Guest Post: Save the Readers! by Leslie Ramey

With increasing technologies and the introduction of ebooks, it is easier than ever to publish a book whether it is quality or not. The sheer number of books published every year does not make finding the right book easy! I don’t know about you, but I can’t count the times that I’ve been sucked into buying a book that I didn’t enjoy one bit! Luckily Leslie and Jessica of Grub Street Reads have come up with a solution! I’m extremely pleased to introduce Leslie of Grub Street Reads: A site designed to help us readers sift through the never-ending supply of books.

Save the Readers!

A Guest Post by Leslie Ramey

There has never been a better time to be a book lover.

There has never been a scarier time to be a book lover.

With more than 100,000 books born every year through big publishing houses, indie publishers and self-publishing, it can be a daunting task to find the right book to read. At the same time, we now how have access to more books than ever. The ease of self-publishing has given many authors the ability to share their works with the world in ways that would have never been possible just a couple of years ago.

It’s easy to see how overwhelming it can be to pick out a book to read and why it’s more important than ever that we become savvy book buyers. One easy way to do this is to educate yourself. Did you know that many book reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble are written by friends or colleagues of the author and may not represent a true unbiased review? I mean, who wants to say anything bad about their friend’s or family member’s book? So, while reviews can be helpful, pay attention to all of the reviews and not just the 5 star ones.

Another great tip is to download a sample of the book. You’ll only get the first 10-20%, but a well written book should be able to suck you in instantly. The samples are like test driving a book. You wouldn’t buy a car without firing up the engine. So check under the cover of your next book before you spend your money.

There is one more way to tell if the book you are going to buy is up to par - check whether or not it has a Grub Street Reads Endorsement. An endorsement from our company (oh, did I mention that this project is the brain child of myself and my business partner, Jessica Bennett?) can guide you to a book that has met the high quality standards of our evaluation process.

Allow me to give you a brief tour of Grub Street Reads. As book lovers like you, Jessica and I were tired purchasing books that couldn’t sweep us up and carry us away. So, we took the situation into our own hands and developed an evaluation system to determine quality books. All great stories have a few things in common like well-rounded characters, engaging plots and a solid ending that leaves you satisfied or excited about the next book in the series. We took these elements and combined them with a few more key components of good storytelling, and wha-la, our evaluation system was born. Books that meet our evaluation criteria earn a Grub Street Reads endorsement, which is noted by our seal on their cover.

We want readers to give some of these unknown authors a shot, and this is one way you can trust that the story you buy is going to be engaging. Now, we don’t guarantee that you will love everything you read from our endorsed book library, because reading is very subjective, and our system aims to be as objective as possible. But we are confident that you’ll meet some great new authors and maybe your next favorite book.

Special thanks to Leslie and Jessica for this awesome guest post! Be sure to check out Grub Street Reads for more info!

Guest Post & Giveaway: Mary Lowry

Today I’m pleased to have Mary Lowry, author of The Earthquake Machine, here to stop by Inklings Read with a guest post….AND giveaway!

About Mary Lowry

Goodreads | Website | Twitter

Mary Pauline Lowry has worked as a forest firefighter, screenwriter, open water lifeguard, construction worker, and advocate in the movement to end violence against women. Due to no fault of her sweet parents, at 15 she ran away from home and made it all the way to Matamoros, Mexico. She believes girls should make art, have adventures, and read books that show them the way.

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girls can’t do that?, or can they?

by Mary Lowry

I wasn’t much of a tomboy growing up. I was mostly a bookworm. I devoured books. I hated that school classes distracted me from reading and by junior high I was a pro at hiding a novel behind a propped-open binder and reading my way through the school day.

The books I read allowed me to live fantastical lives and go on all sorts of adventures. But I wasn’t very old before I realized I wanted to have adventures myself.

When I was 15 I ran away from home. I went south from my hometown of Austin to South Padre Island and then to Matamoros, Mexico. That trip inspired my novel THE EARTHQUAKE MACHINE about a girl who leaves behind her country, her family, and everything she knows to travel deep into the heart of Mexico.

The book questions the expectations placed on young girls. That’s a subject I grappled with myself when I was growing up. Though I love toenail polish and girl talk as much as the next gal, I also wanted the chance to roam the world and have adventures the way I often saw boys doing in movies. So when I graduated college I joined an elite crew of forest firefighters. Together we traveled the American West battling blazes. I decided back then that I never wanted to have a normal sort of life.

I want girls who read THE EARTHQUAKE MACHINE to understand that they can shed expectations that being “girly” and “feminine” also means being docile and shying away from challenges and adventures.

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Giveaway

Mary has been generous enough to giveaway one ebook copy of her book, The Earthquake Machine! To enter, please use the rafflecopter form below! If you can't see it you may need to click "Read More" at the bottom of this post. But first, here’s a bit about the prize:

The Earthquake Machine

Goodreads | Amazon.com

The book every girl should read, and every girl’s parents hope she’ll never read.

The Earthquake Machine tells the story of 14 year-old Rhonda. On the outside, everything looks perfect in Rhonda’s world, but at home Rhonda has to deal with a manipulative father who keeps her mentally ill mother hooked on pharmaceuticals. The only reliable person in Rhonda’s life is her family’s Mexican yardman, Jesús. But when the INS deports Jesús back to his home state of Oaxaca, Rhonda is left alone with her increasingly painful family situation.

Determined to find her friend Jésus, Rhonda seizes an opportunity to run away during a camping trip with friends to Big Bend National Park. She swims to the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and makes her way to the border town of Milagros, Mexico. There a peyote- addled bartender convinces her she won’t be safe traveling alone into the country’s interior. So with the bartender’s help, Rhonda cuts her hair and assumes the identity of a Mexican boy named Angel. She then sets off on a burro across the desert to look for Jesús. Thus begins a wild adventure that fulfills the longing of readers eager for a brave and brazen female protagonist.

Guest Post: Nansi Kunze

As part of the Dangerously Placed blog tour, Nansi Kunze has honored us with her digital presence here at Inklings Read! It is wonderful to have such a talented author stop by and give us some insight into her development as an author as well as some advice for aspiring authors.

Nansi’s Thoughts on becoming an author

I wasn’t one of those kids who dreams of becoming a writer one day. As a teenager, I didn’t really give my career plans much thought – to be honest, I mostly just thought about boys. But I was good at foreign languages, so I decided to become a language teacher. It was only after teaching for a couple of years that the idea of being a writer began to entice me. Once I’d started writing, though, I quickly became addicted to it. Creating my own worlds, making characters do – and be – anything I wanted: what a rush! I soon learned, however, that writing a novel and becoming a published author are two entirely different things. Of course, you can get the writing rush without anyone ever reading your work; writing purely for your own enjoyment is cool too. But if you really want to be a published author, here are some things you might want to bear in mind:

Only a complete idiot would become a novelist for the money! Most novelists only earn a few thousand dollars a year. So you’ll probably need a steady day-job to support your writing habit (I recommend plumbing – it seems to have worked well for Mario).

It usually takes years to become a published author. Just like any other profession, you have to train and practice for a long time to become any good at it. I started writing my first novel in 2000. My first published novel hit the shelves in 2008 – and many writers have to wait longer than that!

Writing a novel means spending months shut up alone with your computer. And then more months fixing up what you wrote the first time. And then more months fixing up what you wrote the second time. And then … well, you get the idea.

So, are you still interested? Then here’s my advice:

Aspiring authors are often told to ‘write what you know’. Possibly more important, though, is writing what you like. I started out trying to write for adults, and it just didn’t work, because that wasn’t really what I liked. I liked reading YA, playing video games and watching the TV shows my high school students watched … so when I began to write YA instead, it felt so much more me. Don’t limit yourself to one genre when you start writing – try a few out, and see which ones fit you.

Successful writers have to walk a fine line between overconfidence and self-doubt. If you want to be an author you have to believe in your ability and the value of what you’re writing in order to keep working at it. But you also have to accept that what you write won’t be perfect. The first novel manuscript I wrote was awful – most first novels are, though I didn’t know that at the time. It took me over a year to write, and it really hurt to hear that it wasn’t all that great! But, looking back, my readers were right. Find yourself some readers who know good writing, and whose opinion and objectivity you can trust. Only let them read your work when you’re ready to hear what they really think. If it’s bad news, go wallow in self-pity (preferably with ice cream) for a few days, and maybe start a new writing project. By the time you’re ready to take a look at your work again, you may well find that your readers’ assessment is useful to you.

Setting goals can be helpful when writing – after all, if you never finish a manuscript, you’re never going to get it published! But goals need to be flexible, too. You’ll need to do several drafts, you may get stuck at some point, and you might need time away from the manuscript – possibly months – before you can see it clearly enough to improve it. (You could also consider sending it to a professional manuscript assessment agency for another viewpoint.)

And finally, remember that you’re writing for the love of it. If you’re finding a chapter less than fun to write, chances are it’s going to be boring to read too – think about changing or removing it. If you’re finding your whole project isn’t enjoyable, put it away and start something else. Don’t despair if that happens. Being an author is totally worth the huge amount of time and effort it takes, because you get to do what you love and share your worlds with thousands of other people. Hearing that your first novel sucks? Yeah, that’s painful. But hearing that a reader you’ve never met loves your latest book? That’s priceless.

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Would you like to learn more about Nansi and her projects? Check out these links for more information:

 Author Website | Goodreads | Twitter | Buy Her Books

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