New Gold City

I've written about book bloggers in the past. I recently had an op-ed piece published at TalkingWriting.com that brought bloggers up as the solution to fake and paid reviews on Amazon. You can read that piece, "Can You Trust Online Reviews?" here . It's a prelude to the column I will be writing for TalkingWriting.com called "Talking Indie." Watch for the column's first entry in November.  Today, though, I wanted to point folks towards one of the more creative and exuberant book blogger sites you'll ever find, CabinGoddess.com. Kristine Morton, aka Cabin Goddess, is truly remarkable. You need to bookmark her site and read her reviews. Also, her bacon porn references are downright oral.  Kriss just posted a little conversation I had with Janie Hawthorn (who happens to appear in the title story of my new, soon to be released collection, Implosions of America ) in the middle of the country about the meaning of Beyond the Will of God (which she is also a...

This is a draft of the cover for Implosions of America prepared for a review copy I'm sending out to short story bloggers for the title story. I will continue working on this for another 10-days or so, then move to press -- both digital and paperback to proof the whole book. I know what I want by way of a cover photo. I've written the photographer to ask his permission. He does great work. Keeping my fingers crossed. Here's the list of story titles.  Drink, Smoke, Search Choices So Beautiful Implosions of America African Violets A Civil Marriage Everyone Always Wants to Do the Cooking The Exact Black of Night Stripers

Read "Stripers" from Implosions in America The story "CHOICES" was posted here from September 14 - 17. It is from the collection Implosions of America: Lessons in Love, Loss, and Confusion. You can read the first third of it at the Work in Progress page on my main website, davidbiddle.net "Choices" is one of several stories in the collection, Implosions of America , that addresses love, romance, and marriage in a non-genre fashion. Romance novels are usually about how people fall in love. But they should also be about how people stay in love, and how they lose that love, how sad they become, but also how much they want love to work. Is there anything more important in life than keeping love going? And what is it that lets some of us continue to love even after our partnerships break down and our hearts break apart? There's a lot more to Implosions of America than mature love. Stay tuned. You will be able to buy the book in digital or paper form soon ...

"Morning of the Magicians" Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shitao/3197160727/in/set-72157625031441773 From about 1993 through 2000 I worked as best I could on my first novel. I am deeply indebted to nearly 20 friends and colleagues who read various drafts over that period. From 2000 through 2005 I tried to get agents and publishers to pay attention to my insane story -- best described as a psychedelic mystery about music and consciousness. I came close a couple times, but no one took me on. After over 100 rejection letters and cards I packed it in and tried to focus on my day job (environmental consulting). I wrote my friend Paula Silici, "That's it. I'm done. No more writing. What a waste of time. How could I have done that to myself?" I went on with my life. My mom died in 2007. My oldest son graduated from college in 2010, the same year my second oldest son was a first round draft pick by the Philadelphia Phillies out of high school.  And Steve Jobs ...

Source: Shitao, "Don't ever let go of my hand......." Last week I reported that I was doing an experiment on the Kindle Direct Publishing promo system. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't use the multi-pronged marketing apparatus that's set up around KDP free books. See the blog entry for that HERE . The results are in and not so happy. Over a two day period, Saturday and Sunday, I received 230 downloads of my novel, Beyond the Will of God . Two weeks earlier, I'd pushed on the marketing apparatus hard and received over 10,000 downloads in three days.  This was not a controlled experiment. The biggest wild card in it is that the poor showing last weekend may have been because those fishing for free books were saturated from my offering just two weeks earlier. If that's so, it makes me doubly wonder about readers in search of freebies. Maybe it's a smaller group than we realize. Or maybe they don't use Amazon's standard Kindle Free lis...