Remember that Name

What names are these?

I'm glad you asked...

John Locke, Amanda Hocking...I'm sure you've heard of them, the self-publishing phenoms.

Now we have also have J.A. Konrath, a mystery writer who has sold 400,000 digital copies of his self-published books, and our newest success story, Darcy Chan, whose manuscript, after being rejected by 100 publishers and agents as too risky, braved the self-publishing maze and published it herself on Amazon. After a $1000 marketing and PR campaign, including a hefty $575 review from Kirkus, and strategically pricing her book at 99 cents, hoping to build an audience, she has now sold over 400,000 ebooks and is attracting interest from movie producers and audio-book publishers.

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing. People pursue it like a holy grail; that magical, mercurial, fairy-dust creature that will bestow success on desperate pilgrims. We seek to ride the whirlwind, to hang onto its coattails and hope it can propel us to success. But like the internet, that vast living spiderweb of human connectedness, no one can truly tame it, control it, or predict its behavior, until after the dust settles. Then, like the wise sages we are, we scratch our wizardly-white beards and claim, we knew it all along. Like hell we did. It's like saying that we can stir the pot and know the exact molecule that will end up in our mouths. We don't. We spit in the wind and hope none of the spittle comes back to smack us in the face.

But it is fun speculating.

The Bell Tolls Relatively?

I've been reading about the neutrino experiments and the controversy surrounding it. A couple of months ago, physicists at CERN, Switzerland, claimed they found a fatal flaw in Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Over a three year period, 15,000 neutrinos were shot from an accelerator in Switzerland to a detector in Italy, about 500 miles away and the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds faster than the beam of light.

Yes, that means the neutrinos were travelling faster than the speed of light. At least, according to their experiments.

Elizabeth Lang is my Guest Author on November 21st 11/21 by Linda Mooney | Blog Talk Radio

Elizabeth Lang is my Guest Author on November 21st 11/21 by Linda Mooney | Blog Talk Radio

In the Ether: A Passive Aggressive Writing Tale by Jennifer Steen

So, I've come across lots of different kinds of writers in my stint, and one of the main stumbling blocks that I find many writers have is either a lack of confidence...or too much confidence. How do we find the balance? How do we realistically evaluate when a piece of fiction is ready for publication? Well, that's the golden question. I can attempt to answer that by telling you a little story.