Congrats to AL Kaplan

AL Kaplan is the readers’ choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge.

The winning entry is rewarded with a special feature here today and a place in our collection of winners which will be published as an e-book at year end.

Without further ado, here’s the winning entry:

Continue reading “Congrats to AL Kaplan”

Title Envy

hidden title 120x177Author, oh author, why is your title so tiny? Don’t you want your book to have a big title, like the other books do? I know you do. And I know you know that size matters.

Then why, oh why, are you not using the space on your book’s cover to better display your title? What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?

This perplexes me. This drives me up the wall. This makes me want to scream.

When you post a book to Thrifty Thursday or Print Book Party, do you just leave? Do you not come back to see your spiffy book cover looking all happy on our pages? Because if you did – you might see that no one can read your title.

The majority of what I’m seeing lately looks like this: Continue reading “Title Envy”

Your Knot Write

Your Knot WriteA long time ago (at least in internet time) I did a post on homonym or homophone errors titled Watt Due Ewe Mien. We all know the most common errors and hopefully look for them when we’re proofing our own work. Most of us have words and phrases in our vocabulary we use less often than the heavy hitters like their, there, and they’re that we know (or think we know) how to say, but have trouble getting them right in our writing. (Or should that be write in our righting?) My own personal bugaboo is sale and sell. You’ve probably identified some of your own. Or maybe you haven’t. What I’m going to cover here are semi-common words and phrases I see wrong more often than I’d expect and a bit of discussion about each. I’ve seen all of these make it past the author’s self-editing and whatever editors, proofreaders, and beta readers assisted them to land smack dab in the middle of a book. Multiple times. Hopefully this will help you avoid these same mistakes. In each I’ll list the wrong usage first, the correct one last. Continue reading “Your Knot Write”