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 essay appeared in Talking Writing in April. Talking Writing is rapidly becoming a high-quality online source of information for writers and content-providers of all sorts.    By David Biddle for Talking Writing Imagine that a rigidly controlled country  you’ve always longed to visit suddenly undergoes a revolution and opens its borders. Its currency value is ridiculously low, making travel a bargain. Do you snap up airline tickets and book a hotel right away?  Or does the prospect of traveling in a land where laws and concepts of ownership are in flux give you pause? For me, that tantalizing country is The Land of Getting Published, now dominated by a digital publishing frontier. I no longer need an agent or even an editor to get me there (though some copyediting help is always useful). With my self-polished text and a decent cover layout in hand, I can publish my own work in just a few clicks through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Lulu, or any of several dozen oth...