Design and Editorial Services for you

Hayes Design and Editorial Service, Living Waters Publishing Company, BlogBuilders, and Erica Newton are proud to announce a joint effort in the

This festival will be a blogger's dream. We will have monetary, book, and gift card prizes. Most of all, everyone will have a great time building their blogs.

Details:
The Blog Building Festival (BBF) will be held from September 1 until October 1. During that time, all registered bloggers will post at least 3 days a week. Each time they post, it will be added to our central blog for this festival. We will all visit and comment on each other's blogs, adding them to our blogrolls, link lists, or incorporating each other into our posts.

Each day of the festival, the central blog will have prompts to help you keep posting. We will also post blogging tips and tricks to get your readership up, boost your Google rankings, and more. At the end of October 1, the bloggers with the most registered (anonymous don't count) comments, who have posted at least 3 days a week, and who have posted comments at other blogs will be entered into a drawing for $200 cash. Two other lucky bloggers will awarded $100 and $50, judged according to comments, content and participation.

The registration fee for this festival is $10 per blog, or $17 for two, payable through Paypal. To register, contact Chris Hayes at hayesdesigneditorial@gmail.com
Registration cut off is August 30.

Every pair of eyes in the establishment turned toward the blond, muscular young man who had arrived in the yellow Corvette that had screeched to a stop in front moments before. He returned their gazes defiantly before descending the three steps to the sunken floor and crossing the room to sit at the end of the bar on that side. The green pattern in his shirt glowed eerily within the nimbus of a sign on the wall advertising Royal Beer, and his green eyes seemed to glow likewise as he stared at the neon words.

The female bartender placed a napkin in front of the brawny youth and said, “What can I get for you?”

“Beer—any kind but that.” He indicated the sign on the wall. “And make it a pitcher.”

“Sure thing, handsome, but I’m gonna need to see some ID.”

He reached in his pocket and slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. “Will that do?”

She palmed the bill and tucked it in her bra. “Helluva good likeness.”

He was still glaring at the sign when she returned with his pitcher and glass.

“So, how long you been in town, honey?”

His eyes moved slowly from the sign to her face. “How much will it cost for you to go chat up somebody else?”

Her smile vanished. “My treat, jerkwad.”

He filled the glass with beer and chugged it, then stared into the empty glass. “One down, ninety-nine to go.”

From behind him, a woman’s voice: “I’m afraid that would leave you much too inebriated for the evening’s activities.”

He turned to rebuke the interloper and froze at the sight of the luminous creature before him. Light seemed to emanate from the pores of her ivory skin, and her hair appeared more of an iridescent silver than mere blonde, but it was her eyes that were the most striking thing about her—the perfect blue of a cloudless sky at the height of summer. The scathing words he had planned to utter dissipated in the glow of her countenance, and he found himself fighting baffling tears.

She took his hand in both of hers. “I’ve been waiting for you, Wade. Come with me and I’ll take you to meet him.”

He rose to follow her but said, “Who are you, and how do you know me?”

“My name is Nicole and I was sent to be your guide. All young people have one when they first arrive.”

“Arrive where? I don’t even know where I am.”

“I know you don’t, my son.” She stroked his forearm in a maternal gesture to match the endearment. “But try to be patient. Things will become clearer before long.”


~Joyce Sterling Scarbrough
True Blue Forever
Different Roads

Read the first chapters: http://www.authorsden.com/joycelscarbrough1
Joyce's Blog: http://joycescarbrough.blogspot.com

If I could have any super hero power in the world, it would be?

I'd use this power to...

If I had unlimited money, the first thing I'd do is?

The world would benefit because...

Having gone through the daunting and laborious task of getting that first book published, I thought I’d take some time and write down some things I’ve learned along the way. Maybe some talented new writer can read this and cut down on the amount of frustration, confusion, and anxiety that I went through trying to break through the barrier from “amateur writer” to “published author.” As the published author of only two books so far (as of the date of this writing), I am certainly no senior writing sage – don’t profess to be. However, I am a quick learner, and I think that if you are new to this industry, you will find my observations and recommendations more than sophomoric. Let’s get started.

First, you have to know what you want, and at the same time you must be realistic in your expectations. Unless you are already famous, in the literary world you are an unknown. If you have never so much as had a magazine or newspaper article published, never hosted a successful blog, never had so much as a poem in print anywhere, no literary resume of any weight, you have to realize that NOBODY KNOWS YOU, and NOBODY CARES that you’ve written a book, even though you may believe it’s the next great American novel. Your friends and family have read your manuscript. They may be filling your head with affirmations of how wonderful your precious book is, encouraging you to get it published, assuring you that you are at least equal to Stephen King and will most surely be fantastically successful. Probably not. Not with your first go-around. Maybe not even with your second or third or fourth book. The King himself went through decades of living as the starving artist before his breakthrough novel “Carrie” vaulted him into “overnight” success. (Read “On Writing” by Stephen King. This is mandatory reading for all aspiring authors). Trying to get a major publisher or literary agent to pick you up (as a novice) is about as easy as herding cats, and as much fun as a root canal. If you go about it the wrong way, you may well become despondent, frustrated, and give up. This article is intended to help you find your way with some clear proven methods of getting your writing career up and running.

Here are your down-to-earth choices, Mr. or Mrs. Novice Author. There are four choices available to you.

1. Self-publish
2. Go with a vanity press.
3. Go with a POD.
4. Get a contract with a small traditional publishing house.

Choice number one: you can self-publish. This is a monumental undertaking. You buy your own ISBN number, you copyright the work yourself, you produce the cover art (or pay an artist for it), you hire a printing press to produce the copies (Amazon.com now has a self-pub option with BookSurge that makes it a little easier, I’ve been told), and then you seek a distributor to distribute your books (which you probably will not be able to get) or you market and sell your books yourself. True self-publishing makes sense only if your work is too controversial for any publisher to print, or if your book relates only to a small geographic area, or perhaps if you just want to produce a textbook for a class you are teaching in some obscure subject that you are an expert at – these types of scenarios. Otherwise, it’s too much work (for this author) to take on.

While the next two options are often (mistakenly) called “self-publishing,” they are actually not. These are publishers that do it (all that work we discussed above) for a fee. They are the vanity presses and the POD (print on demand) publishers. Some of the better known ones are iUniverse, XLibris and AuthorHouse. But there are hundreds of them, just do a Google search. Although they are the easiest way to publish (with many of them, you just pay a fee and they’ll publish it, even if what you’ve written is the most pathetic drivel ever penned). So if you are with me so far, we are now left with two other choices. Get with a good POD publisher, or go for a small traditional publisher’s contract. Let’s talk the POD route first.

A good POD publisher will have standards. The more respectable the outfit, the higher the standards. They don’t publish just any crap. You will in most cases need to submit a query letter to get their attention. You also need to investigate the company enough to know if they are accepting submissions and/or queries at this time. Remember, they are small; they can only publish so many books in any given year. Nowadays they all have websites, so go there and read up on them. Find out what genres they accept and which they do not. Most do not want a full manuscript submission before reading your query. If they like your query, they will usually ask for a sample first three chapters. Know this: submission guidelines vary so do your homework. Your book could miss a chance at being published just because you didn’t take the time to read up on how a particular publishing house wants you to submit your query/sample/manuscript. That nettles veterans in the industry. If you are too unprofessional to read and follow simple submission instructions, or for some reason can’t read, they don’t want anything to do with you. Remember, these are professionals. They’ve been at this a long time, and they can smell an unpromising slow-learning amateur from a continent away. After reading your query and sample, if they still like what they are reading, they will likely ask to read the whole manuscript. Then, and only then, (and after an agonizing long wait, most cases – I’m talking months - really) will you find out if you have landed a publisher willing to publish your work. So, first off, you need to learn how to write an effective, attention-getting, professional looking query letter. There are plenty of sources for tutorials on the do’s and don’ts of writing a good query letter. Do a Google search. Two sources I highly recommend from personal experience are Carolyn Howard Johnson’s book, The Frugal Book Promoter, and Janet Elaine Smith's Promo Paks.

So here are some of the advantages of going the traditional route:

A) They pay all the expenses to publish your book. You have no out of pocket costs. Unless, that is, they don’t have an in-house editor to your liking and/or standards and you need to hire one. And, a side note here, you must use a good editor. Even the best authors with dozens of best-sellers already to their credit have an editor. Even editors use another editor for their own books. As the author, you often cannot “see” what is actually on the page. You think it’s there, but it’s not clear or missing altogether – or visa versa. Good editors will spot timeline inconsistencies, character trait/speech inconsistencies, poor sentence and paragraph structure; I could go on and on. This is mandatory – use an editor, a good one. Back to the advantages.

B) Small traditional publishers still allow you a large amount of control over your work. You will still most likely have the say in what the cover looks like. The company I worked with, (Cambridge Books) even welcomes the author submitting the cover art his or herself if they have it. If they like your manuscript enough to pay to publish it, they probably won’t demand that you rework it in any major way.

Now some disadvantages to consider.

A) As with POD’s, small traditional publishing houses do not have staff and budgets to market your book for you. You are just as alone here as with the POD’s. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

B) When I say “small” traditional publisher, that’s exactly what I mean. You have not hit the big time. Getting your first “real” contract can lull you into a deadly slumber, thinking you’ve “made it” and have no work to do except write for a living from now on. Your book could go nowhere, and probably will, unless you start promoting and marketing the living bejeebers out of it starting months before the expected release date.

C) You make less money on the sale per book. Since the publisher has shelled out the bucks to publish your book, they take a higher cut of the proceeds from sales. Your royalties will be a smaller percentage than with POD’s, and your net ROI will be somewhat less on personal sales than with a POD publisher.

Article written by Marvin D Wilson
AVATAR Award-Winning Author
New Novel Website: www.owenfiddler.com
MySpace at: www.myspace.com/Paize_Fiddler
FREE SPIRIT Blog at: http://inspiritandtruths.blogspot.com/
Eye Twitter 2 – http://twitter.com/Paize_Fiddler
Email Marvin at: marvwilson2010@gmail.com

Imagine what it would feel like to go on vacation, place of your choice.

1) Where would you like to go?

2) How does the sun feel on your skin?

3) What sounds do you hear?

4) Share the details of your vacation with vivid terminology.