C. M. Skiera's Blog

Book reviewers are a hot commodity these days.  With hundreds of thousands self-published books all craving attention, book reviewers have been flooded.  As one of those authors with an attention-starved book, I've been scouring the internet for reviewers, and I've found quite a few.  Today, however, I stumbled upon a really great site I wanted to share with you here. But first, a little soap-boxing from me.  As the self-publishing boom with it's resulting feeding frenzy for book reviewers hit, there have been some casualties.  Bad apples have made the path for the mature, professional, well-behaved self-published author a little tougher.  Due to bad indie author behavior, many reviewers have stopped accepting self-published books. So, before tearing off on these links and requesting a hundred reviews, please, please, please remember to read the review policy.  Can't find it?  Look harder, it may not be in an obvious or easy-to-...

I stumbled across yet another interesting new website for authors this week. Seems they're sprouting up like dandelions (but in a good way).  I've posted about OnlyIndie and Novelnook in the past few weeks, and today's topic is Bublish . Yvonne Hertzberger at Indies Unlimited posted an excellent tutorial for Bublish on Tuesday.  I'm not going to rehash her excellent post, rather, I'll add my two-cents.  After reading Yvonne's article, I immediately had to try Bublish for myself (of course).  So I did, and here's my pair of pennies. Bublish is still in beta, but it's functioning fine from my experience.  From the website of  Serendipite Studios , the creators of Bublish: "Bublish (™) will revolutionize the way writers share their stories and readers discover new work. We're creating the future of social book discovery . . ." As an author, you can select excepts from your book(s) and then write a personal insight, piece of trivia,...

A Flash of Inspiration – Or Is It? Inspiration – what does that word mean to you? In the dictionary it’s defined as: 1. S timulation to do creative work; stimulation for the human mind to creative thought or to the making of art [found inspiration in the landscape around her]. 2. Somebody or something that inspires; somebody or something that inspires somebody to creative thought or to the making of art [His book is an inspiration to all would-be travellers]. 3. Creativeness; the quality of being stimulated to create thought or activity, or the manifestation of this [a moment of inspiration] . As writers we all need inspiration to put pen to paper or our fingers on the keyboard. Yet there’s a missing ingredient here – imagination. To me, inspiration and imagination go hand in hand, like eggs and bacon or toast and marmalade. Yes you can have eggs without the bacon or toast without the marmalade, but will it taste as good? So let’s explore imagination for a minute. As chi...