The Nifty 15: Write Your Book in Just 15 Minutes a Day! (The Prosperous Writer 2)


Honoree Corder - 2016
     You know it’s been rattling around in your head since you were young. You want to write a book because the call of the muse has been getting stronger. And, perhaps you have heard You Must Write a Book. The two keys to success for aspiring authors is consistency and a little bit of time. Honorée Corder and Brian D. Meeks are full-time authors who have written over three dozen books combined, both fiction and non-fiction. Honorée is an expert in non-fiction and Brian has penned tomes across five fiction genres. They’ve combined their knowledge to lay out the best practices and answer the most common questions they hear from new authors. The Nifty Fifteen will take you from the blank page to finished book by wiping away the fear that is born of not knowing where to begin. In addition, you’ll be given access to Brian’s Beautiful Gears, which is a session by session look at how he wrote his 13th novel in just fifteen minutes per day. You’ll see the unedited work with all of its errors to show how a full-time author is worried about one thing…get the first rough draft out. The edited version, all polished up and without the daily comments, will also be made available upon its release. Lastly you’ll be given exercises that will make the process easy to undertake. Everyone has a story to tell. It just takes a little time each day, so why not give The Nifty Fifteen a read.

Introducing Literary Criticism: A Graphic Guide


Owen Holland - 2016
    A brand new literary title in the renowned graphic novel-style of the Introducing Graphic Guide series.From Plato to Virginia Woolf, Structuralism to Practical Criticism, Introducing Literary Criticism charts the history and development of literary criticism into a rich and complex discipline.Tackling disputes over the value and meaning of literature, and exploring theoretical and practical approaches, this unique illustrated guide will help readers of all levels to get more out of their reading.Owen Holland is a doctoral student at St Catharine's college, Cambridge, where he teaches the history of literary criticism.

The Erotica Handbook: (How to Write Erotica) A guide to making $100 an hour writing erotica short stories and selling them online (Emily Baker Writing Skills and Reference Guides)


Emily Baker - 2016
     You will learn how to generate hundreds of story ideas, cover designs, and characters. How to get past writer’s block. How to use the monster mirroring technique. The most profitable keywords, word counts, kinks. THE EROTICA HANDBOOK also includes a thesaurus with a mountain of sexy synonyms to help speed up your writing. Working from home has never been easier, and erotica is the only genre where new authors can price a short story at $2.99 and sell 100 copies in three weeks. THE EROTICA HANDBOOK is the cutting-edge blueprint to obtaining pleasure and money. Don’t deny yourself the joy of making $200 while you sleep.

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them


Elif Batuman - 2010
    “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

How Proust Can Change Your Life


Alain de Botton - 1998
    For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work—his fiction, letter, and conversations—and distills from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.Here, tendered in prose almost as luminous as it’s subject’s, is advice on cultivating friendships, suffering successfully, recognizing love and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on the first date. And here, too, is a generously perceptive literary biography that suggests that the master is as relevant today as he was in fin de siècle Paris. At once slyly ironic and genuinely wise, How Proust Can Change Your Life is an unqualified delight.

The Blog Startup: Proven Strategies to Launch Smart and Exponentially Grow Your Audience, Brand, and Income without Losing Your Sanity or Crying Bucketloads of Tears


Meera Kothand - 2020
    It takes several years for that—more than a book and a couple of days of reading can promise.  But this gives you a plan for success before you even start. Think of it as a road map for your first 90 days!Now, you can start a solid blog with the potential to make money WITHOUT a $1,000+ blogging education! Here’s a snapshot of what’s packed into this how-to guide: Popular guru promises exposed! I expose the truth about popular revenue streams and why NOT ALL monetization options are right for you despite guru promises! The 2M (+1) strategy to help you hit your first $1K blogging. How to find YOUR unique angle, so you can stand out from the pack and attract the right kind of readers. The smartest ways to make critical website pages sticky—Make these pages shout out “YES, you’re in the right place!” and understand what you need and don’t need to include. Why some bloggers make the leap and others don’t. (It has everything to do with what they don’t do!) 3 MUST-ANSWER questions that will shape your blog’s journey. How to create a strategic blog launch plan and my answer to the question “How many posts do you need before launching?” (No more confusion or stress. Just an actionable plan for results.) AND MORE! Imagine knowing exactly what you need to focus on despite all the distractions pulling you in a million directions.Imagine if in a mere year you accomplish more than you ever thought possible, feel a sense of satisfaction, and actually make progress toward this larger vision of what you want your blog and business to do for you.You don't flinch, get panicky, or try different tactics hoping one sticks. You have a plan of action and every decision you make for your blog is calculated and intentional. That’s the power of the process and the promise behind The Blog Startup!Intrigued yet? Then scroll to the top and click or tap “Buy Now.”

Amazon Ads for Authors: Tips and Strategies to Sell Your Books


Deb Potter - 2019
     Learn to monitor, analyze, and optimize. Packed with tips and strategies to improve the quality of your advertising. This book explains the latest Amazon Advertising tools since significant upgrades throughout 2019. Last updated January 2020.

A Life with Books


Julian Barnes - 2012
    A Life with Books is an essay specially commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week, supplied exclusively to independent bookshops. In it, Julian Barnes writes about his early awareness of books and about his obsessive book-collecting and time spent in second-hand bookshops around the country. He ends by praising the physical book and expressing the confident hope that it will survive.A Life with Books is published as a pamphlet, with cover art by Suzanne Dean, the renowned designer responsible for the cover of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.

The Wire Re-Up: The Guardian Guide to the Greatest TV Show Ever Made


Steve Busfield - 2009
    Nothing like it has been made before and—to its millions of fans—nothing as good will ever be made again. It is a show that prompts endless debate, and the debates continue here. Is Omar Little the coolest criminal since Robin Hood? Which series has the best theme tune? Will Bubbles survive Baltimore? Avon or Stringer? How does McNulty have so much success with women? With the show now over, these and hundreds of other questions are discussed in this brilliant collection of features and comments from the Guardian's Wire Re-up blog. Together with interviews with the show's creators and stars, running totals per episode (murders, Bunk drunk, Herc screw-ups, and much more), and a quiz created by the stars themselves, this book will guarantee fans that one last fix they've been craving.

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative


Jane Alison - 2019
    The stories she loves most follow other organic patterns found in nature―spirals, meanders, and explosions, among others. Alison’s manifesto for new modes of narrative will appeal to serious readers and writers alike. As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel―one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. . . . But: something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?”W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc―or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

Author Unleashed: Advanced Publishing and Marketing Strategies for Indie Authors


Robert J. Ryan - 2019
    They want more. But no matter what they do, those sales remain elusive. Worse, the publishing environment is getting harder every year, crushing their dreams day by day.But somehow, some authors succeed. How do they do it? Is there a secret? Is it blind luck? Do they all have teams of ghostwriters behind them churning out novels while one person claims the glory?It’s none of those things. It’s a combination of hard work and correct knowledge.This book gives you that knowledge. You’ll learn things like: How professional marketers write blurbs How to decode Amazon webpages for clues to buyer behavior Why great books sink into oblivion and ordinary books sell How to go beyond accepted practice and find best practice This book gives you the knowledge to sell, and to sell at a high scale. Much of it will surprise you, even if you’re a veteran of indie publishing.You’ll never look at publishing the same way again. Are you ready to unleash your author career?

An Experiment in Criticism


C.S. Lewis - 1961
    Lewis's classic analysis springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind.

The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia


Laura Miller - 2008
    Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. Enchanted by its fantastic world as a child, prominent critic Laura Miller returns to the series as an adult to uncover the source of these small books' mysterious power by looking at their creator, Clive Staples Lewis. What she discovers is not the familiar, idealized image of the author, but a more interesting and ambiguous truth: Lewis's tragic and troubled childhood, his unconventional love life, and his intense but ultimately doomed friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien.Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination.

The Soul of the Lion Witch, & the Wardrobe


Gene Edward Veith Jr. - 2005
    S. Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe he created one of Christendom's most cherished allegories. Viewers of the movie, as well as readers of the book will come away deeply moved by what they have encountered in Narnia.They will have countless questions such as: How did the Witch take over Narnia? Why couldn't Edmund resist temptation? Why did the Lion have to die? And they will find the answers in this wonderful book written for Christians and non-Christians alike.

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time


David L. Ulin - 2010
    In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.