Does anyone have a recommendation for a person to design/overhaul a web page using WordPress for a reasonable sum? Must be able to put together a professional-looking site.

Libbie Hawker, who posts here as ElHawk, has a great new writing book out that I highly recommend, Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing. I've written a gazillion books by now, and one would think that I've either learned all of the applicable lessons or I'm simply incapable of picking them up. But I definitely snagged some useful tips, and if you're a newer writer, this book is gold. Cheap gold, too! $2.99 as of this post.

Okay, not really, but imagine how awesome it would be to hire this guy to read some of your book reviews, both good and bad.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEdXhH97Z7E" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEdXhH97Z7E</a>

I'm having a strange problem, and KDP support is not responding. The "look inside" feature for several of my books seems to have broken, and shows everything in all italics. These are books that have been for sale for months or even years and the samples and actual books look fine when they are purchased/downloaded. In addition, when I check the .mobi files in both KDP and an offline viewer they looks fine. It is only in that "look inside" feature that they look wrong. Obviously, this makes it look to casual browsers as if there is something wrong with the formatting of the books.

The only thing these books have in common is that they were fairly recently updated with back matter changes and the like. I use Calibre to convert an Open Office file to mobi, but this is not a new procedure for me, either. So why is this happening now?

Here are the books in question. The first one is free, if you want to see what it looks like on your device. Or, you can sample any of them, which seems to have the same result.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0068O8MPC
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wolves-of-Paris-ebook/dp/B00FC7O8UY
www.amazon.com/Free-Kingdoms-book-Citadel-ebook/dp/B0068NDLXQ
www.amazon.com/The-Devils-Deep-ebook/dp/B004K1F0E6
www.amazon.com/dp/B005FCCDO4
http://www.amazon.com/The-Devils-Cauldron-Deep-ebook/dp/B00DWYZMZ4

Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm at wit's end.

I'm reading The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, and it was not what I expected. The first couple of pages were challenging, and it has a curious, often circuitous route to move its plot. But the characters are fascinating, the historical depth (the gold fields of N.Z. in the mid-19th century) is amazing, and it has proven to be an incredibly immersive experience. The deeper into it I get, the better I like it, and I'm generally a very plot driven reader and writer, so I don't have a lot of patience for literary gimmicks.

It's a long book, about 850 pages, and not for people who want a rapid-fire reading experience, but if you enjoy a big, meaty read that will keep you engaged for many evenings, I highly recommend it.

Here is an interesting article about the sheer number of writers, books, etc. The stats at the top don't look entirely reliable, but the article itself has some interesting stuff.

That a novelist is nothing like a small business entrepreneur is rather obvious. For one thing, novelists typically don’t assess the market to see if there’s a demand for their labor of love before they begin production. If anything, the decision to write a novel is driven by a kind of secular faith. The process requires enormous amounts of time, energy, and heartache, with no guaranteed return on investment. Like belief in a higher power, the will to publish a novel ignores all the atheistic arguments and the cold hard numbers. Sure, there are some outliers and windfalls. But would anyone start the small business Novel-in-Progress if they knew that the average book in the U.S. sells less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime? Actually, yes, many of them would.

That every novelist occupies a magical realist mindset is worth considering. Annually, there are laments about the death of the novel or at least the death of the good and interesting and innovative novel. From what I can tell, though, there are a few hundred thousand American novelists who pay no attention to this cultural distress call. How many exactly?

This is stunning. I'm so jealous right now.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W8f4-5Rua8" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W8f4-5Rua8</a>

And part two(!):

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiYacikItoQ" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiYacikItoQ</a>

I'm getting ready to release my new novel, The Wolves of Paris, and am trying to come up with a blurb. I think the book is as strong as anything I've written and am happy with my cover, but the blurb is giving me a headache. What else is new? It reads to me like an interesting book, but I'm wondering if I should just boil it down to something like, "Wolves in 1450 Paris. Lots of bloody action with a side dish of romantic intrigue. Enjoy!"

Also, the book is based on a true event where wolves infiltrated the city walls of Paris during the winter of 1450 and killed roughly 40 people before they were put down by an angry mob on the steps of Notre Dame. Should I include this?

Thoughts?

When Lorenzo Boccaccio travels to Paris with his brother Marco on a trading mission, he discovers the city in a panic from a pack of ravenous wolves that have infiltrated the city walls. Lorenzo is summoned by an uncompromising Dominican inquisitor who claims that their business agent is tied to the sorcery behind the wolf attacks. The inquisitor has already burned two accused witches, gibbeted two men accused of changing into wolves, and now demands that the brothers help him root out the rest of the evil.

Rivals within the family business, and in love with the same woman, the brothers make for a reluctant partnership, but they are confident the wolves are a natural phenomenon, and not men or demons traveling in wolf form. All they must do is track the animals to their daylight hiding place where they will be easily destroyed.

But as Lorenzo and Marco follow the bloody path through the city, they are forced to confront the most frightening possibility of all, that the monks and peasants are right and these are no ordinary wolves. The leader of the pack is none other than the terrifying loup-garou, a shape shifting, demonic creature. And if they don’t defeat him, the city’s filthy alleys will be cleansed with blood.

I don't see this article anywhere here, so if you haven't seen this it's well worth a read.

“I read The Killer Angels. It’s a very detailed, extraordinarily compelling account of the Battle of Gettysburg from the point of view of various people in it and it’s historical. It’s historically completely accurate, and the moment I put it down I created Firefly, because I was like, ‘I need to tell this story. I need to feel this immediacy. I so connect with that era, the Western and how tactile everything is and how every decision is life or death, and how hard it is and how just rich it is, and how all the characters are just so fascinating.’ But so I should be on the Millennium Falcon. Now, if I only watched sci-fi I would have just had the Millennium Falcon part, which has already been done, but finding that historical texture, it literally, I put the book down and started writing Firefly. And that was my vacation from Buffy, which was two weeks. I got two weeks every year, and in that vacation I read, in 14 days, 10 books. My wife and I saw like nine plays, and that’s all we did. We just filled the tanks.

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683167/how-to-be-prolific-guidelines-for-getting-it-done-from-joss-whedon

I spread my business around to various formatters, artists, and the like, but have recently been very happy with the work done for me by Damonza. In addition to providing excellent work, he is responsive, and willing to tweak things as requested. A professional experience, which is very important for me. This is an unsolicited recommendation. Here are the two covers:

David Dalglish just signed six (!) books in his Shadowdance fantasy series to Orbit. I've read the first four and they're great books.

NEW YORK, NY (February 15, 2013) – Today Orbit US & UK announced the international acquisition of the Shadowdance novels – an epic fantasy series by self-publishing success David Dalglish. The author has already digitally published the first four books in the series, all of which have been e-book bestsellers.

Link

A win for indie writers everywhere.

Last night I read a slim volume called "If I Don't Do This, I'll Never Do Anything: The Journal of a Self-Publishing Writer." It was written in the 70s, by a GED instructor named Chuck Herring who self-published his GED study books. From the stamp in the front of the book, it came from the alternative high school where my father used to teach, including night classes for adult ed students. I'm not sure how it traveled with me across the decades and various moves across the country, especially since I used to disdain self publishing and had never read it before. I suppose I couldn't throw away anything writing related.

The journal entries are rather whiny and mopy at first as this guy struggles to finish his novel, gets form rejects from publishers, etc, and picks up in mood as he finds success with his first non-fiction volume. The whole process sounds awful, from typing and retyping manuscripts to get them perfect for publication, to finding printers, to figuring out how to distribute the darn things. So many more tools exist now that allow.

However, there are some things that remain exactly the same, including his correspondence with editors and agents, the attitude of the gatekeepers to what he is doing, and the people who got scammed by the Publish America outfits of the day. There is also this observation from October 16, 1976:

Craziness is writing for 2000 hours and getting a postcard-size form rejection notice two months later in return mail: "Does not meet our current needs. Good luck."

But how can they do anything else? A personal response would add to the overhead. The higher the overhead the more copies a publisher would have to sell to break even on each publication. The more copies needed to reach the break-even point, then the fewer unpublished writers will get published. The fewer the unpublished writers that get published, then the less motivation for people to get excited about writing.

There must be some way to break up this chain.

An answer popped in: A re-birth of self-publishing. Rookie writers need to self-publish. This is the alternative to the craziness of submitting to New York publishers.

Change a word here or there and that could have been written by someone on this board.