Blogger Stories

  When you read a professional newspaper or magazine, it's not often that you find errors whether it be in spelling or grammar. That's because they have proofreaders, people who are paid to apply the their knowledge of words and the rules of grammar. Typically, bloggers like me do not have the luxury of having these experts. It, therefore, falls on our shoulders to ensure that such errors do not creep into the text undetected. Of course, the main defense against these kinds of gaffes is knowledge of the language. If you know the rules, it's possible to write correctly and do it right the first time. If you know the rules, even if you make a mistake, you'll be able to catch them during the proofreading stage. Now, I'm not an English writing expert. I make mistakes from time to time, mostly due to fatigue. After writing for the better part of the day, it's possible for me to commit a faux pas and miss them when I go back over the article. That's why I recommen

U-1215 was published in August 20, 2016. For two years, it hardly moved. No one was buying it and I even thought of taking it out and rewriting it to make it interesting. Then, one day, I read an article about one author whose book also wasn't selling very well. She had someone make another cover and she republished it. Thereafter, the book's sales soared and continues to sell very well. So, it got me to thinking. Could my book benefit from an improved cover as well? I set out to try. First, I changed the color to blue. Blue represents the color of the sea so that seemed appropriate. Then, I made the color darker towards the bottom since that's what happens the deeper into the sea you go. Second, I made the text larger so as to be more visible without overdoing it. I changed the subtitle to all caps to also make it a bit more visible. I decided to enlarge my name and change the font because I read that you should advertise yourself but don't shout it out by making your

I've been neglecting my blog. When Facebook removed the Notes feature, I told myself to use Blogger in place of the Notes feature. Sorry to say, I haven't been doing it. So, hoping to get things started again, I'll post a few figures I got from my sales from my books in Smashwords . So, according to the numbers, I sold 578.3 books from 2011 to 2022. What's with the 0.3? How can you sell one-third of a book? Those sales came from Scribd. They offer a partial sale (a small percentage of a book) for $0.10 with an option to buy the whole book if you liked it. Out of those 578.3 books, I made $279.87 (USD). Why so little for the quantity of books? Did each book cost $0.48? No, a large part of those books were sold for free. Yes, free. One of the advice from other authors, as well as Smashwords, was to offer books for free from time to time so that readers would get to know the author on the premise that, if they found the books interesting, they would later buy the author