Amazon Giveaway is Retiring. Now What?

Hmmm.

chrismcmullen

Image from Shutterstock

NO MORE AMAZON GIVEAWAYS

October 10, 2019 will be the last day that you can run an Amazon Giveaway. (To do so, visit the product page for any eligible item at Amazon.com.)

October 17, 2019 will be the last day to enter Amazon Giveaways as a customer. Until then, you can find Amazon Giveaways here:

https://www.amazon.com/ga/giveaways

What will you do after that?

Authors can still create contests for free books through Goodreads Giveaways.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway

I currently have a Goodreads Giveaway for my new Fun with Roman Numerals math workbook. You can enter my giveaway until October 7, 2019:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48192781-fun-with-roman-numerals-math-workbook

Pros:

• Goodreads is a popular site for readers.
• Giveaways generate interest, and almost all entrants add your book to their To-Read lists, which adds activity to your book’s Goodreads page.
• The price per-book for a Kindle eBook giveaway is pretty reasonable if you choose to give away 100…

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18 Calls for Submissions in October 2019 – Paying markets – by Erica Verrillo…

October. 🙂

Teachers Are More Stressed Out Than You Probably Think

gadflyonthewallblog

When I was just a new teacher, I remember my doctor asking me if I had a high stress job.

I said that I taught middle school, as if that answered his question. But he took it to mean that I had it easy. After all – as he put it – I just played with children all day.

Now after 16 years in the classroom and a series of chronic medical conditions including heart disease, Crohn’s Disease and a recent battle with shingles though I’m only in my 40s, he knows better.

Teaching is one of the most stressful jobs you can have.

You don’t put your life on the line in the same way the police or a soldier does. You don’t risk having a finger chopped off like someone working in a machine shop. You don’t even have to worry like a truck driver about falling…

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Things You Shouldn’t Say In A Query Letter

M.L. Davis Writer

Query letter writing isn’t easy. Last week on the blog I spoke about some of the things you should include in a query letter. So today, I thought it’d be neat to write about some of the things you shouldn’t include in a query letter.

Remember, the letter should be a product of your own, and different things will suit different writers and different agents and different stories. But this is some general advice I’ve learned at writing events and through agent interviews and articles.

Dear Sir/Madam…
Really? This will be the biggest query letter mistake you ever make. Sending out several queries at one time? That’s okay. Sending out the exact same query to a number of agencies/publishers? Not okay. You need to know who you’re writing to, and if your query is not addressed personally, by name, to that person, you will put them off at once…

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11 Haitian Women to Celebrate During Hispanic Heritage Month

Repeating Islands

In “Herstory” (Remezcla) France François writes about eleven Haitian women to celebrate during Hispanic Heritage Month—a great reminder! Read the full article at Remezcla to read about Adbaraya Toya (or Victoria Montou, originally from Dahomey), Cécile Fatiman, Suzanne Sanité Belair, Alice Garoute, Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel, Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Catherine Flon, Edwidge Danticat, Marleine Bastien, and the women protestors involved in the PetroCaribe Challenge.

Without the Haitian Revolution, there would be no Latin America today. Although Haiti was central to the creation of Latin American states, the fight for abolition of slavery and regional liberty from colonial oppression, few of those who consider themselves Latinx today know the role Haiti played in helping them overthrow the chains of Spanish oppression.

Haitians liberated Dominicans from slavery in 1801 and again in 1822 to unite the island and form the only free Black republic and a haven for runaways from across the region…

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26 Magazines Accepting Sci-Fi/Fantasy Submissions

Melissa Rose Rogers, Author

Dear Writers,
If you’re in the quest for publication, like I am, then knowing where to submit your short stories may be daunting.

Many of the periodicals listed by the SFWA are closed to submissions for the foreseeable future, and many of the smaller non-qualifying markets I saw on other guides were also closed (some permanently and others temporarily).

To share my efforts with you, here are 26 magazines accepting submissions as of September 2019 or in the near future, with notes about them – especially response time.

Since so many markets for short fiction don’t allow simultaneous submissions, response time can be important to me for prioritizing whom I should query next.
If you have a different approach for prioritizing, please let me know. I’d love to hear it.

I’ve broken this into three groups:

– SFWA Qualifying Markets
– Qualifying Rates but Not Approved SFWA Venues
– Non-SFWA…

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A School Massacre and Toxic Heroism

Based on my first reading of this post the following is one of my favorite parts: “And I want to emphasize here again that this is not about pathologizing individuals. This is not about anyone’s personal mental health. This is a cultural problem of dysfunction and social organization that has neither simple explanation nor simple solution. We need to change the stories we tell about ourselves and each other; we need to educate our community from birth about how our minds work and how narratives can condition us; we need to break the restriction of narrative identities and lives lived imposed by biological gender, sex identity, and physical ability; we need to think about whether or not our social organization allows people to live with meaning and a sense of belonging. “

SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE

The Story and School Massacres

“For, that which is instilled into young minds will set deep roots, and will not easily be removed by any force afterward.”

Nam quod teneris mentibus insitum est, alte radices mittit, nec facile postea divelli ulla vi potest

Vergerio, de ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adulescentiae studiis, XLIX

A few years ago, Amy Pistone emailed me during the aftermath of yet another mass shooting to ask if I knew of anything in ancient Greek literature to respond to this all-too-frequent terror. I threw together a collection of passages which didn’t really get to the heart of the issue: the absolute horror of people suddenly killing scores of others, compounded by the practically criminal failure of our public officials to respond with anything more than stock phrases and empty gestures. 

I have spent a lot of my life jousting with depression, death anxiety, and the ups…

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The Perverted Character: An Anime/Manga Staple?

One of my favorite manga/anime series was Ranma 1/2 saturated with misunderstandings, gender-bender hilarity, ridiculous martial arts/dancing duals with a poor hero, Ranma Saotome, smack-dab in the center of it. Why? Because he was cursed after falling into the “Spring of Drowned Girl” and every time he is splashed with cold water he transforms into a girl (temporarily). The world of Ranma 1/2 is filled with pseudo-perverts (misunderstandings) and actual perverts who get the taste dragon punched out of their mouths.

Legends of Windemere

Master Roshi (Dragonball); Meliodas (Seven Deadly Sins); Jiraiya (Naruto); Sanji (One Piece)

This is a topic that I’ve been tempted to do for a long time, but I was never sure how it would go over.  Wednesday’s ‘7 Tips’ post is probably going to be worse.  Yet, I’ve been wondering a lot about this archetype after finishing ‘Naruto’, continuing ‘One Piece’, starting ‘Inuyasha’, and talking about ‘Dragonball’.  You’ll notice that all of these are animes and mangas.  To be honest, I can’t think of an American show or movie with a perverted character who isn’t a villain.  So, why is that?

Much of it has to do with cultural taboos.  I think.  Here’s the problem.  I tried to look all of this up and found essay after essay on the topic.  Half of them explained that Japanese culture is more open to nakedness and male desire (not female desire), so…

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Deep POV: What IS It & Why Do Readers LOVE It So Much? – by Kristen Lamb…

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

Deep POV. Deep, man. So…um what is it? Maybe you’re bee-bopping along on the inter-webs, clicking on blogs, checking out writing resources when you see the term ‘Deep POV’ drift across your tweet deck.

Or perhaps you’re at a writing conference looking all intellectual and stuff, and in the conversations this phrase Deep POV keeps floating past. Deep POV. Deep POV. You keep hearing it, seeing it…

And, if you are anything like me, you don’t want to look like an idiot so you don’t ask that question burning inside you.

Um, what the heck is Deep POV?

Continue reading HERE

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How a book deal works

Phoebe Morgan

So I ran a Twitter poll the other day asking people what topic would be the most useful for me to write about, as I really want to try to make this little blog as useful as possible. When I was trying to get published, I spent HOURS trawling the internet for information about the publishing process (before I was working in it as closely as I am now) and so any light I can now shed on things for other people is hopefully a good thing. Anyway, the majority of people chose ‘how a book deal works’ as something they’d love to hear more about, so here goes…(maybe grab a tea, this is quite long!)

A book deal is, in itself, a contract between you (the writer) and the publishing house (the publisher). It is legally binding, and it ties both you and your publisher into a deal which…

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