publishing

Author Ivan Baidak

Author, IT specialist and peripatetic This is a very special post: a conversation with Ivan Baidak, author of Invisible and five other books. Invisible has recently been published in English by Canadian publisher Guernica Editions of Hamilton, Ontario. I met Ivan five years ago on a trip to California for a writer’s conference in Russian […]

Amnesia by D.G. Torrens

Amnesia, by bestseller D.G. Torrens Amnesia, a romantic suspense novel by the acclaimed, bestselling author D.G. Torrens, is now out! This is the latest editing project, edited by Scott Bury, to be published. What’s it about? Cassie is suffering from trauma-induced amnesia. Weekly visits to her psychologist are proving challenging until fragments from the night […]

Writing tip: Doing dashes right

One of the dead giveaways of a non-professional book is misusing the poor hyphen instead of a dash. Let’s clear something up right away: a hyphen is not the same thing as a short dash, which is distinct from a long dash. They are three different punctuation marks, each with their own uses and rules. […]

How to format your book for e-publishing

I have found that a lot of independent authors feel intimidated by the process of e-publishing. In the past few posts, I showed you how to use Styles to make formatting more efficient and consistent, and how Styles also help automate other processes you’ll need to publish your book. Your word processor has a number of […]

Writing tip: The cascading benefits of Styles

Last week, I wrote about the benefits of using Styles in your word processing program to make your writing more consistent, efficient and professional. This week, I explain some of the resulting efficiencies that come from understanding how to use Styles. I am using Microsoft Word as the example, but the same concepts apply to […]

Originally published on Blogger in 2012. Kudos to Smashwords and its head, Mark Coker, for pushing back against censorship. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a column about how Paypal was forcing e-book retailers like Smashwords to remove e-books whose content it found objectionable. If any e-book seller was found to be selling books […]