My Blog
My musings about the world, self publishing, living abroad, and my author career.
A to Z blog challenge theme reveal
For the next month and a bit there will be a short interlude in my normal blog posts, as rather than posting every Monday with a longish post about whatever I feel like that week I am doing the A to Z blog challenge. So every weekday during the month of April I will...
Revealing my secret project
Over the last few months I have been working on a secret project. Beyond hints that I have been working on something I haven't announce this. My newsletter found out first (sign up to my newsletter) and I am pleased to announce that I have two non-fictions titles...
Parent teacher meetings
Last week I had parent teacher meetings for both children. These were fifteen minute sessions with their teachers and without the children there. And we have these three times a year now - late autumn, early spring and before the summer holiday. Both of them are doing...
How many words do you know?
One of the things about continuing to life in a different country is that I'm actively looking for new words. The children at school have activities in order to increase their vocabulary. But I need to work to keep developing mine, otherwise it's too easy to stick to...
Self publishing 5 – building your audience
This is in a way the most difficult thing about self-publishing - finding people who are interested to buy your books. I am in no way an expert on this, so all I have here are my thoughts on a process I am trying to work through. You can write the best book in the...
What is my time worth?
I've been struggling recently with a whole series of questions about how I spend my time. Is it better for me to do things myself, or to pay for someone else to do them? Which comes back to the question of the value of my time. Now, at the moment, what income I am...
Launch of The Emotion Thesaurus
Hi guys! Today I'm helping authors Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi launch their new book, The Emotion Thesaurus (Second Edition)! You might know about The Emotion Thesaurus or even have it on your shelf. But chances are, you may not have known a second edition was...
Twitter v Instagram as a writer
I recently joined Instagram and have been experimenting with it and finding out how it works. So I thought it was a good opportunity to look at it compared to Twitter and consider what their pros and cons were for me as a writer. Twitter I've been on for years, though...
Creating a new group
With two local writer friends I have set up a new group for writers in the area we live in. We had all been looking for such a thing, but hadn't found it, so we've decided to create it ourselves. We want to create a supportive group for writers of all sorts from this...
Happy unbirthday to me – free books for you!
To celebrate my unbirthday I've made all four of my short stories free on Amazon for this weekend only. So, if you haven't had a chance to get them yet go and download them while they're free! They are all linked from my author pages on Amazon: Clarissa Gosling on...
Self-publishing 4 – beta readers and critique partners
So, you've finished your draft and done some editing on it, what's next? Before you publish it you should have some other people read it and give you comments. These can either be beta readers or critique partners. I'll go through the differences below. Beta readers...
My favourite tool
I have to put my hand up and admit that I love spreadsheets. I use them for all sorts of things: recording who we send Christmas cards to each year, managing our family finances, outlining my next book, planning the edits to the last one. They are such a useful tool...