Do Your Due Diligence

I’m sure you have one of those relatives who forwards scary emails to you. Sometimes it’s about how you should always check the back seat of your car when you get in, in case a rapist or murderer is hiding there. Sometimes it’s about how some Internet virus is going to wipe your hard drive and steal your identity and all your hubcaps. It’s frustrating because the warnings are nearly always bogus, and the person who sent the email would have known that if he or she had just bothered to go to Snopes.com before hitting “send.” Which you know because you checked it out at Snopes.com yourself, didn’t you? Continue reading “Do Your Due Diligence”

Exception Rejections by Bill Stephens

Author Bill Stephens

Before I became an indie author, I did serious agent querying for my current project, and I learned that agents have discovered something more demeaning and insulting than the “Dear Author” form letter/post card/email rejection. I’ve dubbed it the “Exception Rejection.”

Here’s how it’s explained on the agent websites: “We receive such a high volume of queries, that we respond only to those in which we are interested. If you have not heard from us in four to six weeks then consider that we have passed on your project. Do not under any circumstances inquire about your submission or we will put your genitals in a vise and force you to watch us eviscerate your first-born. ” Actually, I added that last part. Continue reading “Exception Rejections by Bill Stephens”

Paying for Reviews? Just Say No.

Don’t know about the latest indie kerfuffle? That’s because you’ve probably been spending your free time writing. Mazel tov. In case you haven’t looked up in a while, here’s what you may have missed:

A few weeks ago, in a New York Times article, a gentleman named Todd Rutherford and his now-defunct company were “outed” for selling thousands of fake, five-star reviews to authors hoping to get an edge on their e-book sales.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, one of Rutherford’s customers was a rather well-known indie scribe who published a rather well-referred-to book about how he became a well-known indie scribe, mainly by purchasing hundreds of fake reviews. Now, Indieland has exploded with blogination: pro, con, and indifferent. Aspersions are raining down on this well-known scribe, who shares a name (if that indeed is his real name) with a dead philosopher and says of his meteoric rise to million-dollar sales, “Reviews are the smallest piece of being successful. But it’s a lot easier to buy them than cultivating an audience.” Continue reading “Paying for Reviews? Just Say No.”