Matthew Iden's Blog, page 14

The following post began life as a how-to email I sent to a writers’ group I belong to, the Northern Virginia Writers Club, after several non-techy members expressed frustration over trying to get onto the web. It seems a bit redundant to post this bit about WordPress on a WordPress site…but of course any number [...]

I have the travel bug, which makes me a sucker for travel shows. And one of my favorite shows is Rick Steves’s goofy yet wonderfully accessible travel series Europe Through the Back Door. The theme of the show is to introduce American travelers to Europe in a down-to-Earth way that doesn’t insulate them from the [...]

When you’re ready to publish and are thinking about the free and easy-to-access methods of promoting yourself, a few options spring to mind: social media sites, your blog, and, of course, email. In a strange way, however, email is the most cumbersome of the three. Out-of-the-box, the medium can be plain and un-compelling. Most standard [...]

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of a side-project of mine, Telling Your Tale: A Beginner’s Guide to Novel Writing, available on this site through Oronjo.com (all formats supported, see below) and Amazon.com for the Kindle. I was inspired to write my first e-article after reading a great post on fantasy author Lindsay Burocker’s blog. Subsequently, [...]

You wouldn’t think there’d be a new twist in the work-flow/word processing/information-management software arena, but I’m happy to report that Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a new, useful, and fun departure from all of the tired applications you’ve seen over the years…and best of all, it’s free. The Need Not long ago I realized I was juggling [...]

I’m incredibly excited to announce that my debut crime fiction novel, A Reason to Live, is out and available both for the Kindle and in print from Createspace and Amazon! Read the synopsis at the end of this post to learn more about the story. But be sure to check out the special offer for [...]

In preparation for promoting some upcoming titles, I wanted to check in with the giveaway page on Librarything.com and see if anything had changed since I ran some giveaways of my own back in November and January. Things have changed all right. Imagine my surprise when I saw this news blurb on the LT homepage: There [...]

I’m friends with a musician (not Vince Gill) who is considering throwing in the towel or at least going on strike, until he can find a way to support himself through his art. This isn’t a debut; he’s been playing and touring for thirty years. He’s had no illusions about his chances of hitting it [...]

I don’t have the writers block of popular imagination, the blank white screen and blinking cursor that keeps me paralyzed for hours. But I do have a “writers reluctance,” which in some ways might be even more insidious. This is a familiar syndrome for most of you, where the distractions of meta-writing—research, outlining, emailing, formatting [...]

Reblogged from TechCrunch: Authors no longer have to impress stodgy English majors to get their book a quality review: new research from the Harvard Business Review shows that the aggregate rating of Amazon reviewers are every bit as good as professional book critics. Professional book critics, on the other hand, suffer from nepotism: critics give more [...]