Who wants to be a Writer?

Being an avid reader I always thought I could be a writer. I fact in college friends asked me to write papers for them. My answer was, "Sure I will, get me all the details, do the research and give me your notes and I'll put it together." Guess what? They never did. Writing is something you have to have a feeling about, you need to put yourself in the story. Be part of the plot. Think about it twenty-four hours a day. How could you do that with someone elses notes. Doesn't work that way. It's one thing to write a book. That may be the easiest part. Next is trying to sell it to someone. Oh yeah, we all have a network of friends who may or may not buy it, but then what. Marketing, marketing, always marketing. The friends have to tell friends, they have to tell their friends and on and on. Pretty soon you have a thousand people who are in your book circle. Well we hope so. Good Luck!!!

An Ebook on NY Times Best Seller List

"Never" is what a famous writer said, it's not really a book. Does the definition of a book have to include a hardcover, a jacket, weigh five pounds and cost $14.95 to $24.95. I don"t think so. A book must give you information either fact or fiction. A Google search for ebook gave 750,000,000 items, a search for book gives 850,000,000. The first ebook was available in 1991 but most people didn't have the software to download it. The Gutenberg printing press was developed five hundred years ago. So in another year or less the number of items in the searches will be roughly the same. I predict the NY Times will soon have a bestseller ebook list, could this be possible. Yes there will be a list but not in the NY Times, to staid in their ways. For fun check "The Gutenberg Project."

Real writers write with pen and paper

Hemmingway never used MS Word. He is what a lot of writers would call a man's man. He used pencil and paper, wrote in notebooks and tablets. He also lived all over the world, but mostly in Europe and America. He spent a lot of time as a young man at his family retreat on Walloon Lake in Michigan. In his book "For Whom the Bell Tolls" he uses the quote from John Donne, 'no man is an island he is part of the whole.......'Donne wrote that in 1624 it's worth looking up. In 2010 we also are not alone, we depend on others as others depend on us. Any mans death deminishes me.

The New Book

I finally submitted my book, "The Man in the Moon" to smashwords.com. They do ebook publishing, so the book can be downloaded to a number of different electronic readers. It's a novella, that means it is around 25000 words. It's a very surreal feeling. Each morning I check email to see if there are any sales.

What a pleasant feeling to see that sales number grow. Marketing is a huge. Since I'm an unknown in this world I need to try to spread the word myself. So my plan is to rely on friends and they let their friends know, etc. So time will tell. Meanwhile I have begun a follow-up book.