Photo from iStock Photo

I had an interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago with a friend about whether or not you should consider paying for book reviews. She wanted to, she's an indie author trying to make book sales, but is having a hard time getting reviews because so many of the review places are glutted. There are a number of companies out there now that are charging authors in exchange for a review. Authors can pay for a review for as little as $5 per review and as much as nearly $500 for a review. Honestly, I was stunned because more and more of these types of services are being offered now  and I had to ask myself, "Would I pay for a book review?" Honestly, I would never pay for a book review. I have several issues with this and while I know it can be more difficult to get reviews right now since there are so many new authors, I still would be more likely to hit up book bloggers, and free review websites than I would to pay for a review.

My biggest concern is that I don't feel like a pay for book reviews place would give me an honest review. Personally, I'd rather have an honest review even if the review wasn't saying my book was fantastic. Another issue is when you pay for a review you can never be certain that the reviewer actually read the entire book, after all the more books they read and review the more they'll be paid.While most of these companies claim to give an honest review, if their reviewers started writing reviews such that they didn't like certain books, it would be bad for the pay for review company's business. So you most likely would always get a good review. While this might seem cool to some authors, personally I'm of the mind that if a book has nothing but 5 star reviews then there's something wrong. This isn't to suggest that there aren't books out that are just that darned good, because there are, but rather that even those kinds of books have detractors. There is always going to be someone who doesn't like your book, always. And in most cases there will always be someone who is not afraid to write a review that is less than stellar. So the point I'm making is that books that only have 5 star reviews? I tend to think at least some of those reviews has been paid for. As an author I do not want other readers or even other authors thinking that so I'll take my free honest reviews any day over a paid for review.

Don't believe me or don't think there's anything wrong with paid for reviews? Check out this article, it might change your mind!

This is just my opinion of course but feel free to chime in if you have a different thought or even if you agree. I'd b interested in hearing what other authors and readers think about this!

Photo from Morguefile

I was thinking about this today and wondering which excerpt I should put up, and I decided on Alien Dreams, one of my upcoming new releases! Enjoy!










Denara crouched behind a crate waiting for Lamdarak to return to the cargo hold; he always seemed to know when she was there. She had never been brave enough to go to the bridge, worried that someone else might sense her presence. She’d been leaving her body during sleep and traveling to the starship since the first time she’d accidentally come here when she was fifteen. That was ten years ago, and now she traveled here as often as she could, simply by thinking that she wanted to.


Suddenly Denara heard heavy boots slapping metal and knew that Lamdarak had sensed her presence and come to see her.


“You can come out now, Denara. I am here.” He called, his voice heavily accented. How he had managed to learn English she had no idea. Especially considering she didn’t think he even knew where her planet was.


Denara took a quick sniff of the air to be sure she only smelled Lamdarak. Once a crewmember had followed him and she had nearly been discovered by another. When she could only smell his heavy earthy scent, she stood and came out from behind the cargo crate that was being held by a force beam to keep it from moving around the cargo hold.


She took in the sight of the man she had loved for ten years. He was six and half feet of lavender skinned muscle with long hair that was a much darker shade of purple. His eyes had square rather than round pupils and were an enchanting color that she thought of as opal because the milky color with the flashing colored sparkles reminded her of the stone. Even stranger was the long tale covered with a short coat of fur, and ending in a thicker tuft the same color as the hair that nearly reached his hips.


She loved everything about him, his look, his eyes, his trim hips and long muscled body, but while he had always been very affectionate with her, he had never shown any sexual interest. This made her sad, but she respected him too much to push for something that he might not be capable of.


“Hi, Lamdarak. I missed you!” She called, running and then jumping towards him, knowing he would always catch her.


As was normal he shoved his face into her hair taking deep breaths, scenting her as he had always done. Denara had learned early on that his people’s sense of smell was much more developed than her own.


“Mmmmm…I’m sorry it was so long before I came again, but I had friends visiting from out of state and you know I talk in my sleep.” She rolled her eyes. “ I didn’t want them to hear me.” She said, pulling back from him.


(c) Copyright 2008-2014 by Regina Paul. All Rights Reserved.

Photo from Morguefile.

One of the hardest things to do when you're an author in my opinion is finding the balance between your writing, editing and publishing and your day job and just everything else that life throws at you. It's something that I've been working on for years and this last year I've been failing pretty miserably in most cases. I do quite a bit of freelance work on top of my day job and so my writing has taken a back seat to everything else in my life. Throw in a lot of overtime with my job at the hospital and you can guess how frustrating that can be at times.

Initially I thought if I set a schedule for myself with this blog that I'd be able to keep it, but as usually happens, my day job, my home life and my freelance work got in the way. While I was able to keep it for a few weeks, continuing became difficult when the time just wasn't there. And there's another thing, this thing called time and how we use it. Why is it that we always think we don't have enough time. The truth is I think at least for me is that I don't manage my time well. In fact, I'm lousy at it, and I'll be the first to admit it. So that's one part of me finding balance as an author that I've been working on.

The main thing with time is that I'm finding I have to work on training myself to focus on what I'm doing this moment. For example, in this moment I'm writing this article. So, the trick is whenever my mind wanders to what I'm going to make for dinner tonight, what I have to get at the store, the statements I need to print out so I can pay my school loan payment, and when I'm going to do my taxes that I work on gently bringing my mind back to the task at hand which is writing this article. We get so caught up in what's coming up or what has happened ie we got a bad review for example that we don't focus on the present. My Native American ancestors were actually really good at focusing on the present tasks and I think it's an important part of finding balance to adopt this habit. It's not easy by any means, but it does work when you continue to employ it. I also find I get much more done when I focus on the task at hand. We've become such a society of multi-taskers that it's not any wonder that we feel so frantic all the time. We rarely give our brains a break to just think about one thing at a time.

Since I've begun doing this paying attention to what I'm doing in the moment I mean, I've actually begun writing again. Wonder of wonders, with just this little tip to help me find some balance in my author life, I've begun writing again. Imagine that!

Photo from Stock Xchng

One of the things that really drives me nuts as an author is having so much to do, writing, blogging, editing, and promoting that I get overwhelmed and just want to throw up my hands. I actually love doing all of the above, but figuring out when to do each of these things can be difficult. Even when I work hard to find the time, I often have problems staying on top of all my author duties. So, what does an author do when they have too much author stuff to do and not enough time?

Most of the time we actually have the time, it's just that we don't utilize the time we have in an effective manner. Here are five tips for utilizing your time so you can stay on top of your author duties.

1. Make a list of all your author tasks, both writing and non-writing such as promotion although that can also involve writing such as my article here.

2. Make a list of everything you do each day. This will help you to figure out where you have true free time. Spend an hour each day surfing the internet? Maybe you could spend a half hour and write 1000 words instead. You get the idea.

3. Figure out how much time an author task will take. For longer tasks break these into steps so you can fit steps into smaller free time slots, and break up your tasks so they still get completed but you're not trying to do too much in a smaller time slot.

4. Once you've made your list of what you do each day and you've figured out where you can carve free time out, then look at your list of author tasks again. Test it out, choose a few tasks for the week and then plug them into your free time slots on a calendar. In other words make a schedule. How you do this is up to you, but there are tons of free online scheduling and calendar options.

5. Make sure that you don't schedule too much author task to fit the free time slot you've allotted to it. Don't be afraid to break down tasks into steps that way you can schedule two steps or three steps into a smaller allotted time slot for example and then the final steps in another free time slot.

6. Finally, don't throw out your fun to do tasks. You should always schedule fun activities into your schedule as well. If all you're doing is working then this makes authors very dull indeed. Make time to play too!

I hope these time management tips help you as much as they've helped me. I find I write more and I do more promotion when I go about it this way, rather than hit or miss.

Photo from RGB Stock

I thought I'd share a piece of a series I started about six months ago. I haven't done much with this since I'm still working on Heart of a Jumper my M/M/M/M romance, but this is something that I can easily work on in between since it will be shorter than a novel and come in chunks. This is my first attempt at a series.

Photo from Morgue File

As an author, I know one of the most important things I need to do is build my brand. Building your author brand is how you get both yourself and your books well known enough that people recognize both. This isn't always an easy thing when you're a little known author in a sea of self-published and small e-pub published authors. But it's not impossible. Here are five tips for helping to build your author brand:

1. Use your name, not your book title. Many authors try to build their brand by using their book title rather than their name. The problem with this is that once you write your next book, then you're stuck with a website domain with the old title and people have no idea who you are. You end up having to re-build your brand based on your name all over again.

2. Blog, blog and blog some more! Blogs are a great way to build your brand. If you blog often enough, even twice a week is fine, then you'll get a following over time and people will remember your name, and hopefully your books!

3. Buy a domain. I can't stress this one enough. Domains are cheap, like $12.95 for a year. It's worth it and will help to build your brand. Oh, and make sure you use the name you write under, whether that's your real name or a pseudonym.

4. Attend online chats and get interviewed on online radio shows. Again, these help to build your brand. Even if you're not the sort to want to be in the spotlight, both of these are easy and you can do them from the comfort of your home. The more people hear about you, your books and your name the better.

5. Participate in Blog Hops and Blog Tours. Blog Hops and Blog Tours are another great way to build your brand, and they bring more new readers to your books. Blog Hops in particular since they are done with other authors will bring both your own readers and all the other author's readers as well, so they are a great way to maximize getting your name out there. Blog Tours bring in the regular readers of particular blogs who might not have otherwise seen you or your books. Both are a great way to build your brand and sell your books!

Remember it's all about the name. Whatever name you write under is the brand you want to build, so be sure and get your name out there wherever and whenever you can!

Winter Wonderland from RGB stock

NaNo for those who don't know is National Novel Writing Month and November is the month where many authors including myself try to finish a novel in you guessed it, a month. I've gotten close, but I've never quite finished a novel in a month using NaNo. I love the idea of it, but staying on task when you have a day job with a lot of overtime during the holiday season makes it tough. I work in a busy hospital OR during the day and October through February tends to be our busiest time of year since most people have satisfied their deductible by this time and are trying to get any necessary surgeries out of the way before they have to start from ground zero deductible wise.

A few things that I've found to be helpful in staying on task with NaNo are the following:

1. Get up a little earlier in the morning and write 1000+ words. Or I write when I have breaks. I don't try and have great swaths of writing time. For one thing it's not realistic and for another I hate it when I have hours and hours to write and then I can't write. I do better with short bursts of writing.

2. Play some kind music softly in the background, preferably without words. Listening to music with words I understand just takes my attention away from my writing so I tend to either listen to music without words, or if it does have words, words I don't understand. That way my attention doesn't easily become focused elsewhere.

3. Just write. I don't go back and read or edit anything I've written previously. This is hard especially if you can't remember precisely where you left off. In that case, I might read a few of the previous paragraphs just to get me started, but no more.

4. I make sure I get plenty of rest. One of the things that will easily kill my ability to write effectively is not getting enough rest. I can do it once, but if it becomes consistent I make a lot more mistakes and man do my stories take weird turns when I'm sleep deprived. When I'm tired they go places I never would have taken them!

So, there you have it. What I do to stay on task during NaNo.

          

Photo from Morguefile

Photo from Morguefile

One of the things I've been playing around with is how to get the word out about this and other blogs that I write for. While it's easy to write the occasional post and hope someone visits, it's not enough to just Ping your blog and hope they come. So one of the things I've been toying with is how to use my RSS feed more effectively. In case you don't know what an RSS or Atom Feed is, it's simply a website address with a listing of all the most current posts on your blog.

Your RSS feed can be one of your most effective tools when it comes to getting the word out about your blog and your books. The easiest way to get the most out of your RSS feed is to tie it into your social media sites. Thanks to sites like Twitter Feed and Hootsuite this has become much easier. Although I find Twitter Feed to be the best tool to use to tie my RSS feed into my Twitter and FB accounts. RSS feeds with Hootsuite are a little more complicated and I've about given up on this tool for posting from my RSS feeds.

So, if you want to take the pain out of posting manually to your Twitter and FB pages sign up for a Twitter Feed account and set it up to automatically post to your social media anytime you post to your blog!