Original articles
I’ve blogged recently about a collection of Roman coins, but let’s examine some of the flip side of Roman economy: roads and pollution. In this post I want to present you with several resources about the far-reaching effects of the far-reaching effects of the empire, from unusual angles.
I recently came across Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story. I thought they are pretty brilliant, regardless of the scope of you story (they could apply to a full-length novel just as much), so I have reproduced them below together with my thoughts about them. 1. Use the time of a total […]
Rather than an article, I include below links to two others, with my thoughts on them. I think they show pretty well the current turmoil that the publishing industry is in. The first is titled “Cover Story: The Quiet Catastrophe, Then Reinvention Of Book Publishing”, by John Birmingham on which-50. Here’s a notable excerpt: The last […]
A few weeks ago, Mary R. Woldering has asked me to contribute a piece for her blog, with the theme of National Maritime Week. I have chosen to address the issue of the life of ancient galley-slaves, and who really rowed the naval war galleys. Below I reproduce the full post. Hi, and welcome to the […]
A few weeks ago I ran a Facebook giveaway for marketing material – images to help authors put some pizzazz in their book marketing efforts. It gotten quite a response (particularly the later analysis of results), so I thought you’d all appreciate seeing what the fuss is about. Here are a few different ways in […]
Last week I ran a giveaway on my Facebook author page, in order to generate more likes. Let me first announce the winners, and then do some analysis on the effectiveness of such giveaways. Huge congratulations for Phillip J. Kessler and Karen Tate for winning marketing graphics! I’m sure you’ll be able to see the […]
This is a little exercise I sometimes do, to help me write. It’s probably old news to some authors, and won’t work for others, but for me it’s a useful little bit. I write Felix’s mysteries in first-person voice. This means that we see the case unfolds through Felix’s eyes, we learn the evidence at the […]
A guest post I have written as part of Mystery Thriller Week, originally published on Rae’s “A new Look on Books” blog. What’s in common between the latest scientific research about virus propagation, genetic modification for interstellar colonisation, and ancient priests poking about in animal entrails to predict the favour of the gods? More on […]
As part of Virtual FantasyCon (that awesome event where Murder In Absentia received an unprecedented five awards ;-), we did a blog hunt. As an introduction to this site, I did a post about the historical inspirations behind the fantasy lighthouse of Egretia. This post was originally published on L.D. Rose‘s site, and is replicated […]
I’ve seen people talk about the number of reviews on Amazon that can somehow trigger the “amazon algorithm” to start promoting your book. Some debunking is in order. This is my takeaway from the below article by Cate Baum: Amazon will promote your book whenever it thinks it has a chance to make money. If […]
