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Starting April 19, 2008, with the Baltimore CityLit Festival, I plan to give away a few books this spring and summer. I hope the next wave of "The Developers" readers gets as much enjoyment out of the book as the first wave did.
Anyway, if you received a free book and want to show your appreciation, check out the free book page "donations" options and/or email me your comments about the book!
So the news out recently is that PayPal is going to block "unsafe browsers." I'm not talking about people here, but actually web browsers. How will PayPal know if something is unsafe? Good question, but one way they will tell, according to this article, is by determining the version of the actual browser.
My first tour stop in 2008 will be the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, where I'll be a part of the fifth-annual CityLit Project. The event is free to both the public and exhibitors, which is not typical for most book-related events. It's pretty annoying to go to some events where either you have to give up a large percentage of your sales or you have to pay an upfront fee.
For Christmas, I received one of those Page-A-Day calendars to keep on your office desk. Normally, when I have one of those, I pull off about two months' worth at the same time because I completely forget about it. And I still do that for the newest one I own, but this one is a little different. This calendar is full of odd and wacky websites, which of course, is great research for my columns. I'll highlight some of my favorites here, and try to give a little bit of info when necessary.
As a huge fan of baseball, I enjoy reliving the past seasons, teams and players that I may have seen, read or heard at some point in time. Rob Neyer cleverly combines the best and worst of every Major League Baseball team in his "Big Book of Baseball Lineups".
I'll be heading back to familiar territory this weekend as I host a book talk in Crawfordsville, Ind., at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Crawfordsville Public Library. A little later in the day (3 p.m. CST), I'll be at the Champaign, Ill., Borders.
I lived in Crawfordsville in 1998-99, working at the Journal Review during my time there. I will be discussing writing and publishing at the library, as well as explaining the process of putting together my novel, The Developers.
Many of you know that I used to work at Kentucky Kingdom, an amusement park in Louisville, Ky. The park closed three years ago after Six Flags filed for bankrupcy. A group of Kingdom alumni are trying to generate interest in the park at SaveMyPark.com. Join us in saving the park!
If you have managed to ignore all talk so far about the upcoming presidential election, I commend you from a particular standpoint. How on earth can you tune out something as important as that? Do you have the new Bose BodyPhone, which enables a person to completely shut off the real world entirely? I thought the BodyPhone was only in prototype?
Authors who are either self-published or with small publishers have an extremely difficult time getting the word out about their novels. Most large publishing houses have money devoted to advertising, and well-known authors usually have their own publicists to handle marketing.
Surely by now, you've started to realize that many of those ads you see on the Internet for free stuff might just be bogus.
Of course, there might be some truth to the "free" part, but that could involve talking to a sales rep for 53 hours, wrestling an alligator or taking part in a survey about going to the bathroom in foreign countries.