I just ran across Bookazine. Great name, and I think they do something cool – I just can’t really tell what it is.

Their site, which also looks cool at first blush, seems to break every rule of good web design practice. It’s really hard to navigate, all the content seems to be in pdf format(!?), I couldn’t really figure out what they do, and it kept making obnoxious sounds (gunshots, cat meowing, and “Hello, Bookazine!”)

It looks like they started out by exporting magazines to europe, and are a general bookseller now? It’s hard to tell.

Anyway – if you have a few minutes to kill playing with something, and you have already gotten to the “please pay to go further” part of the amazing Windosill game, I guess you could find worse ways to waste a few minutes than playing with Bookazine’s site.

Oh, and I think they sell books too. I think.

Are you a publisher? You know you’re suppose to be using the heck out of facebook, right? Not sure how? Need some inspiration?

The GalleyCat blog has done us a huge favor. They have listed what they consider to be the “Best Publisher Pages on Facebook.”

Stop over there and take a look to see how other publishers (some big, some small) are using facebook to raise awareness of themselves and their books.

Some that look good to me are Invisible Publishing, Murdoch Books, and Peachtree Publishing but the list is so long, these are practically picked at random.

The good ones seem to be using the discussion tab, listing their titles with cover images, posting videos – all the tools. But really, it doesn’t look like it takes that much to get set up well.

Of course the hard part is keeping it up, and attracting fans.

While you are over at facebook, make sure to check out the IndieBookMan facebook page and, what the heck, AuthorsBookshop.com’s as well.

The Galleycat list is a reader-curated directory, and they invite you to add suggestions via the comment section. So once you get your publishing company on facebook and ship-shape, drop it into the comments section and hope they deem you worthy!

I know I used to post what I called “Book Porn” a lot – gratuitous photos of books sure to make any book lover swoon – but this is not what I had in mind. I think this is fabulous though, and a great way to promote books and reading while taking the new burlesque phenomenon in a whole new wonderful direction.

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

This brilliantly bad sentence written by Molly Ringle has won her first place in San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Inspired by Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, a writer best known for beginning his novel “Paul Clifford” with the sentence “It was a dark and stormy night” and coining other phrases such as “the pen is mightier than the sword”, the competition challenges writers to create the opening sentence to a hypothetical, unbearably bad story.

Along with overall winners, category winners are selected for western, romance, detective, and more. Submissions are accepted year-round and winners are announced in June. To enter, email srice@pacbell.net with your name, phone number, address, and stunningly bad sentence in Arial 12 font.

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com

Click this to see why kids should never ever ever be allowed any where near books.

Seriously, can’t they just play with rocks, or logs or something?

Ok, just kidding. Actually, this is why some people shouldn’t have kids. Note that the (awesome) parent is considering taping it back up and leaving it in the drop box at the library. Good thinking. You are awesome.

And, just for the record, I was joking about kids not handling books. My 6 year old is sitting on the floor next to me at this very moment reading a book. True.

For the writers of you out there who desire to avoid trope and cliche’, this Slate article is well worth the read. Apparently, nearly every novel written in the English language in the past 100 years has a dog barking in the distance at some point.

Ok, maybe I exaggerate, but this breakdown of dogs barking in novels is pretty funny:

“Somewhere a Dog Barked”

This is a guest-post by author L.M.Preston, who’s Young Adult Sci Fi novel Explorer X-Alpha launched recently, and who’s next novel The Pack will be released soon.www.phenomenalonepress.com

Nano (National Novel Writing Month) from November 1st-30th. It’s the writing frenzy where you kick out a large number of words to hopefully finish a novel in record time. Many people start the challenge and end up with a sizeable number of pages by the end. Some are inspired to start writing for the first time. Others are inspired to finish something for the first time. Some, like me, find that writing at breakneck speed produces a lower quality of work that doesn’t reflect what is normally produced when writing within your own timing. Truth is, my natural timing is four months from start to finish. I tried to increase my speed and did it without much trouble. It increased by 3 weeks, and for me, that cooking time for a novel fits just right.

There are ways to make speed writing more effective. The overall goal, is to produce more in a shorter period of time. If you keep this up, who knows, speed writing may become a habit.

Prepare for it

When you set out to write a novel in a short period of time, outlining is your friend. Take a week to write a detailed outline of the story. It will help to work out most of the kinks before you even sit down to write. Create character profiles of the main characters and review outline before the start of your writing marathon.

Plan it

If you are going to focus on spitting out as many words as possible a day, then plan it. Block out your writing time for the month. Figure out when you are most productive. Is it in the morning, at night or midday? Make a rule – no sleep unless you have kicked out a minimum of a certain amount of words. Make sure you schedule extra time for working out of corners or temporary writer’s blocks. Make your schedule somewhat flexible so that you don’t get burned out and give up.

Write it

With a printout of your outline next to you and a bullet list of your character profile – start the race. Follow your outline. If you want to go rogue, go ahead, write until the roadblock. If you reach a road block – write anything, take some time off to think on it, then re-work your outline and get back to it. Whatever you do – don’t stop writing. Remember, you will always have to edit it.

Don’t look back

Whatever you do, don’t read over what you’ve written until you are finished. That is an easy way to get distracted. Remember, you’ll have to edit the thing many times before your piece of art is perfected. Just write forward, don’t make corrections, don’t read over it, just push forward and write.

By LM Preston, author of Explorer X – Alpha and THE PACK, www.phenomenalonepress.com , http://lmpreston.blogspot.com/

Irony has been a big deal for the past, say, 10 years. Or, longer even. Ironic t-shirts and trucker hats and debates over whether something is or is not ironic are familiar to most of us.

But it gets a little confusing, doesn’t it? What is irony? When and how do you use it properly? Every serious writer should understand irony and how to use it, right?

The super funny folks at The Oatmeal have put together a handy (and super funny) chart to help you sort it all out. Check it out and you will be straight:

The Three Most Common Uses of Irony

Here is a video of a speech by IndieBookMan hero Richard Nash. If you care about writing or publishing at all, you must must must watch this.

NOTE: This is an online broadcast… you don’t even have to leave your house! Just tune in at http://umbrellaradio.org/, relax and listen…

Our favorite Baltimore related zine (OK, our favorite zine altogether,) Smile Hon, You’re In Baltimore, published by Eight Stone Press, is launching it’s latest issue this month: Waste. We wanted to help them celebrate, and we wanted a chance to get some of Baltimore best “underground” writers to come by the studio to read some of there work on the air.

So, we have invited editor William P Tandy to come down, and bring a handful of the Waste issue contributors to talk about the zine, writing in Baltimore and to read their contributions.

Alex Hewett, Gavin Heck, Fernando Quijano III and William P Tandy, and perhaps others, will be joining is for the conversation.

It’s going to be a great time, and certainly a lively conversation. I hope you can listen in!

More info about Smile Hon, Waste and Eight Stone Press can be found here: http://www.eightstonepress.com/hon/honwaste.htm

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The IndieBookMan Radio Show covers all aspects of literature, writing, books and indie publishing in the Baltimore region and far beyond.

If you are interested in literature, books, writing or publishing, if you know you have a book inside of you and want to find out how to get it out into the world and into the hands of readers, then The IndieBookMan Radio Show is just what you need.

Hosted by AuthorsBookshop.com founder Brad Grochowski (a.k.a. the IndieBookMan) each show features an author, publisher or mover-and-shaker in the indie book world. We explore their history, walk through the steps they took to success, and find out a bit about their project.

Join us June 2mdh at 8:00 PM est at http://umbrellaradio.org/ for the live broadcast, listen to the archive at http://indiebookman.com/ or subscribe to the podcast at http://bit.ly/ibm_podcast