MSI Press Blog

  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

  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 the unpleasant situation where someone tries to undermine your book. That someone can be a person you know or a complete stranger. They usually have a reason. Often, it is not a good one. And, gee whiz, it is hard enough to garner book sales without having an enemy out there working against you. That said, let's look at what these evil souls do to authors and why and what you can do about it. Some ways that "enemies" can undermine your book and its sales: They write a really bad review, totally panning the book, condemning it in unfounded ways, sometimes outright lying about it, an

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 post discusses the difficulties in getting book reviews -- from the publisher perspective and the author perspective. Sometimes, those perspectives are the same. Reference here is not to paid reviews; those are pretty easy to get -- put up your money, and back comes a review. Reference here is to unpaid, professional reviews, what every publisher wants and expects and what every author should, too. Lost in the Haystack of Pre-Publication Reviews Pre-publication reviews are hard to get because there are very few reviewers out there, and they are overwhelmed with books being sent to them. One reviewer who wanted to review one of our

  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 addresses book reviews. Why are they important and what they will do for you as an author. And why a lot of reviews do not turn immediately into a lot of increased sales. Why you should care about reviews : Reviews get the news out about your book. Even bad reviews can result in publicity that brings out book sales. Some bookstores (e.g., the Barnes and Noble chain) usually check out book reviews before stocking a book from an independent publisher (which is a hard-to-get agreement to begin with); in my experience, the minimum required is 25 good (4-5 stars) reviews. There are a significant number of pe

Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Wrong Thinking That Impedes Your Learning Progress; Right Thinking That Speeds Up Your Progress All too often learners are held back from complete success by obstacles of their own making through just plain wrong thinking. We call these kinds of wrong thinking cognitive distortions. They creep into our thinking rather naturally, but we need to fight them off because w hen we let cognitive distortions creep into our thinking, we end up interpreting events in such a way that fuels emotions such as anxiety, depression, or anger—and that puts up barriers to language learning success.  For the sake of space, in this book, I am including in the sections that follow those cognitive distortions that I have found to be especially pertinent for language learners. If you are interested, you can Google the term, cognitive distortion , and find quite a long list of cognitive distortions that researchers have found. All-or-Not