Amazon book reviews. What a mess. While Amazon tried to clean up book reviews a couple of years ago, it would seem that they have failed miserably in ridding their site of paid Amazon book reviews. Over the last couple of months, I have been followed on Twitter by a bundle of users offering ‘verified’ paid…
I love being an English teacher. For those readers who may not know, I actually do something other than ramble on about things that annoy me and scribble out books and poetry. In fact, my principal activity is as an English teacher. Not your Shakespeare and Keats English Lit teacher, but an English teacher of ESOL. That…
What do you know about self-publishing? Self-publishing has come in for its fair share of bashing over the last year or so by those who seem to either fear it, misunderstand it, or simply have their selfish grievances about new writers playing in their sandpit. Most of the articles and posts I have read that…
I hate passwords with a passion. Hardly a day goes by when I do not get a message from a website, social media site or financial site, asking me to change my password. Usually, this is in response to a security failure from the particular website, as it probably was today when Facebook advised me…
The publishing world is full of hypocrites I rarely get upset and resist using my blog as a soap box, but hypocrites, charlatans and snobs do sometimes just become too much to swallow. It is an unfortunate fact that there are those riding on the wave of the success of self-publishing by boldly calling themselves publishers,…
The big problem with social media is that it’s a snowball. Once it starts rolling for you, there is simply no way of stopping it increasing. If you have a book you want to promote, social media is naturally the most logical starting point and with the success of ebooks, it’s a no brainer. However,…
