editorial

Checking Out the Fine Print - Amazon's KDP Select Program

Irene Watson

You may have heard already that Amazon just unveiled their KDP Select and is inviting KDP self-publishers to participate.  It may all seem wonderful but not all is as what it may seem it is.  Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware recently posted this and I want to share it with you:

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featured this week

Fiction - Relationships, Novel, Life

Spare Change

Bette Lee Crosby

Bent Pine Publishing (2011)
ISBN 9780983887911
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (11/11)

Synopsis

Author Bette Lee Crosby’s Spare Change is a quirky mix of Southern flair, serious thoughts about important things in life, madcap adventures of a young boy, and a late change of heart that made all the difference in the life of an unusually independent woman. Olivia Westerly, who at an age when most of her friends are knitting booties for their grandchildren, marries for the first time. For nearly forty years she's avoided such an entanglement, because marriage means children and the very thought of children sends a shiver up her spine. With a flippant no thank you, Olivia goes her merry way until Charlie Doyle happens along. Blinded by love and trusting that a man ten years her senior is beyond the age of wanting children, Olivia marries Charlie, only to have him topple over dead while they're honeymooning in Miami.

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featured this week

Fiction - Novel, Fantasy, Life

Fancie’s Followers

Jannet Ridener

iUniverse (2011)
ISBN 9781462008278
Reviewed by Marty Shaw for Reader Views (11/11)

Synopsis

Francie's Followers, by author Jannet Ridener, revolves around a group of people that are each facing their own seemingly insurmountable dilemma. Sheriff James Weaver is suffering from a severe case of boredom mixed with a dose of midlife crisis. He’s tied down by the constraints of life and doesn’t even know it. Elaine just wants to be loved, and she’d prefer if that love came from her crush, Alex, who is too busy doting on his fiancée, Mia, to realize he doesn’t actually love her. Emmett is Alex’s new friend, and Elaine’s new crush. Each of these individuals are living messed up lives but things become even more chaotic when they find themselves unwittingly involved in a battle of wills between Theron and Eugenia, the king and queen of the fairies.

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Spotlight - reader views literary awards winner

First Place in the South Region

The Empty Lot Next Door by Arthur M. Mills, Jr.

Xlibris (2010) 
ISBN 9781450072212

When video games were still in their infancy, children of the 1970s and 1980s had to come up with other entertainment options. Arthur M. Mills Jr., chose writing. Many years later, while a US Army soldier stationed in Korea, Arthur wrote The Empty Lot Next Door. Arthur is a Warrant Officer in the US Army and has lived throughout the world. Arthur and his wife, Yonsun, have two children, Arthur and Allen.

Synopsis: The Empty Lot Next Door is a tale of a haunting based on the actual experiences of the author, Arthur M. Mills, Jr., at about age eleven.  After a move out of the projects and into a regular house in a better neighborhood, Ray (Arthur’s nickname) has great expectations for a normal life.  The youngest of four brothers in a family faced with financial trouble and emotional distress, Ray instead endures an ordeal so terrifying, so confusing, that years went by before he could tell a soul about it.  This is the story of his visits from Candle Face, the girl rumored to have died in the house fire next door, and who relentlessly tormented him. 

But this story is much more than a ghost story.  It is also a story of the desperation, the pain and the helplessness experienced by children whose parents work long hours away from home, necessarily leaving them to fend for themselves against both real and imagined evils.  It’s about sibling abuse, and the scars that such abuse leaves on the victim as well as the abuser.  And this is the story of the intense struggle of a child to make sense of the world without communicating his fears and thoughts to the adults in his life since he doesn’t want to add to the family’s problems. 

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List of 2010 Literary Awards Winners

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First Place in the Southeast Region

As the Sycamore Grows by Jennie Miller Helderman

The Summers Bridgewater Press (2010)
ISBN 9780982773208

Jennie Helderman broke the glass ceiling at age 10 by becoming the first girl page in the Alabama State Legislature. That surge of girl power would not be the last time she saw a need to put women’s issues at the forefront. In the 1970s, after she helped set up a crisis-call center in an old house, a cry for help at the other end of the phone line incised her memory with indelible ink. That call was the catalyst; eventually, the empty bedrooms upstairs served as the community’s first shelter for victims of domestic abuse. From there, Helderman began work with women’s issues and leadership, community development, public relations and communications, beginning in Gadsden, Alabama, and reaching to national levels.

Synopsis: As the Sycamore Grows is the true story–real names–of a seventeen year abusive marriage.   A Sleeping with the Enemy in the Tennessee backwoods, as told by Ginger, who escaped, and Mike, who abused and holds no remorse. As the Sycamore Grows is an incredibly powerful and sobering true account of obedience, poverty and isolation escalating in mounting abuse and violence.

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List of 2010 Literary Awards Winners