MSI Press Blog

  Our white cat Murjan (pictured here) had a very thick fur, but one day a bald spot showed up. and then it grew larger. The vet scratched his head and gave us some salve. But the spot grew even larger. Now, we could see it right off, without even having to look for it through his fur, and the fur around the bald spot pulled out easily making the bald spot even bigger.  We took Murjan to a specialist. The specialist scratched her head and then gave us flea medicine for all the cats. By then, Murjan was not the only balding cat. Two others among the six started showing the same signs. So, the specialist asked us to bring in one of the other cats, too. She was able to pull a larger patch of hair from that cat to analyze -- and sent both samples to a lab. It turned out to be scabies. No one had considered that because these were indoor cats. However, a neighbor's cat had come into the house and spent some time with our cats. That cat was an outdoors cat, and the neighbor did not pay a

  Excerpt from Clean Your Plate! (Bayardelle) -  Don’t Be a Quitter Your kids want to try out ice skating. They’re jittery with excitement for their first class. They come home glowing and talk of little else for the next week. They ask for new ice skates for Christmas, they start saving up their allowance for new gloves to wear during their lessons, and you start Googling how to be the parent of an Olympic ice skater. As the weeks turn to months, the excitement slowly starts to wear off. After a few weeks, they no longer look forward to classes with as manic a level of excitement, and after a few months, they start outright complaining or asking not to go. If this is your first rodeo (i.e. the first sport or extracurricular your kid has tried), it’s probably no big deal. You let them stop and pick another activity because you don’t want to drag them to something they no longer enjoy. So, they decide try soccer. You see the same manic excitement and the same letter to Santa requestin

  It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic is about reviews. How do you get reviews?  How should you interpret them? How should you handle bad reviews? So, let's take each question separately. How do you get reviews? There are professional reviewers. Some will review before the book is published -- they want a 3-4 month heads-up (i.e. book in hand, with a later release date). These are highly desirable. Examples are Library Journal , School Library Journal , Foreword Reviews (the free version), and Publishers Weekly . All of them accept submissions sent directly to them. (There are also otherLs; Google them.) You can put your book up on Net

  Excerpt from  Understanding the Entrepreneur  by Quinelle - Chapter 7 The Entrepreneur at School The Entrepreneur at school is not all that different from the Entrepreneur at home. Where the Entrepreneur is the teacher, the relationship is not that dissimilar from that of a parent. Where the Entrepreneur is a student, the relationship is not all that different from that of being a child.* The Entrepreneur as Teacher The Entrepreneur can make a marvelous teacher for the Entrepreneur student if the teacher remembers that while they themselves are natural leaders, so are their Entrepreneur students. Therefore, they must rein in their innate tendencies to lead and provide opportunities for their Entrepreneur students to lead. Not the parlayer of rules and regulations by nature, like the Seeker teacher, the Entrepreneur teacher looks to find ways to help students understand the underlying systems behind phenomena, the reasons behind rules, and the supporting theories behind conceptual st

  It is Tuesday. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side.  Today's topic looks at the differences between books that sell well long-term and those that fizzle out.  Recently, I decided to analyze two kinds of books that experience good sales to see if there is some general guidance for authors; the long-term steady sellers and the first-year wonders. Book niches and author individualities vary widely, but perhaps some general information could be insightful if you are trying to make some decisions about how to market/promote your book. Criteria. In analyzing both sets of  books , I looked at the following 15 categories of criteria: ARC, prepped followers, platform, social media presence, recogni