Those of you who have been following this blog for some time know that I’m, more or less, a one man operation. I write the books/stories, I do the interior formatting for both e-books (Kindle, Smashwords) and print books, I design the covers, and stuff like that.
What you don’t know is that sometimes I do these things for other writers. It’s not something I’ve been advertising, so I don’t have an impressive portfolio, but let me show you my latest work. Continue reading
Okay, so I know I haven’t been updating this blog lately. But I have some pretty good excuses, such as:
1. My computer is a piece of trash. It’s either gonna die soon or explode. Of course, if it explodes it also dies so…
2. I’m working on the magazine.
So, here’s the thing. I had something like an epiphany a week or so ago and decided that each issue of irevuo magazine is going to center around a certain subject… some’ like that. This month’s topic is self-publishing, and I’d like to ask you (you being my fellow indie writers) three simple questions. Continue reading
This year’s last post is going to be short. I’m just gonna say that it was a crazy year; a lot of stuff happened. I’m closer to becoming a professional writer. I self-published two novels, a couple of short stories, and a collection of essays. I wrote 200 blog posts.
And I founded an online magazine.
So, yeah, it was a good year. I’m not the one to complain.
Thank you all for your support! Let’s hope we all have a better, crazier (in a good way) 2013.
When I decided to self-publish my first novel in January 2011, I knew nothing about the book industry, about marketing, about promoting my work. I didn’t have a blog or a Twitter account or even a Facebook fan page. Also, even if we’re talking about 2 years ago, the whole self-publishing gig was still young, yet yo achieve the popularity it now holds among readers.
In the next months I tried to learn as much as possible about self-publishing, especially by following the blogs of those who were doing better than I was, or those who simply appeared to know what they were doing, because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Continue reading
If you’re somewhat interested in self-publishing, odds are that you’ve read John Locke’s How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! Of course, odds are that you’ve also read about the real “secret” behind his success as a self-publisher.
But what really upset me was his genuine belief that he’s dealt some kind of deadly blow to traditional publishing, or that people are tools who should be used for marketing purposes. You know, talking monkeys with credit cards glued to their backs.
A couple of days ago I read an article by a Romanian writer, in which he said that the way we perceive certain foreign authors in Romania is different than how they are perceived in their home countries. The reason for this is that only their best works are available in Romania, thus readers have a distorted perception.
Somehow, this idea that a bad novel can counter-balance a good one makes sense. It’s something that often happens with prolific writers: some of their stuff is good, some great, but a lot is also mediocre at best.
But the writer of that article said that the key to all this is to write for a couple of years on a collection of poems, short stories, or a number of novels and then only choose to publish the best of them. This solution is something I disagree with. Continue reading