This post takes a deep dive into how Amazon’s search engine works. We’ll touch on information-theory concepts, and aim to use as little technical jargon as possible. If it’s all a bit much, skip to the end to read the summary of takeaways to help you choose and optimize keywords for your book. Note: ‘keyword’ […]
Read More How Amazon Search Really WorksWorth considering. By their standards, I’m a slow writer! I first blogged about the plight of slow writers back in 2014, at the height of the indie publishing boom. All the indie superstar gurus were telling writers to grind out ebooks as fast as they could type to take advantage of the “Kindle Gold Rush”. […]
Read More Are Slow Writers Doomed to Fail in the Digital Age?KAMERON HURLEY’S SCIENCE fiction novel The Stars Are Legion almost never saw the inside of a book store. She came up with the idea in 2012, but she and her agent didn’t think anyone would buy it. A “big gory political space opera” wasn’t something flying off the shelves at the time. But two years […]
Read More Space Opera Fiction is Back & Better Than Ever!Here’s a few links to a series of articles about getting horses right in fantasy & historical fiction. But they are somewhat oversimplifications: I also highly recommend the Wikipedia article on coat colour in horses, and following up on the specific articles on coat colours that interest you. Through this, I learned that Lightning, my […]
Read More Writing Horses RightNow this was a resource I just had to share! I may, in the future, repost particular articles that are relevant to something I’m immediately writing, but there’s just too much stuff to post the whole series at once! Science in Sci-Fi, Fact in Fantasy is a blog series for authors and fans of speculative […]
Read More Science in Sci-Fi, Fact in FantasyAmazon is the most powerful online retailer in the world. Although books are just part of their business model, they dominant the literary sector. Around 70% of e-book sales in the United States happen on Amazon.com. Every title in the store has a “Best Sellers Rank” (also called Sales Rank) reflecting how well it’s selling relative to the […]
Read More An Experiment in Amazon Sales Rank“I have a cold mind and a warm heart, whereas most people have cold, troubled hearts and warm, muggy minds, which they mistake for sincere feelings.” ― James Tiptree Jr.
Read More Cold Minds and Warm HeartsScience fiction has a reputation for being a field that has traditionally been entirely dominated by white heterosexual cisgender men, both in terms of its writers and its protagonists. It’s a reputation that the whole field has been working very hard to leave behind. One often wonders (at least, I do,) how it got that […]
Read More One Reason Why Science Fiction Was Traditionally Racist — Maybe
