Your humble host.

I can hear your collective groans from here. Stop it.

As an author, you will occasionally get to do interviews. As the shy, retiring type that most of you writers are, you won’t want to do them. As a marketer, you do want to do them! Interviews raise awareness of your product – the book you want to sell – but don’t be fooled. The TV stars you see being amazing in interviews on late night TV or the Ellen show didn’t just fall out of bed and hit a home run, being all charming and spontaneous and witty.

Luckily, most of the interviews you get to do will be by email or some other written version. (For some sample interview questions I put together, click HERE. Many are the typical stuff you’ll be asked; some are just me.)

Why is that lucky? Because radio…

Recently, I attended a session called “Writing About Fighting” at VCON, a science fict ion and fantasy conference. The panel consisted of writers and experts who were disciplined in multiple martial arts, including authors Lorna Suzuki and T.G. Shepherd, and Devon Boorman, the swordmaster of Academie Duello in Vancouver.

For me, this talk was so fascinating, it was worth the cost of admission alone. I spent days thinking about the topics discussed and tried to incorporate them into The Watcher Saga. These are just a few of them as I remember it.

Eight Things Writers Forget About Fight Scenes:

1. It’s not about the technical details

First of all, if you’re not technical and don’t know the details of fighting, you shouldn’t try to write about them. Some writers try to to include technical details of fighting, which only calls out their lack of expertise. If you don’t know what…

What do you know about Kindle Worlds (KW)?  An author of several Lei Crime KW novella, author Julie C. Gilbert makes some convincing points about the merits of KW stories for writers and readers alike.

8 of the Many Benefits to Writing and Reading Kindle World Stories
by Julie C. Gilbert

4 Benefits for Writers:

• Discover new readers – Amazon chooses worlds that are already popular. Here’s your chance to shine before a fresh lot of readers.
• Challenge yourself in a new way – novellas are a different beast than novels. They’re shorter than novels, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “easier” to put together. It’s just a different skill set. In a novel you have a lot of time to go deep into your characters and flesh out the plot, but in a novella, you’ve kind of got to get to the point quickly, while still maintaining enough characterization…