There was a time when avid readers were frequent customers of small, neighborhood bookstores – these were the places where books lived and could be bought. Then the big chain bookstores: B Dalton, Crown, Borders, and Barnes & Noble shoved the small shops out of existence. The book buyer’s expectations changed as the venue changed.
Barnes & Noble and Amazon have been duking it out for control of the print book market for some time. Then, about three years ago, eReaders came on the scene and the venue changed again. Continue reading “Turning the Tables on Bookstores”
One of the best business management tools you can learn to use is a budget. Oh, I know; “budget” ranks right up there with IRS, death benefit, hemorrhoids and goiter as words we want to avoid associating with. But, this word does not have to be something vile and filthy. You don’t need to wash your hands after writing it. It can, in fact, be an excellent tool for helping you improve your peace of mind and your quality of life.
Bethany Lopez was born in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in Michigan and San Antonio, Texas. She went to High School at Dearborn High, in Dearborn, Michigan, which is where she has set her Young Adult novel. She is married and has a blended family with five children. She is currently serving in the United States Air Force as a Recruiter in Los Angeles, California. She has always loved to read and write and has seen her dream realized by independently publishing her first novel through Amazon with CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing. Ta Ta for Now! is also now available through Smashwords at Barnes and Noble.com, on the Nook and the Sony eReader. Her second novella in the series, xoxoxo, will be release on March 2, 2012.
I’ve never cared much for all the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) machinations that many of the top bloggers say everyone must do to become really popular. So I’m not going to talk about those. There are some basic things that we should all do to grab a reasonable amount of search engine spider attention. And if you want a really quick way to learn to improve your blogs SEO – and if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog – snag the WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in and install it. If you have a WordPress.com blog, it appears you can not use plugins at all.
In this article I’m not going to try to tell you how to build up your creative muscle, I’m going to do an analytical breakdown of the creative process I went through to write my last blog post. I’ll preface it by saying that this is not the process I use all the time: sometimes an article just springs into my mind, fully written, my only task is to record it before the words fade from my mind. Often these Inspired Writings occur at the most inopportune times: like 3:00 am. If I am able to ignore the call and go back to sleep I’ll remember that I had a wonderful idea, but won’t remember anything more about it. Opportunity lost! 
Please pop over and read 
He sat staring at the small semi-automatic pistol laying on the kitchen table. He had been staring at it for a long time. Thinking. Deciding. He knew what needed to be done. The pain had to stop. Her pain had to stop. He hated what was happening to her, but he was powerless to prevent it.
Recently I’ve been asked by several author/bloggers to submit a guest post about creativity. At first I balked because when it come to creativity I feel like a gnu among gazelles. I “hang out” with a lot of novelists but I am a non-fiction writer. I’ve tried writing novels – three of them – they all made the rounds of agents without a nibble. I write well, so I assumed I’m just not creative enough.
In a recent post,