MathiasCavanaugh.com

People like to knock self-published authors, those brave souls that have decided to try something other than traditional publishing, with broad strokes that lump every self-published author into the category of garbage.  Yes, most of what is self-published is horrid trash.  Bad plots.  Poorly contrived characters.  Not to mention continuity errors, misspellings, and awkward sentences galore!  Sometimes self-published books overcome these problems, Fifity Shades of Grey for one (though don’t ask me how or why), but it is not common.  The crap that is self-published gives everything else a bad name.

But the sad truth is that, for all the bashing of self-published authors who rush their works onto Amazon.com without proper editing and proof reading, traditionally published books are rife with errors as well.  Yes, they are often farer and fewer between, but they are still quite common.  Most traditionally books I read have errors that I spot easily.  So no way a “professional” editor couldn’t.  Usually it’s just punctuation or a cumbersome sentence that takes three or four passes to understand.  These errors stare me in the face all the time, and I wonder how on God’s green Earth they made it past the supposed filters. Read more…

I spent some time in advertising.  I also have spent a lot of time selling my own products.  Over the course of those many years I have learned one thing, brute force publicity rarely works.

What do I mean by “brute force publicity”?  Simple.  I mean beating your potential clients over the head repeatedly with your message to the point where it becomes annoying.

Yes, it is true that one of the rules of selling is to ingrain your message in the heads of potential customers.  But, doing so to the point where they tune you out is bad. Read more…

I hear aspiring authors such as myself say it all the time. They say they are going to write a vampire novel because vampires are hot. They say they are going to write chick lot because that’s where the money is. They say they are going to write a novel about this teenage wizard because Harry Potter was a smashing success. They say they are going to write a post apocalyptic adventure with teens fighting each other and struggling to survive because, well, because look how many copy’s The Hunger Games has sold.

What these people are doing is writing for other people and trying to hop on a trend. They are not writing for themselves. And, if you ask me, it shows in their final products. I’ve read more than my share of these concoctions.

It seems that every time one of my friends opts to put up a novel on Amazon written in such a manner they ask my opinion on it. Ok, ignore the fact that vampire (the blood sucking type) novels are not really my thing. But I do like a good story. Note I said “good”. It doesn’t even have to be great! Read more…

I have been taking a break from writing this weekend but have been working on my list of story prompts.  I like to sit down every now and again and jot down ideas with the ones being most interesting to me making it to my official list of story prompts for future work.  The current list stands at 40, which I think is quite good considering that I just started it last June.  It will keep growing, some of the prompts will get combined into a single story, others might get their own treatments in time.  One thing I have learned as a writer is that you have to keep the funnel filled and never, ever let an idea go poof because you did not write it down.