If you've been following this blog since I started it a couple of years ago, you've probably forgotten that I write a blog. My bad. I've been very negligent with this project and haven't posted anything since January, despite the New Years Resolutions I gave at the time. There are several reasons for this, most notably the busyness that you are all too familiar with in your own life. But there's another underlying reason why I haven't been an active blogger. I just don't know what to write.
I think this is a pretty common problem, yet somehow the avid bloggers I follow have pushed through this rut to find fresh, interesting content to write about regularly. I've reflected on this over the summer and I think I suffer from a classic self-deprecation that many people have when it comes to talking about themselves. What could I write about? Why would anyone be interested in what I have to say? I don't do anything remarkable. You know these people. When you meet them for the first time and try to get to know them, they describe themselves as "I'm just a..."
Stop right there.
For starters, I realized I do this! In my case, it's: "I'm just an adjunct professor." In the past, it's been: "I just work retail." I've always thought, who would ever want to read anything about me. But I also had the more important realization that I the people in my life who are "just this" or "just that" are actually pretty interesting if you talk to them. I ran into my neighbor while I was taking out the trash this summer and we struck up a conversation about what we do for a living. He "just" drives expedited freight in a cargo van. Well, I found that pretty interesting, or at least enough so that we talked for a good half hour. He probably thinks he has the most boring job in the world, but as someone who does not drive expedited freight for a living, I enjoyed hearing about the challenge of having to cross customs into Canada multiple times a day.
I'm interesting, dammit!
Now, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying this from a place of conceit. I'm not the Dos Equis Guy. (He is, of course, far more interesting in any of us!) But I do have quite a few interesting things going on in my life that I can draw upon for inspiration to write what I think will be insightful blog posts:
I'm an historian and college professor at three colleges. I'm struggling to build a career in a time when higher education is confronting several challenges. I work in the home of one of the Presidents of the United States. I'm a writer, and one who has decided to light out for the territories into the life of an independent author. I co-edit a quarterly literary journal called The Quill. I'm a husband and have been for nearly five years. I'm a dad, and let me tell you, there is no end to what can be said about a day spent with a toddler! I'm a foodie, coffee fanatic and beer snob. I'm an avid reader who tries to get through about 50 books a year. I love to travel. The list goes on...
I think this has been the problem. I set this blog up as a blog about writing. Indeed, writing is my passion and to become a professional fiction author is still the dream, but my life is so much more than just my writing. I feel my blog should reflect more than that. Plus there are my readers to consider. I am a writer, but I don't even want to read blogs on writing all the time. It's silly to expect you who are not writers to be that interested in a blog devoted to writing either.
So coming soon: either I'm going to dive into travel a little bit and talk about my recent trip to South Carolina or I might talk about what it means to me to have a daughter about to turn 2 years old. We'll see how I'm feeling in a few days!
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Sunday, January 4, 2015
To 2015 and Beyond!
Hey all!
I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. I was able to spend some quality time with family and seeing a 1 year-old open Christmas gifts is such a joyful experience!
Now that we're beyond the holiday season, each of us has a brand new year to look forward to. This is always an exciting time. We get to reflect on the previous year - what went right, what mistakes we made, what opportunities we missed, and how we grew. We also get to take what we learned and plot a course for the coming months.
So what can my readers expect from me?
1. First and foremost I am in the finishing stages of Witches of the Water, Book Two - The Yucatan Escapade. This is my sequel to The Golden Merra. Readers will join Wil and Albert in Mexico after the events in Book One for an adventure that expands upon (and I think surpasses) the fun of its predecessor. I am pushing to get this published by January or February.
2. I plan on holding at least one book signing this year. I have never done one of these so this will be a new experience for me. I have no details at this point on the when or where, but once I figure that out I will of course share. I'm a little nervous about this idea...meeting the reading public, face-to-face, in person....it's huge! But this is part of the writer's life so it's high time I start doing it.
3. I plan on buying an author table at either a local fair or festival, such as the Old West End Festival, or perhaps something more tailored to books specifically. Again, no details as of yet. There is a lot involved in getting a booth at one of these events like building inventory and licensing, but I think this will be well worth the investment.
4. Getting my work on store shelves. I plan on finding retail venues around the Toledo area to sell my books as a local author. I have a few locations in mind and I look forward to meeting with people in the local business community about partnering with them.
5. Last but certainly not least. I need to finish editing Book Three of the series! This will probably be a very late 2015 project, if not 2016. I love this series and I've spent about seven years working on it. I look forward to getting in done and out there so I can move on to some of my new ideas.
6. #IndieBooksBeSeen. I've recently blogged about the IndieBooksBeSeen movement I'm a part of. They have a lot of big plans for 2015 that I am excited to be a part of. They plan on making some commercials, representing indie books at book expos and getting the word about indie books to school nationwide. I look forward to wroking with them to promote the indie author community. As of today, they finished their first goal for 2015 (they didn't waste any time!): Here's a link to their new commercial.
That's it from me. I hope you will all join me on this journey!
Kevin
I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. I was able to spend some quality time with family and seeing a 1 year-old open Christmas gifts is such a joyful experience!
Now that we're beyond the holiday season, each of us has a brand new year to look forward to. This is always an exciting time. We get to reflect on the previous year - what went right, what mistakes we made, what opportunities we missed, and how we grew. We also get to take what we learned and plot a course for the coming months.
So what can my readers expect from me?
1. First and foremost I am in the finishing stages of Witches of the Water, Book Two - The Yucatan Escapade. This is my sequel to The Golden Merra. Readers will join Wil and Albert in Mexico after the events in Book One for an adventure that expands upon (and I think surpasses) the fun of its predecessor. I am pushing to get this published by January or February.
2. I plan on holding at least one book signing this year. I have never done one of these so this will be a new experience for me. I have no details at this point on the when or where, but once I figure that out I will of course share. I'm a little nervous about this idea...meeting the reading public, face-to-face, in person....it's huge! But this is part of the writer's life so it's high time I start doing it.
3. I plan on buying an author table at either a local fair or festival, such as the Old West End Festival, or perhaps something more tailored to books specifically. Again, no details as of yet. There is a lot involved in getting a booth at one of these events like building inventory and licensing, but I think this will be well worth the investment.
4. Getting my work on store shelves. I plan on finding retail venues around the Toledo area to sell my books as a local author. I have a few locations in mind and I look forward to meeting with people in the local business community about partnering with them.
5. Last but certainly not least. I need to finish editing Book Three of the series! This will probably be a very late 2015 project, if not 2016. I love this series and I've spent about seven years working on it. I look forward to getting in done and out there so I can move on to some of my new ideas.
6. #IndieBooksBeSeen. I've recently blogged about the IndieBooksBeSeen movement I'm a part of. They have a lot of big plans for 2015 that I am excited to be a part of. They plan on making some commercials, representing indie books at book expos and getting the word about indie books to school nationwide. I look forward to wroking with them to promote the indie author community. As of today, they finished their first goal for 2015 (they didn't waste any time!): Here's a link to their new commercial.
That's it from me. I hope you will all join me on this journey!
Kevin
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Why I love being Indie. #IndieBooksBeSeen
I am not a good blogger.
My infinitesimal readership has no doubt noticed my blog has been pretty neglected as of late. Well, part of that is due to my work schedule. As a newbie adjunct professor who has had to teach all brand new courses for the last year and a half, winter and summer breaks have really been my only opportunity to write anything, let a lone blog. But there is a second reason for the stagnation of this site. I suck at blogging. Some writers can wow us with prose, some earn Pulitzers for their stellar reporting and some can bare their souls online. Well, I may not be any of these but I'm certainly not the latter. Blogging does not come natural to me. I've tried to give helpful writer tips but then seemed disingenuous being that I am so new to the profession myself. I tried the book review thing for a while, and while that was fun, I'm not sure if passing judgment on writers in my exact same position is the right thing to. So, world, here I am at it again. But this time I'm not going to try to make this blog "about" something, but instead write about me, my thoughts and my feelings about this whole writing adventure. While I doubt there are a lot of people out there who want to read ramblings of me writing on me (I know I certainly wouldn't!), I believe that's okay.
So here we go...
For my first post in writing about myself (again, not my strong suit) I'm lucking out in that I have a prompt to write about. Since my last posting in August, I've joined a group, or movement if you will, called #IndieBooksBeSeen. It began as a Twitter hashtag in July to show the solidarity of indie writers everywhere and has grown by leaps and bounds over the fall to become a multifaceted group that has a ton of ideas in the works for "taking indie mainstream," as #IndieBooksBeSeen's founder, Mark Shaw (@MarktheShaw) likes to say. #IndieBooksBeSeen functions basically like a cooperative, very similar to the old farmer and electrical co-ops of the early 20th century, and the model works by these geographically separated writers pooling their talents and resources to work as a singular entity in order to work in a system designed to service large businesses at the expense of the little guy. I hope to share more news about my involvement with #IndieBooksBeSeen as I work to renew this dormant blog.
Why do I love being an Indie author? This is the prompt one of our members at #IndieBooksBeSeen has challenged us to blog about. Well, in my opinion, becoming an independent author is both the worst and best decision a writer can make, in that order. When I went down this path, and I think most independent authors can relate, I naively thought that while I probably will never sell the millions of copies necessary to break the New York Times bestseller list I could definitely sell a few hundred copies to supplement my income and maybe even eke out a living someday way down the road. Then I hit the "publish" button. Turns out there are about a million other equally ambitious authors trying to do the same thing. The net result is a lot of unstructured noise in which it is almost impossible to build a readership. This was obviously quite disheartening to my 2013 foolishly hopeful self. Somewhere in the midst of my realization that my intrepidly American proclamation of "I'll do it my damned self" was going to be a lot harder than previously thought, I began trying to figure out if I had made a mistake. In researching the book industry, I discovered, quite to my surprise, that the life of a traditionally published author was in reality not much better than being an indie author. Unless I became outlandishly successful (or knew somebody influential at a publishing firm which I do not) I would likely to get little to know support for promoting my book. Furthermore, unless you're Stephen King or J.K. Rowling with enough clout to dictate terms, authors are by and large human commodities who sign away almost all ownership of their work to the publishing company. This is the first reason I love being an indie author. My book is my book. The story is the story I want to tell, not the story an exec thinks will sell. If my book ever gets turned into audio or picked up by a large retailer, I'm involved in the process. Finally as an indie author, I, the person who actually wrote the book, make a respectful percentage of every sale as opposed to the traditional system where the author gets table scraps of 5-10% from which they need to pay their agent his/her cut. This sense of ownership over my creation is far more valuable than anything I would make in a large book contract.
The second reason I love being indie did not exist a year ago. Before #IndieBooksBeSeen, we were all, for the most part, trying to out yell each other for readers' attention. It was a very lonely sea to be a part of. But now because of #IndieBooksBeSeen and I think a growing sense of comradery among independents, there is a vibrant and growing community. I have made like-minded acquaintances along my journey as an indie author, people I want to see succeed and who I know want the same for me. As we grow as a voice and our tweets increasingly grow into video Skype conferences and eventually face-to-face conventions, I wholeheartedly expect these relationships to grow into literary friendships. And that is one thing you just can't put a price on. If you're interested in hearing why other authors love being indie, visit: https://clrozelle.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/10-things-that-suck-and-rock-about-being-an-indie-author-part-1/
My infinitesimal readership has no doubt noticed my blog has been pretty neglected as of late. Well, part of that is due to my work schedule. As a newbie adjunct professor who has had to teach all brand new courses for the last year and a half, winter and summer breaks have really been my only opportunity to write anything, let a lone blog. But there is a second reason for the stagnation of this site. I suck at blogging. Some writers can wow us with prose, some earn Pulitzers for their stellar reporting and some can bare their souls online. Well, I may not be any of these but I'm certainly not the latter. Blogging does not come natural to me. I've tried to give helpful writer tips but then seemed disingenuous being that I am so new to the profession myself. I tried the book review thing for a while, and while that was fun, I'm not sure if passing judgment on writers in my exact same position is the right thing to. So, world, here I am at it again. But this time I'm not going to try to make this blog "about" something, but instead write about me, my thoughts and my feelings about this whole writing adventure. While I doubt there are a lot of people out there who want to read ramblings of me writing on me (I know I certainly wouldn't!), I believe that's okay.
So here we go...
For my first post in writing about myself (again, not my strong suit) I'm lucking out in that I have a prompt to write about. Since my last posting in August, I've joined a group, or movement if you will, called #IndieBooksBeSeen. It began as a Twitter hashtag in July to show the solidarity of indie writers everywhere and has grown by leaps and bounds over the fall to become a multifaceted group that has a ton of ideas in the works for "taking indie mainstream," as #IndieBooksBeSeen's founder, Mark Shaw (@MarktheShaw) likes to say. #IndieBooksBeSeen functions basically like a cooperative, very similar to the old farmer and electrical co-ops of the early 20th century, and the model works by these geographically separated writers pooling their talents and resources to work as a singular entity in order to work in a system designed to service large businesses at the expense of the little guy. I hope to share more news about my involvement with #IndieBooksBeSeen as I work to renew this dormant blog.
Why do I love being an Indie author? This is the prompt one of our members at #IndieBooksBeSeen has challenged us to blog about. Well, in my opinion, becoming an independent author is both the worst and best decision a writer can make, in that order. When I went down this path, and I think most independent authors can relate, I naively thought that while I probably will never sell the millions of copies necessary to break the New York Times bestseller list I could definitely sell a few hundred copies to supplement my income and maybe even eke out a living someday way down the road. Then I hit the "publish" button. Turns out there are about a million other equally ambitious authors trying to do the same thing. The net result is a lot of unstructured noise in which it is almost impossible to build a readership. This was obviously quite disheartening to my 2013 foolishly hopeful self. Somewhere in the midst of my realization that my intrepidly American proclamation of "I'll do it my damned self" was going to be a lot harder than previously thought, I began trying to figure out if I had made a mistake. In researching the book industry, I discovered, quite to my surprise, that the life of a traditionally published author was in reality not much better than being an indie author. Unless I became outlandishly successful (or knew somebody influential at a publishing firm which I do not) I would likely to get little to know support for promoting my book. Furthermore, unless you're Stephen King or J.K. Rowling with enough clout to dictate terms, authors are by and large human commodities who sign away almost all ownership of their work to the publishing company. This is the first reason I love being an indie author. My book is my book. The story is the story I want to tell, not the story an exec thinks will sell. If my book ever gets turned into audio or picked up by a large retailer, I'm involved in the process. Finally as an indie author, I, the person who actually wrote the book, make a respectful percentage of every sale as opposed to the traditional system where the author gets table scraps of 5-10% from which they need to pay their agent his/her cut. This sense of ownership over my creation is far more valuable than anything I would make in a large book contract.
The second reason I love being indie did not exist a year ago. Before #IndieBooksBeSeen, we were all, for the most part, trying to out yell each other for readers' attention. It was a very lonely sea to be a part of. But now because of #IndieBooksBeSeen and I think a growing sense of comradery among independents, there is a vibrant and growing community. I have made like-minded acquaintances along my journey as an indie author, people I want to see succeed and who I know want the same for me. As we grow as a voice and our tweets increasingly grow into video Skype conferences and eventually face-to-face conventions, I wholeheartedly expect these relationships to grow into literary friendships. And that is one thing you just can't put a price on. If you're interested in hearing why other authors love being indie, visit: https://clrozelle.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/10-things-that-suck-and-rock-about-being-an-indie-author-part-1/
Monday, August 18, 2014
Goodreads Giveaway of The Golden Merra
Goodreads Book Giveaway
The Golden Merra
by Kevin Moore
Giveaway ends August 24, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
A Whimsical Adventure: A Review of The Wizard in My Window
by J. David Clarke
The Wizard in My Window by J. David Clarke is slightly outside of my normal fare for reading. There are a lot of people who live and breathe YA (Young Adult), particular YA Fantasy. I am not one of those people. I feel it takes a lot to stand out in such a saturated genre. Now that I've given my disclaimer, let me begin by saying that The Wizard in My Window does indeed stand out.
The short novel/long novella follows the Collier Family as they move into their new home. While his elder 15-year-old sister Nicole is too busy in her world of teenage angst, Timothy claims the upstairs room with a peculiar mark in the window. That mark is, you guessed it, in the shape of a wizard. It doesn't take much time at all before a magical spell book called the Magus Liber appears followed my a new relic each day. As the kids learn what these artifacts are capable of (and begin playing with them in properly reckless youth fashion), ancient beings are drawn to its power.
Where this book excels is in its narrative. It is refreshingly nonlinear and takes a couple of unexpected sharp turns during the adventure. One of my personal pet peeves with the YA fantasy genre is its overuse of the coming-of-age template. I was happy to see Clarke exercised some real creativity in breaking this mold. I was happy to say at about three-quarters of the way through, that I couldn't tell exactly where the story would end up. The main characters in this story are also very well defined, and Clarke did a good job giving each Collier (even the baby) a distinct personality.
The Wizard in My Window could use a little improvement, in my opinion, with character dialogue. Sometimes what the characters have to say is somewhat pedestrian, perhaps bordering on corny. This is most noticeable, I think, with the book's villains. My second issue has to deal with the way the characters expressed emotion. Sometimes characters yell in ALL CAPS or with multiple exclamation marks. This is particularly true from Nicole. I found it to be somewhat distracting.
Overall, The Wizard in My Window is an entertaining, fast read. It's a good choice for young adults and big adults alike.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
I'm Sorry Amazon...I Want an Open Relationship
Dear Amazon,
When we first met in 2012 and you batted your lashes at me from across the room, you were clearly the alpha girl at the party with your sexy Kindle and #1 market share. Other e-readers just seemed to fall in your shadow. Then I bought you a drink and we talked a little. Free promotions? You'd put me in the Kindle Prime library and pay me some undetermined cut of a pool for every borrow? You were the whole package! All you asked from me in return is that we be exclusive and not see other people. Like every guy, I was a little hesitant about committing but in the end I just jumped in head over heels.
Then the honeymoon phase ended. You became a little clingy by automatically reenrolling me into another 90 days of KDP Select, but I didn't really think anything of it at the time. With our free promotions, while fun and exciting at first, you... well...you just seemed to get bored, as if your mind was elsewhere developing new promotional tools for more famous authors who could take you out to nice dinners at fancy restaurants. The once triple-digit free downloads promos slid into double-digit downloads and before long, I'm ashamed to say, we got to a place where our downloads only gave away like two copies of my novel The Golden Merra a day. What happened to our sales algorithms? Sure, you threw me a bone with your Kindle Countdown Deals, but you made it all complicated by saying I could only enroll after my price had been fixed for so many days and telling me I was ineligible because I had already used the free promo option. I couldn't figure you out! I thought you meant one thing, you meant another; we just didn't connect on the same level anymore! I'm sorry for that angry email I sent you, by the way.
Look, we'll always have some great memories... like the time my short story "Waves and War" almost had 1,000 free downloads in one day, beating out a Tom Clancy ebook for a hot minute. But I think it's time we started seeing other people. It's time we face facts here; our relationship has gone from KDP Select to It's Complicated. I'm not saying we can't still be friends or you can't sell my work. In fact, I know you've been selling the books of many other writers for a long time and I'm willing to accept that a part of who you are. I've done a lot of thinking the last few months, and I've learned a lot about myself, a lot about distribution and marketing strategy too. I've realized there are other fish in the sea: Nook has a great royalty rate for lower priced ebooks that will be perfect for my short fiction and Smashwords is just so easy to get along with.
I know it's hard. Please don't cry. It's not you, it's me. Well, okay, it's kind of you. But you're still Amazon, though, and you alway will be. You're great! And I'll never be able to live without you. What writer could? I know it'll be awkward for a while -- what do we tell the kids? What if the neighbors ask? But, you know, I don't think this is something to be ashamed of. We're just two very different people who need to focus on our own goals for a while. Besides, a lot of authors are doing multi-platform these days.
Yours,
Kevin
When we first met in 2012 and you batted your lashes at me from across the room, you were clearly the alpha girl at the party with your sexy Kindle and #1 market share. Other e-readers just seemed to fall in your shadow. Then I bought you a drink and we talked a little. Free promotions? You'd put me in the Kindle Prime library and pay me some undetermined cut of a pool for every borrow? You were the whole package! All you asked from me in return is that we be exclusive and not see other people. Like every guy, I was a little hesitant about committing but in the end I just jumped in head over heels.
Then the honeymoon phase ended. You became a little clingy by automatically reenrolling me into another 90 days of KDP Select, but I didn't really think anything of it at the time. With our free promotions, while fun and exciting at first, you... well...you just seemed to get bored, as if your mind was elsewhere developing new promotional tools for more famous authors who could take you out to nice dinners at fancy restaurants. The once triple-digit free downloads promos slid into double-digit downloads and before long, I'm ashamed to say, we got to a place where our downloads only gave away like two copies of my novel The Golden Merra a day. What happened to our sales algorithms? Sure, you threw me a bone with your Kindle Countdown Deals, but you made it all complicated by saying I could only enroll after my price had been fixed for so many days and telling me I was ineligible because I had already used the free promo option. I couldn't figure you out! I thought you meant one thing, you meant another; we just didn't connect on the same level anymore! I'm sorry for that angry email I sent you, by the way.
Look, we'll always have some great memories... like the time my short story "Waves and War" almost had 1,000 free downloads in one day, beating out a Tom Clancy ebook for a hot minute. But I think it's time we started seeing other people. It's time we face facts here; our relationship has gone from KDP Select to It's Complicated. I'm not saying we can't still be friends or you can't sell my work. In fact, I know you've been selling the books of many other writers for a long time and I'm willing to accept that a part of who you are. I've done a lot of thinking the last few months, and I've learned a lot about myself, a lot about distribution and marketing strategy too. I've realized there are other fish in the sea: Nook has a great royalty rate for lower priced ebooks that will be perfect for my short fiction and Smashwords is just so easy to get along with.
I know it's hard. Please don't cry. It's not you, it's me. Well, okay, it's kind of you. But you're still Amazon, though, and you alway will be. You're great! And I'll never be able to live without you. What writer could? I know it'll be awkward for a while -- what do we tell the kids? What if the neighbors ask? But, you know, I don't think this is something to be ashamed of. We're just two very different people who need to focus on our own goals for a while. Besides, a lot of authors are doing multi-platform these days.
Yours,
Kevin
Monday, June 2, 2014
Review: 77 Shadow Street
77 Shadow Street
by Dean Koontz
The cover and description of this book would have you think that it is traditional horror tale about a haunted apartment building, something in the vein of Stephen King's The Shining. But, in reality, this is a sci-fi novel. The story is centered around the Pendleton, a once upper-crust apartment from the Gilded Age. The building has a history of its residents periodically going insane, and naturally the reader is about to join the Pendleton's current residents in one of those periods.
Suddenly the Pendleton seems to change around the characters and the changes are not positive: bioluminescent grass outside, bizarre liquid metal/humanoid creatures and some entity known as the "One" who is hellbent on "exterminating" every single one of them. The trapped and disoriented residents can recognize this new Pendleton as their home plainly enough, but it is at the same time, quite different. Perhaps the most important difference is the mysterious figure known as "Witness" who roams this new apartment building.
Now, I like science fiction; I like Dean Koontz. In this case, I did not like Dean Koontz writing science fiction. Koontz is a master at writing the suspense thriller, and he's pulled off some good sci-fi in the past. The Watchers was an excellent book (two or three terrible movies but an excellent book). Readers moderately familiar with dystopian fiction will be able to guess where the plot is going early on, and unfortunately once that happens, reading through to the end often feels like going through the motions. Koontz raises some interesting philosophical questions, as all sci-fi should, but while they are relevant questions, they have been thoroughly explored time and again.
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