Author Archive: Sandra Hutchison
10 Reasons To Be Less Productive During A Pandemic
1. You fear dying. Especially if you’re as much of a hypochondriac as I am. When I woke up with a headache, sore throat, and the dreaded DRY COUGH a couple of weeks ago, I feared the worst. I spent the next two days drinking lots of fluids, taking my (resolutely normal) temperature, and checking […]
What Happened When I Gave Up My Amazon Sales Rank for Lent By Sandra Hutchison
In 2017 I made a little chunk of money as an indie novelist on Amazon, thanks to my first novel THE AWFUL MESS being in one of their Prime reading promotions. Including that one, I had three stand-alone novels out, and I enjoyed some read-through of the others, too, especially in Kindle Unlimited. But as […]
Fourteen Book Covers for Four Books: A Cautionary Tale about Nudity, Flailing, and Copyright
Years ago, I worked as an acquisitions editor and marketing manager in professional and educational publishing. I approved covers, and I tried to wheedle better covers out of busy and/or stubborn design departments, and I defended covers to a lot of disappointed authors. Most I considered unreasonably disappointed, though at least one was absolutely right […]
Nuance vs. Propaganda
Most novels have a message of some kind, even it’s just “sometimes you have to break yourself out of a bad place to get to a better one.” We all want the stories we’re reading or watching to have some meaning. That’s why we started telling them to each other in the first place. But […]
Can You Think Like A Publisher?
When you’re an author-publisher, or self-published author, you face nearly all the choices a traditional publisher faces, but in a much more intimate, more personally-invested, more personally-at-risk way. This is a wonderful in some ways, and not so good in others. For about seventeen years in my callow youth I worked in publishing as an […]
Why Won’t (Insert Name Here) Read My Book?
So you wrote the book, which is an amazing accomplishment. You published the book, which is another accomplishment. You also dug in and did your marketing homework and set up a great plan to connect with those readers, and began to get some good reviews, and began to get some sales. Now comes the part […]
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