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Bob Clouston
Author platform,                             audience,                                             social media,                                                                     engagement,                                                                                            reach,                                                                                                       conversions,                                                    …

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Authors' Chat, Writers, Readers & Self Publishing

Cover Crush: Sorrel and Myriana by Evelyn Sun

Bob Clouston
I am not a cover designer but I can agree that cover layouts play an important role in the overall presentation of books and I must admit, often times I first judge a book by its cover B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree Synopsis Pain begets insanity. Insanity begets love. Love begets pain. It is 1932, and the City of Dalltop is teeming with corruption. In the dead of night, a woman cries for help, but none turn an ear to her pleas. She scuttles through the lost buildings under their leaky roofs for shelter, but they always come. They dress as dark as the night and hide in the shadows. She pierces her feet in mileage and tears her clothes in desperation, but they always find her. Myriana was a rich young lady with no ambitions, no voice of her own that is until she became the wife of the handsome tycoon, Sorrel Borchardt. She soon learns that nothing is as it superficially appears. The streets that shine during the day actually stand upon the rotten foundations of a mafia organization known as Idon. What hand does Sorrel Borchardt have in Idon? Will Myriana learn to adapt to her new violent lifestyle…

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History in the Making by Susan Hughes

Bob Clouston
How I wove in the history to my story and what I chose to include: My novel, A Kiss from France, is set during the latter part of WWI and into the first year of the peace (1917-1919). I didn’t want to write about the trench experience because that was primarily a male perspective. I was more interested in the women left at home because their history is a dynamic one: they didn’t sit still and wait for the war to end, instead they also became active participants in the war effort by taking over the absent men’s jobs and keeping the country going. At the time my story is set the British people were war-weary and weighed down with grief and loss, so I explored this through the character of Eunice Wilson. Amidst all of this sorrow, women began to embrace new-found roles and enjoy greater independence. With this change, came opportunities for self-fulfillment, but also to go off the rails because did it matter what you did one day if you might be dead the next? This attitude promised potential for multi-layered complications and the character of Lizzie Fenwick embodies this. During my research into WWI, I discovered…

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A Writer’s Life With Award Winning Author Noel Coughlan

Bob Clouston
We would like to welcome Award Winning Author Noel Coughlan to indieBRAG today. He is here to talk with us about his writing. Noel lives in western Ireland with his wife and daughter. From a young age, he was always writing a book. Generally, the first page over and over. Sometimes, he even reached the second page before he had shredded the entire copy book.  In his teenage years, He wrote some poetry, some of which would make a Vogon blush.  When he was fourteen, he had a dream. It was of a world where the inhabitants believed that each hue of light was a separate god, and that matter was simply another form of light. He writes stories in this so-called Photocosm and also other fantasy and science fiction. When writing, what makes you feel happiest? The thing I most enjoy is when the characters write their own story. Aside from saving me a load of work, I get to sit back and savour what’s happening like a reader. There’s been a couple of times in my books when I had two possible outcomes for particular scenes and I didn’t know which one to take until the words appeared…

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History In The Making With Gloria Zachgo

Bob Clouston
We would like to welcome Award winning Author Gloria Zachgo today to talk with us about some of the history in her story. Never Waste Tears takes you on a journey with Rebecca, Nathan, Hannah, Carl, and Sarah to homestead on the lonely Kansas prairie, where they pave the way for generations to come. They individually share their dreams, challenges, heartaches, and guilt. Each had their own reason to leave everything they knew. The land was free—the true price—often high, where opportunities and tragedies were in equal abundance. Those who were strong, didn’t waste their tears, but used them wisely to help wash away their grief. Gloria, why is Historical Fiction important to you?  Near the farm where I grew up, my sister and I found the scarce remains of a fire pit in a neighbor’s pasture. I was told it had been part of a dugout that our ancestors had lived in when they first settled in the area. Why would they have tried to farmstead on a rocky hill? Did their wagon break down and the woman said she’d go no farther? Was it the last of the free land that the government gave away? Or did a member…

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How to Use a Free Short Story to Entice New Readers

Bob Clouston
Stephanie: I love the idea of authors offering a short story for free when people sign up for their mailing list. That is a great marketing strategy and as a reader myself, it really helps me to decide if the author’s work is something I want to invest my time and money in.  Deborah Swift -B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree does this and I have asked her here today to talk with us about that and she gives a list of benefits in doing so…Thank you, Deborah. Please share your experience. I write under two separate personas – Davina Blake who writes WW2 fiction, and Deborah Swift who is currently writing a big book set in the 17th century. My husband says Davina Blake is not as grouchy as Deborah Swift! Just before Christmas, longing for a breather from my long novel, I decided to swap personas and leave the Deborah Swift book (then 300 pages long) and write something shorter. Feeling a bit Christmassy, I had an idea for a short story with a winter theme, and hit upon the idea of making it a free gift to my Newsletter subscribers, and any other readers or bloggers I’d come into contact…

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Books and Me by Steven McKay

Bob Clouston
I’ve always loved books, for as long as I can remember. My mum was a teacher so I suppose she felt obliged to make sure I could read well so she’d take me to get books from the library all the time. I have vivid memories of borrowing one with a little clock that you could move the hands on. I must have been about three or four-years-old but it’s still in my mind and must have helped spark my love of books. When I was old enough I would go along to the library myself and get out things like the Hardy Boys, Asterix and anything I could find about ghosts or the supernatural. I enjoyed writing little things myself eventually – silly short stories that made no sense and infuriated my English teacher who clearly recognised I had some skill but only wanted to waste it by writing nonsense to entertain my adolescent friends. Sadly, adolescence passed and I grew up into a sensible man who wanted to write things a little more serious and my grandma would always say to me, “Hurry up and write a book. I want to see your book in the library.” She…

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A Victorian San Francisco Christmas

Bob Clouston
By M. Louisa Locke-Award Winning Author   Because the most recent book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, Pilfered Promises, is set during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 1880, I spent a good deal of time researching how residents of that city were celebrating the holidays that year, including looking for articles in the San Francisco Chronicle. What I found was that many of the traditions that we are familiar with today started in the Nineteenth century…including the importance of advertising special holiday sales! “The Arcade: We are offering this week SPECIAL and EXTRAORDINARY INDUCEMENTS to buyers of HOLIDAY PRESENTS, especially in our SILK DEPARTMENT” ––San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1880 However, these traditions were actually relatively new. Before the mid-1880s, most native-born Americans, particularly Protestants from the Northeast, saw Thanksgiving and not Christmas as the key national holiday. In fact, throughout the 1800s, a number of Protestant denominations were very resistant to the celebration of the birth of Christ in any fashion beyond religious observances. Not surprisingly, it was the Southern state of Louisiana, where there was a significant Catholic population, that first declared December 25th a holiday (in 1837), and Christmas wasn’t declared a national legal…

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My Bookish Life by indieBRAG Reader Tracy

Bob Clouston
I’m a bookaholic.  I love to read books, shop for books and collect books. I love the feel of a book, the smell of a book, and the weight of a book. I’m a full-fledged addict and I’m not seeking a cure…ever! Luckily I grew up in a household where books littered the floors, bedside tables and crammed homemade bookshelves crafted by my dad. My mom loved mysteries, my dad books on the civil war. We were library regulars, and my mom subscribed to the Book of the Month Club, and Readers Digest Condensed Books.  Gifts of books were a regular part of my childhood. I loved Golden Books, fairy tales, Dr. Seuss and Dare Wright’s Lonely Doll series.  When I started reading instead of just being read to, I loved Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. In high school my pleasure reading turned to non-fiction and biography. My taste ran the gamut from English and U.S. History to movie star tell-alls and Presidential bios. I loved it all! During my teens I started a collection of “smelly” books. My collection isn’t really smelly, okay maybe a bit aromatic, but it is filled with old and captivating books that have…

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Comics Are Books Too!

Geri Clouston
  When I was a child, I saved all my money to buy comic books!  Not just any comic books but the ones called Classics Illustrated and Classics Illustrated Junior.  The former were condensed, comic book versions of some of the greatest books ever written, and the latter were the greatest of fairy tales.  At one time, I owned them all and I am so fortunate that one of my sons, a serious comic book collector, has preserved those of these treasures that survived my growing up and many household moves over the years.  I credit these comic books for my love of books today. I was only about 5 years old when I began collecting the fairy tales—some well-known—and others just as wonderful but lesser known like The Penny Prince, The Wild Swans and Silly Hans.  When I was in grade school, I moved up to the Classics. Can you imagine a second grader reading The Last of the Mohicans?  In comic book form they were readable for a young child and I loved them.  I later made it a goal to read the entire book version of each of these classics. We all know the benefits of reading…

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