paint), and links to website/blog, Twitter, Facebook fan page, and the likes. Just so people know where to find you. Oh, the address is contact at cristianmihai dot net. Or you can use the contact form on my blog or on irevuo’s website.

I plan on getting the electronic version of this Showcase downloaded like crazy this year.

After all, the idea behind irevuo was to promote independent artists, and I’ll be damned if I don’t do that.

Other stuff:

There’s going to be a new section called Photographer of the Week. You can submit photos and a short bio, and we’ll promote you.

If you’re a self-published author and you’d want me to review your book in the Friday Reads section, go ahead and contact me, and we’ll make things work out. If you want an interview, basically you have to do the same.

Anything else? Hmm… yes. In order to get things going with the new website (a proper domain name would be cool), and in order to make this showcase thingy really cool and advertise the hell out of it, we need your help. Actually we need money, but books don’t sell well in summer, so we need your help. You can learn more about what we need, and what we want to do, and how you can help out here.

Though my soul may set in darkness,

it will rise in perfect light.

I have loved the stars too fondly

to be fearful of the night. – Sarah Williams

Words are our most important discovery. Forget about fire, forget about all the places we’ve been to, and all the places we’ll reach. Words allow us to see farther than any telescope. And, at the same time, words allow us to see inside each and everyone of us, to see every lever and gauge and all the other tiny elements that make us work. So it’s also a microscope.

Sometimes you read something a stranger wrote on a lonely night and you feel less lonely. You feel like you somehow know them, and your only regret in the world is that you haven’t read their words sooner. It doesn’t matter that it’s late and you’re tired, it doesn’t matter that tomorrow the words will still be there.

Sometimes you read something that’s so good that you want to absorb it all, you want for those words to become you, to express  who you are. Words written by a stranger, describing who you are to a billion other strangers.

And sometimes words are just beautiful. They sing to us in ways that no song ever could, in ways that turn the ordinary into extraordinary.

We didn’t invent words. No. The words invented us. They invented this world, and kindly allowed us to create a million more inside our head or on paper. And we use so many words, at strange hours of the night, that sometimes we feel trapped by them. We feel lonely and scared, and we feel as if words can’t really express who we are. That, somehow, all we are doing is diminishing our experiences and feelings by writing them down or saying them out loud.

It’s easy to feel this way, especially if you’ve been writing for some time. To feel that we haven’t yet discovered the words that could accurately describe the fire that burns inside us.

And what do we do?

We use words to create the future. We use them to write about who we always dreamed of becoming but never had the courage to become, we use them to write about who we’d want to be, who we think we are. We use them to describe a world that was never meant to exist.

We travel this world with our pockets filled with dreams, and we can only make come true a few of them. The rest we write into existence hoping that someone else might want to make them come true…

Reblogged from irevuo:

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The idea that the world's most important artworks should be made available online isn't new. Also, the idea that we're spending more and more time in an online environment can't be denied anymore. We'll let someone else ponder whether this is good or bad.

The idea behind Google's Cultural Institute is pretty simple: they have partnered with museums and other cultural institutions in an attempt to provide people digital copies of important artwork or cultural landmarks.

Read more… 349 more words

Reblogged from irevuo:

It is possible to fail simply because you want something too bad. Or because you want it all at once.

One of the most difficult lessons to learn, and one I constantly try to deny, is that some things take time to grow. Some things just don't happen over night. Probably that's why we invented magic in the first place. And dreams.

Read more… 260 more words

But the thing is, I wasn’t really sure how to write such a book. Now, I kind of know. So it’s going to be like this: you ask me what you want to know about different aspects, and I’ll do my best to give you a proper answer. If I don’t know the answer to your question, I’ll do my best to find someone who does.

The best part is that I’m going to offer this guide for free. I just hope that the indie writers who are following this blog have 50 questions that they want to ask.

So, yeah. You can ask the questions in the comments section of this post.