Elyria 5th-grade teacher Dawn Neely Randall finally spoke out over fears of reprisal against the 20 hours of tests designed for Ohio public school students.

From her Facebook post:

Well, I did it. I addressed our school board. I had packets for each member as well as our superintendent and walked them through sample PARCC passages that had no clear articulation through the grades and shared with them information straight from the website that proved that the maturity matrix of many passages were well beyond the students’ grade levels.

Randall encouraged the school board to stand up to Columbus and for Elyria students. The Lorain County Chronicle featured her story here.

Last week, we talked about how marketing begins with your target audience.

While my experience is largely with non-fiction, one of my favorite comments came from athenap about marketing fiction:

With fiction, you’re offering an experience. An entertainment experience, to be exact. So you have to create a question in your target audience’s mind. “What would happen if an entire world’s survival hinged on one short, hairy-footed guy who liked to throw jewelry into a volcano?” or “Hey, what’s that space princess doing in prison, who’s looking for these lost droids, and where did that small moon come from?”

I would never have thought about it this way, but this is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve seen about writing fiction. If you know your question and who it might intrigue, you know your target audience and have a leg up on how to generate interest and market your book.

Along these lines, I thought today I’d talk about five resources I found useful to help connect you and your book with your audience.

Chris Christie said on Monday: You know it’s much more important what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. And that’s what we do. But I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the […]

Last week, skywriter published an excellent piece recommending indy publishers consider both CreateSpace and IngramSpark. It’s a great read and the follow-up discussion was also extremely valuable.

In a poll at the end, skywriter asked about the hardest part of self-publishing and two themes emerged: writing the book and marketing the book.

We’ll be getting to the marketing aspect, it’s the hardest part for me as well. First though, I wanted to talk about a realization that helped me get past a few of my writing hurdles.

This realization was that writing and design are not two separate things. They influence each other. You want the layout to complement the text and the text to work with the design. You want something aesthetically beautiful, whatever beautiful means for the work that you’re creating.

Once thinking about the writing became thinking about the design, the writing became much easier – it was just another aspect of the design.

Layout and typesetting are other critical components. This is why I’d highly recommend using a professional layout program. Or, as I’m going to recommend, LaTeX.

I am a former news reporter. These days I work as a book shepherd, editing and designing print and digital books for authors. Doing so keeps me mostly out of trouble and able to pay some of the bills some of the time.

Akadjian asked me if I’d guest host this week and talk about strategies for publishing and choosing between IngramSpark and Amazon CreateSpace.

Did Ayn Rand send Christmas cards?

According to Scott McConnell’s 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand she did indeed. Unfortunately, none are included in McConnell’s 656 page book.

Fortunately, with a little help from the Ayn Rand Archives*, we’re able to present to you this exclusive, never-before-seen collection of Ayn Rand favorites.

Last week, we talked about 11 reasons to self-publish your book.

This week I want to start off with two of my favorite comments. First, from Glen The Plumber:

My mom told me self-publishing causes blindness.

I just had to post that because it made me laugh so hard. Well played, Mr. Plumber, sir!

The second comment from skywriter spoke to setting yourself up as a publisher:

To become a publisher, the writer must buy publishing numbers called ISBN or International Standard book Number from the sole source provider: Bowker. Without buying that number or those numbers, someone else is the publisher and has control over the author’s literary work.

I wanted to talk about what this means and several early decisions involved in self-publishing.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee recently launched The Big Ideas project.

At this site, people like you and me can submit ideas we have for a better country. It’s a great idea.

Some ideas from the current front page include:

• Debt-free college
• A law to regulate out-of-district money in elections
• Full employment
• A basic income guarantee
• Reversing Citizens’ United
• Expanding social security
• Etc.

The trouble I have is that I want all of these things. I don’t just want to focus on one or two.

I want major change. So I asked myself the question: What’s holding us back from major change?

I believe the biggest thing that’s holding us back from doing these things is a corporate special interest group idea. It’s the idea that government should serve the interests of corporations and this will, in turn, be good for everyone.

I know, crazy right? But a lot of people have bought into this notion because it has been sold to us as “freedom” in the form of smaller government.

The corporate special interest marketing and educational campaign has been so successful, in fact, that it dominates public discussion and opinion to the point where I don’t think we’re going to get anything on the PCCC’s wonderful big ideas list until we can convince more people that there’s a better way.

That is, the proposals on the big idea list make sense to us because we believe in a different definition of our country. We believe our country is a democracy that should start with people and we believe freedom is about opportunity and shared prosperity.

All the policies at the big ideas site make sense to us because of these beliefs. The problem is they don’t and won’t make sense to many, many people unless we first revive ideas about democracy.

This is why my big idea is about how to revive democracy and make possible more of the policy ideas on the big ideas list.

Welcome to Self-Publishing 101!

The goal of this new series is simple: to share information about self-publishing and learn from others.

After completing my first book, I realized I had a mountain of material about self-publishing: what I’d tried, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d learned along the way.

I wanted to share and hear about what other people have done or are doing.

Throughout the process, I found myself constantly amazed at how far the world of self-publishing has come and how reachable it is to a new world of authors.

In this first post, let’s look at 11 reasons to self-publish.

Here in Cincinnati we’ve been engaged in a fight to not become the largest metropolitan region (2.1 million people) in the country without an abortion clinic. When someone posted an update about the fight to one of our local politics forums, it attracted comments like the following painting right-to-lifers as “pro […]