A friend who reads my blog posts advised me recently that my scribblings would make a great memoir. She sent me an article from WritersDigest.com: “Seven Tips for Turning Your Blog into a Book.” Frankly, I haven’t read “Writers’ Digest” in years because, at the time, muc
A caring friend recently sent me a website that offered tutorials on how to market my books. The first in the series was how to raise one’s ranking for Amazon book sales. All of the tutorials came with a price tag, naturally. I’ve seen this type of promotion too many times to si
There’s a new work out on Helen Keller, written by Rosie Sultan. It’s a fictional biography, “Helen in Love,” which speculates on the nature of real characters, Helen and Peter Fagan, the young man who served as her secretary for a time. Sultan admits nothing is known about
April 10 of this year I wrote a blog post about the ethics of piggybacking my work on to the sites of other authors. Some would call it marketing. Others would call it opportunism. My virtual book tour has given me a new set of questions. Followers have begun to drop into my Tw
I finished my work early yesterday and as it was a sunny afternoon, I walked to one of my neighborhood bookstores. The stroll was pleasant but long, so midway I stopped to rest on a stone bench near a curbing. A large, gray cat leapt up to join me and rubbed its fur against my arm,
Like the number of ice cream flavors that exist, book bloggers write for any number of reasons. Obviously, they enjoy reading but many are writers and use their blogs to develop an audience. They differ, too, in ages, ranging from retirees to frenzied mothers or students diverting the
I thought, when I retired, I could throw away my alarm clock. But as I get older, time plays a larger and larger role in my life. When I was young, my birthday or Christmas seemed slow to come around. Now I’ve hardly blown out one set of candles on the cake when it’s time to blow
I had lunch with a friend yesterday and during the course of our conversation, he observed that, “The earth has seven billion people on it and in 10 years the projection is for nine billion.” He is a man who works with numbers, so he uttered his observation with awe. As for me, th
“…atheists are among the most disliked groups in the U.S.” according to Robert Putnam and David Campbell who compiled their studies into a new book,“American Grace. Polls show that the general attitude among churchgoers is that atheists commit most crimes. The general opinion