Last Day of Book Offers - HURRY!

Today is the last day of November and with it comes the last day of special offers from me. Yes, tonight at midnight (or thereabouts) all the following offers expire:

1. New Blood - 20% OFF!! - 16+ Young Adult Urban Paranormal. Get it HERE!
2. How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel - 20% OFF!! - Get it HERE!
3. The 10 Hour Project Manager - 36% OFF!! - Get it HERE!

So, there you have it. Be quick, prices revert tomorrow. AND the price of How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel also increases in price tomorrow. That's a double reason to pick it up today.

   

Buy one of my books... Available above at Amazon. Also available at SmashWords

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How To Live an Electronically Synchronized Life - The Complete Digest

Part One - The Challenge

As some of you may already know, I live my alter non-author ego in the world of technology. Actually I think this is something that has helped me become a better Indie Author as the proliferation of self-publishing sites and software has evolved.

So today I thought I'd write a little about that other world I live in, in the hope that it is of some use to the rest of you out there. Let me start by defining my day-to-day problems. During a typical month I need to:

• Travel to an office 'day' job
• Continue writing upcoming novels
• Market existing books and generally keep up with Social Networking sites
• Travel for weekends away
• Check my email and calendar from anywhere
• Ensure that everything on all my electronic devices stays synced

It's a tough challenge and something that I am sure most of you are already familiar with. So how have I managed - someone who is supposed to be tech-savvy? Well first off, let me tell you that I still have not found the perfect solution. I live in hope of a fold-up PC with the power of a desktop, the closed footprint of a phone, and something able to give me, on demand, a screen that is at least 11 inches in size. Have I come close? Yes. But I'm still not there yet.

To give you a better understanding of why I need this synchronization, here are a few of my detailed challenges:

• I want to be able to edit my plot ideas from wherever I am and have them available to me when I get home
• I want to be able to write a page or two of my book if I suddenly get a great idea or I'm stuck somewhere with some time
• I want to be able to check and respond to all my emails wherever I am
• I want to be able to sit in a hotel room at 6 in the morning and crank out a chapter of my book
• I want to be able to read what other people are saying about different topics and maybe contribute some feedback to them
• I want to...

You get the idea. I'm no different to the rest of you out there. So that's it, the electronically synchronized challenge.

In the next post I'll give a little background to how I've tried to solve the problems during the past three years; what has worked and what hasn't. And then in the final post I'll write about the solution I currently use and the advantages and disadvantages to it all. I'm getting close to an ideal. Technology may soon not actually get in the way of real work!

Part Two - Three Years of Trying

It all started back in late 2008 when T-Mobile released the very first Android smartphone (The T-Mobile G1). This was a wonderful day for me. I'd been using a Blackberry phone for a couple of years, but the Android phone was several steps further forward. At last I had true web-browsing, email, alerts, music and more all on one phone. My life was complete! Or was it? I soon found out that the slide out keyboard really was a little bit of a pain and the Android phone was fairly slow at doing quite a few things. Add to that the relatively small screen size when viewing web pages and although the phone was a big step forward from my Blackberry, it wasn't the be all to end all that I had hoped for. I still needed my desktop and laptop PC.

Let's look back at my original list and see what was better:

• Editing plot ideas and having them synchronized for when I got home? - NO
• Write a page or two of my book? - NO
• Check and respond to emails wherever I am? - YES
• Sit in a hotel room and crank out a chapter? - NO
• Do some reading / social media? - MAYBE

So, not such a huge success!

Wind forward 18 months or so and I decided to go the Apple iPhone route. This was about 3 months after getting myself an iPod and using it for all sorts of things. What impressed me the most were the apps - thousands of them that did just about everything.

Did the iPhone make a huge difference to me and do all the things I wanted? No. But I was getting closer.  And then when the iPad came out, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Surely this was the answer to all my dreams? With the iPad I was suddenly able to synchronize things across all sorts of platforms and do some really useful work wherever I happened to be. Specific iPad apps started to appear and I thought I was finally going to be able to cross everything off my list and retire to the ultimate device.

I have had an iPad for about 18 months now and it has made a huge difference to my productivity. But there is one area where it just doesn't quite cut it. The area of typing. For surfing, notes, apps and lots of other things besides, it is a brilliant tool. But for cranking out a few pages or a chapter of my book, it falls a long way short. I even bought myself a bluetooth keyboard that I take with me when I go to hotels, but this really defeats the purpose of an iPad. The extra bulk and weight cancel out the benefits.

So, that brings us to November 2011. What is the next step forward? How can I solve all my desires and find the ultimate technological helper? In part three of this article I'll tell you how I've compromised in order to be able to write wherever I travel, but still have everything else available to me.

Part Three - The Ultimate Compromise

So, we've wound forward to November 2011 and I've finally come to the conclusion that my trusty iPad doesn't cut it for me when I want to write chapters of my book, or knock out a quick blog post. For that I need something with a keyboard.

In my quest to find the perfect companion to my iPhone and desktop PC, I scoured Amazon and read a million reviews. Should I buy the Macbook Air? Seems pretty nice and compact. But the downside was that it cost $1,000 and was not as Windows friendly as everything else I already used. So, how about the PC equivalent? I found several really nice looking mini-laptops that were Macbook Air knock-offs, but each was also around the $1,000 mark. Not really a cost effective compromise.

In the end I stumbled across the HP Mini 110-3830NR, a mini-netbook from Hewlett Packard that seemed to promise a lot for its very diminutive size. What's more, it was only $279 - a price I could live with. The netbook promised up to 8 hours of battery life, full Windows 7 compatibility, access to all my existing programs, and of course a real (if not slightly smaller) keyboard. Would I be in pig heaven at last?

I decided to take the plunge, paid the extra couple of bucks for next day delivery, and eagerly awaited my mini-lifesaver. It duly arrived just over a week ago and I unpacked it, amazed at just how small it was. It's really not any bigger than my iPad when it's closed up, and the quality of the screen and general construction are excellent. I am pleased to say I have not been disappointed. So, let's go back to my original wishlist of three years ago and see how I've done:

• Editing plot ideas and having them synchronized for when I got home? - YES 
• Write a page or two of my book? - YES 
• Check and respond to emails wherever I am? - YES 
• Sit in a hotel room and crank out a chapter? - YES 
• Do some reading / social media? - MOSTLY

And I say mostly on the last point because the netbook is not really a reader, but it does allow reading, and for relatively short periods of time will be fine. I'll get a chance to give it a real try over the Christmas holidays when I try and read a few books. I may have to steal my wife's Kindle reader, but we'll see! But in the meantime my digital synchronized life is complete... At least for another year!

Cyber Monday SALE - The 10 Hour Project Manager 36% Off!!

Here it is, exclusively for all my wonderful blog followers and readers. Today you can buy my best selling Project Management book, The 10 Hour Project Manager, at a 20% discount for the ebook and at a 36% discount for the paperback!! BUT - you have to purchase the ebook from Smashwords and the paperback from Lulu. The links are below.

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Genre: Project Management Reference

Who is this book for? Most likely you are someone who has been managing projects for a few years, in a variety of different situations. Maybe you're a consultant that wanders from project to project, or an employee that gets passed from pillar to post depending on the hot topic of the month. Either way, you're not fresh out of school and you've seen a scary thing or two happen during project implementations. What you're really looking for are some words of wisdom, or maybe a guide you can refer to as necessary, that will enable you to manage your projects more efficiently and cut down your work weeks to something more sustainable. You would ideally like to spend some quality time somewhere outside the confines of your office.

The objective of this book is to enable the reader to successfully manage most every project you will ever be given in less than ten hours a week. That's only two hours a day! Okay, when you've stopped laughing read on. This is actually the premise of the book. I have managed successful projects in many companies, in many countries, in many cultures and in many situations. Nearly without fail I have only paid very close attention to the management of that project for about ten hours a week, over the majority of the project lifecycle. In some cases, it was even less!

What will I learn from it? This book is about the meta-rules associated with running a project. It's about the management skills that will not only help you decide what you need to pay close attention to but also what you can safely de-prioritize. This will allow you to focus on the relevant and important items in a project. Every project is a little different, but the meta-rules are the same. By the end of this book you should have all the tools necessary to be able to successfully manage most projects in only ten hours a week (during the majority of the lifecycle). Just think what you will be able to do with all that spare time. Maybe you'll even be able to start that little money-earning side project you've always intended to get underway!

Read more about the book HERE

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Ebook: The regular price of the ebook is $5.99 - but if you head on over to Smashwords and use coupon code AY89B at checkout, you can get it for just $4.79 (and don't forget that at Smashwords you can read 20% of the book for FREE!!)

Paperback: The regular price of the paperback is $11.95 $10.16 - but if you head over to Lulu and use coupon code BUYMYBOOK305 at checkout, you can get it for just $7.62 - That's a full 36% saving on the full retail price at Amazon!!!

What are you waiting for! Happy Cyber Monday!

WARNING - Upcoming Price Increase - Buy It Now!!

My ebook, How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel, has enjoyed great success since it was first launched. So much so that I have decided to increase its price by a dollar to $3.99 from December 1st.

I know, that's terrible news for you! But actually it's not so bad. You still have a day or two to get it at the regular price of $2.99. Actually, you can buy it for $2.39 by jumping over to Smashwords and using coupon code CH82X on checkout! (And don't forget, you can always read 20% of my books for FREE at Smashwords). Yes, now there's no reason to delay in your purchase.

The book is a series of 24 essays that will help you on your way to successfully writing and self-publishing your first novel. The contents are listed below. You can also jump over to my author website HERE to read more about the book. So, don't delay, order your copy today!

CONTENTS
1. Don't Start the Story at the Beginning
2. Become a Successful Writer in 2,000 Hours
3. Poems and Short Stories
4. Creating a Good Plot
5. How Long Should a First Novel Be?
6. Writing in the First Person
7. Writing in the Third Person
8. Dialog Versus Narrative – Show Versus Tell
9. Writing Your First Novel: Words & Routine
10. Conflict and Its Importance
11. Plot Pace
12. Creating Believable and Well Rounded Characters
13. Writing Dialog – Or ‘He Said, She Said’
14. Creating a Page Turner
15. Letting the Book 'Cook'
16. Self-Editing Your Novel
17. The Process of Pre-Reads
18. Creating a World of Fantasy
19. How to Write & Self-Publish a Novel: The End-To-End Process Checklist
20. Creating a Writing Environment without Interruptions
21. Reading to Write
22. Encouraging All Would Be Authors
23. The Self-Publishing Process - The COMPLETE A-Z Instructions
24. Marketing Your Novel - The Relevance of Social Media, ARCs and Book Bloggers

Black Saturday SALE - How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel 20% Off!!

Here it is, exclusively for all my wonderful blog followers and readers. Today you can buy my best selling writing self-help book, How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel, at a 20% discount - for both the ebook and the paperback!! BUT - you have to purchase the ebook from Smashwords and the paperback from Createspace (Amazon). The links are below.

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Genre: Authorship & Writing Advice

Writing and publishing your first novel is tough. It usually takes a long time. Years for most people. It can be soul destroying too. You finally complete your manuscript; you send off samples to agents and publishers, and anxiously watch the mail for the responses. Then they come in, one at a time, rejection after rejection.

How do I know this? I've been there. Does this mean I was a bad writer? No, but I could have used some help in those early days. Sure, I had purchased a few books on writing and I had tried to pay attention to the advice they gave, but there were so many of them and sometimes advice seemed to conflict other advice. It was way too much to take in.

This ebook is a series of essays solely concerned with improving your writing skills and getting your first novel successfully self-published. It is written in a way that you can keep dipping into it, and keep coming back to parts of it, time and time again. It is concise and to the point and it is written from experience; thousands of hours of experience. Every essay in this book is relevant and has a purpose. Every essay will give you pause for thought.

Can I turn you into a bestselling author? No - only you can do that. But I can set you on a path to success. I can give you clear guidelines about what not to do, and how to do things better. And I can tell you exactly how to self-publish that novel. This ebook takes your novel from the beginning and leads you along a path of self-discovery. When you have finished reading you will be Writing for Success and be someone who has a better chance than most every other wannabe author out there of becoming the next Tom Clancy, JK Rowling, Stephen King, or whoever else is your writing hero.

Read more about the book HERE

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Ebook: The regular price of the ebook is $2.99 - but if you head on over to Smashwords and use coupon code CH82X at checkout, you can get it for just $2.39 (and don't forget that at Smashwords you can read 20% of the book for FREE!!)

Paperback: The regular price of the paperback is $8.99 - but if you head over to Createspace and use coupon code PKFDDMV9 at checkout, you can get it for just $7.19

What are you waiting for! Happy Black Saturday!

Black Friday SALE - New Blood 20% Off!!

Here it is, exclusively for all my wonderful blog followers and readers. Today you can buy my latest novel, New Blood, at a 20% discount - for both the ebook and the paperback!! BUT - you have to purchase the ebook from Smashwords and the paperback from Createspace (Amazon). The links are below.

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Genre: 16+ Urban Paranormal Thriller

A single kiss can get a girl killed. But what if he's the most irresistible man you've ever met? What would you do?

In a world where big corporations are controlled by a secret society, Beau is on track to have everything he ever wanted and more. And there is only one woman that stands in his way - As long as she can resist falling in love with the man of her dreams.

In this contemporary tale of power, greed, ambition, love and death, what would you be prepared to sacrifice to have it all?

Read more about the book HERE

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Ebook: The regular price of the ebook is $2.99 - but if you head on over to Smashwords and use coupon code YE22J at checkout, you can get it for just $2.39 (and don't forget that at Smashwords you can read 20% of the book for FREE!!)

Paperback: The regular price of the paperback is $12.95 - but if you head over to Createspace and use coupon code PKFDDMV9 at checkout, you can get it for just $10.36

What are you waiting for! Happy Black Friday!

How To Avoid Your Novel Becoming a Thanksgiving Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving Day - to all of you in America. Happy November 24th, to the rest of the world!!

As many of you already know, I grew up in England and the USA was just somewhere I heard about at school and watched on TV and in the movies. I never dreamed growing up that I would end up living here. Actually there was a time when I really didn't want to live in America! But that was a long time ago. America is now my home and I've been living here for the past 16 years. What the heck, I've even embraced Thanksgiving! (and College Football - Roll Tide!!!)

So in the spirit of Thanksgiving I just wanted to write a little today about not letting your writing lead you down a path that will end with your novel being the proverbial Thanksgiving turkey!

Today I am going to write briefly about two subjects:

• Poems and Short Stories
• Creating a Good Plot

These are both excerpts from my self-help book on writing - How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel - a consistently good seller in Amazon's bookstore. You can read more about the book HERE at my author website (and pick it up for only $2.99).

Poems and Short Stories (You can read the original post HERE)

There’s no better way to practice the art of writing than to write a few poems and short stories. Have you ever tried your hand at them? It’s surprising the number of writers that have never done this. Instead they jump straight in with their first novel.

Poems
Poems are a great way to get your creative juices flowing. Why? Because they force you to either rhyme or scan or express your feelings. And most poems are quite short, probably less than 200 words or so. Stuck for a subject? Then just pick a sentence from a book and write a poem about it. It doesn’t have to be very long. Or else choose something in your house, or your son or daughter, or your cat or dog. There are a hundred different subjects you can find. Let me try my hand at a limerick:

I once had a big tiger cat
Who got incredibly fat.
I cut out her food
She got in a mood
And she swallowed my other pet, rat!

There we go, less than five minutes and that included being attacked by my cat, Pipsqueak. She’s a little one year-old tabby by the way. The point is it’s not that difficult to write poems and practice the art of writing. As we’ve said already, the more you write, the better you will get.

Short Stories
Onto short stories. The beauty of short stories is that you don’t have to sit at the keyboard for days on end to finish them. Ideally, short stories should be somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 words in length. Assuming you write at about 1,000 words an hour, you can see you’ve only got to write for three to ten hours. I write at about 1300 to 1600 words an hour usually, so I ought to be able to write a short story in two to seven and a half hours. That’s only a couple of days work! Think about it, you can have a complete story in two days! 

How do you write a short story? First spend a day or so planning the story. Lay out a simple plot, introduce a couple of characters, add some conflict and there you go. Then jot down somewhere between ten and twenty story points. Next re-order them to make sure the pace of the story is correct and the conflicts are in all the right places. Finally, start writing. The objective is simple. For each story point you are going to write somewhere between 300 and 500 words. Don’t worry about getting it exactly right, just write. Don’t self-edit, don’t re-read what you’ve written. Just write each story point and move onto the next. At the end of your exercise you’ll have a short story that will be ready for editing at some point in the future. And I’ll say this again; just leave the story and let it mature on its own in the dark. Article fourteen in this series, Letting the book ‘cook’, discusses why you should do this. For now just be happy that you’ve written a short story (cont)...

Creating a Good Plot (You can read the original post HERE)

Creating a good plot for a novel is a lot more difficult than you might imagine. It’s one thing having a story in your head, but actually getting it down on paper and turning it into something that is 80,000 words or so is no small task. If you have tried to create a short story as was suggested in the previous article, you already have an understanding of story points. As I wrote before, a short story needs between ten and twenty story points, but a full-length novel is going to need a couple of hundred! Do you have enough ideas to make a story progress through two hundred bullet points?

So how do you get to this place? I like to start simple and expand on it. I start with the ten to twenty story points of the short story type and see what else I can intersperse. Maybe that will get me to forty or fifty, but I will still be a long way short. How do I dramatically increase this number so there are lots of exciting things for the reader to read about?

First it is important to understand that novels of 80,000 words don’t just come from people’s minds on their own. They need planning. Lots of planning. Most writers have an idea for two or three major plot twists and what the ending is going to be. But that’s about it. Hence the ten to twenty story points. The exercise here is to dramatically increase those story points. This is where you need to think of other things that can be happening in your story – the sub-plots. All good novels have sub-plots. Several of them. Maybe they involve the major characters or maybe they involve other minor characters, but there at least has to be some cross-over between main plot and sub-plots. If you watch any good movie on TV you will see this in action. Okay so the movie is boy meets girl; boy dates girl; girl leaves boy; boy has change of heart; boy and girl live happily ever after, but there are a lot of other things that happen along the way. If all movies were simply the plot outlined above, no one would watch the movie. Sure, we know that in the end the boy and the girl will live happily ever after (usually), but it’s the journey there that makes up the movie. Lots of sub-plots are thrown in and these sub-plots are full of conflict, emotion and everything that could possibly go wrong, going wrong. That’s what makes a movie special. It’s no different for novels. Conflict and disaster and emotion keep readers turning pages. The reader wants the happy ending but feels compelled to read through all the drama so that they can get there. Hopefully they stay invested with the main character during this journey as well.

The secret is to add enough story points on top of your twenty to fifty to reach at least a hundred, preferably a hundred and fifty. And I say this because by the time you’ve finished writing you’re going to need all two hundred of those story points, no matter what (cont)...

Now go and enjoy your Thanksgiving turkey and later spend the time to invest in your writing career.

How To Live a Synchronized Life (Electronically) - Part Three

Part Three - The Ultimate Compromise

Read Part One HERE
Read Part Two HERE

So, we've wound forward to November 2011 and I've finally come to the conclusion that my trusty iPad doesn't cut it for me when I want to write chapters of my book, or knock out a quick blog post. For that I need something with a keyboard.

In my quest to find the perfect companion to my iPhone and desktop PC, I scoured Amazon and read a million reviews. Should I buy the Macbook Air? Seems pretty nice and compact. But the downside was that it cost $1,000 and was not as Windows friendly as everything else I already used. So, how about the PC equivalent? I found several really nice looking mini-laptops that were Macbook Air knock-offs, but each was also around the $1,000 mark. Not really a cost effective compromise.

In the end I stumbled across the HP Mini 110-3830NR, a mini-netbook from Hewlett Packard that seemed to promise a lot for its very diminutive size. What's more, it was only $279 - a price I could live with. The netbook promised up to 8 hours of battery life, full Windows 7 compatibility, access to all my existing programs, and of course a real (if not slightly smaller) keyboard. Would I be in pig heaven at last?

I decided to take the plunge, paid the extra couple of bucks for next day delivery, and eagerly awaited my mini-lifesaver. It duly arrived just over a week ago and I unpacked it, amazed at just how small it was. It's really not any bigger than my iPad when it's closed up, and the quality of the screen and general construction are excellent. I am pleased to say I have not been disappointed. So, let's go back to my original wishlist of three years ago and see how I've done:

• Editing plot ideas and having them synchronized for when I got home? - YES 
• Write a page or two of my book? - YES 
• Check and respond to emails wherever I am? - YES 
• Sit in a hotel room and crank out a chapter? - YES 
• Do some reading / social media? - MOSTLY

And I say mostly on the last point because the netbook is not really a reader, but it does allow reading, and for relatively short periods of time will be fine. I'll get a chance to give it a real try over the Christmas holidays when I try and read a few books. I may have to steal my wife's Kindle reader, but we'll see! But in the meantime my digital synchronized life is complete... At least for another year!

Thanksgiving Promotions & Author Re-Branding

As we enter the final few days before Thanksgiving, I thought I'd spend a few moments telling you what I'm planning over the coming week. I'm also giving an update on how my author re-branding exercise continues.

Firstly on the promotions front, I have decided to embrace Black Friday (and Saturday) and also Cyber Monday and offer different promotions every day. So just two more days until the fun begins. Why not take the opportunity now to head over to Amazon and buy a copy of my first published novel, Xannu - The Prophecy. It's only $0.99 and represents a great bargain for what has been described as a 'wonderful read.' As you may guess, I'm not going to be discounting this great book any further!!

So, onto the re-branding. As I've recently posted, I've updated and redesigned my main website, pauldorset.com. I've also spent some time to update other sites that build on my branding. All my trending tweets can be found at tweets.pauldorset.com and as from today, you can also find this blog at blog.pauldorset.com. Then for all you Facebook fanatics, you can friend me at facebook.com/pdorset27. I believe it's important to build a platform on which you can be successful that uses everything you have at your disposal. Branding is about consistency. Now that I have successfully ported everything underneath the PaulDorset umbrella, I can start to make better use of my brand.

So, there we have it. Watch out for the Thanksgiving promotions and take a look at all my branded sites.

Emoticons & Texting - C U L8R - Right or Wrong?

I've seen a lot of articles in the press recently concerning emoticons and text message abbreviations. Most of those articles have been written by older members of our society. And most of those articles have come out against the use of both topics.

I guess I could also be considered an 'older member of society'; after all I am over 50 years of age now (a scary thought in itself). So I thought I'd spend a little time today writing about the prevelance of emoticons and word and sentence abbreviations.

The main argument against the use of these things seems to be that they make reading more difficult and that young people today should learn how to write properly and use real grammar and words in sentences. I wonder if those very people would have said the same thing to Shakespeare if they had been living in his day? Actually it may even be the other way around. Shakespeare would cetainly have great difficulty understanding most modern day books and comics. Our usage of the English language has changed considerably over the past four hundred years.

My point is that language, over time, evolves. Who's to say that writing 'see you later' is more correct than 'c u l8r'? Maybe in another hundred years, we'll all be writing that way. We shouldn't be making judgments on how our language is evolving. Only time will determine what sticks and what doesn't. After all, I am writing this article using a host of abbreviated words. Even a couple of hundred years ago, such a thing would have been severely frowned upon, yet now it is perfectly acceptable. New words enter our everyday vocabulary each year. Should we poo poo those as well?

As a writer I try to embrace the use of modern concepts and new ways of expressing myself. Sure, I don't always want to write in shorthand note form or use emoticons with gay abandon, but I'm not going to criticize their use. Who was it that said we should never stand in the way of progrerss? Emoticons and text messaging abbreviations are progress - in their own minor way.

?4U @TEOTD will U <33 me more?   

And if you're interested in a more comprehensive list of abbreviations, take a look here: http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/textmessageabbreviations.asp

How To Live a Synchronized Life (Electronically) - Part Two

Part Two - Three Years of Trying

It all started back in late 2008 when T-Mobile released the very first Android smartphone (The T-Mobile G1). This was a wonderful day for me. I'd been using a Blackberry phone for a couple of years, but the Android phone was several steps further forward. At last I had true web-browsing, email, alerts, music and more all on one phone. My life was complete! Or was it? I soon found out that the slide out keyboard really was a little bit of a pain and the Android phone was fairly slow at doing quite a few things. Add to that the relatively small screen size when viewing web pages and although the phone was a big step forward from my Blackberry, it wasn't the be all to end all that I had hoped for. I still needed my desktop and laptop PC.

Let's look back at my original list and see what was better:

• Editing plot ideas and having them synchronized for when I got home? - NO
• Write a page or two of my book? - NO
• Check and respond to emails wherever I am? - YES
• Sit in a hotel room and crank out a chapter? - NO
• Do some reading / social media? - MAYBE

So, not such a huge success!

Wind forward 18 months or so and I decided to go the Apple iPhone route. This was about 3 months after getting myself an iPod and using it for all sorts of things. What impressed me the most were the apps - thousands of them that did just about everything.

Did the iPhone make a huge difference to me and do all the things I wanted? No. But I was getting closer.  And then when the iPad came out, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Surely this was the answer to all my dreams? With the iPad I was suddenly able to synchronize things across all sorts of platforms and do some really useful work wherever I happened to be. Specific iPad apps started to appear and I thought I was finally going to be able to cross everything off my list and retire to the ultimate device.

I have had an iPad for about 18 months now and it has made a huge difference to my productivity. But there is one area where it just doesn't quite cut it. The area of typing. For surfing, notes, apps and lots of other things besides, it is a brilliant tool. But for cranking out a few pages or a chapter of my book, it falls a long way short. I even bought myself a bluetooth keyboard that I take with me when I go to hotels, but this really defeats the purpose of an iPad. The extra bulk and weight cancel out the benefits.

So, that brings us to November 2011. What is the next step forward? How can I solve all my desires and find the ultimate technological helper? In part three of this article I'll tell you how I've compromised in order to be able to write wherever I travel, but still have everything else available to me.

Read Part Three HERE

Author Paul Dorset - In The Press!!

I've been in the press quite a lot during the past two weeks. Following are some of the links to articles about me. The article is entitled: New Blood: Melrose Offers Something for Older Teens, Young Adults, and Their Parents.

Here are some links:

• http://www.jacketflap.com/megablog/index.asp?postid=999646
• http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/48581/new-blood-melrose-offers-something-older-teens-young-adults-and-their-parents
• http://www.imdb.com/news/ni17686528/
• http://www.buzzbox.com/news/2011-11-05/blood:melrose/?clusterId=6175258
• http://buffaloathome.com/dct/54/id/18784/mid/2135/For-Readers-Who-Cut-Their-Teeth-on-Vampires.aspx
• http://holdyourfuture.com/new-blood-melrose-offers-something-for-older-teens-young-adults-and-their-parents/
• http://www.birminghamtimesonline.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7398:for-readers-who-cut-their-teeth-on-vampires&catid=1:latest-news&fontstyle=f-larger
• http://www.dreadcentral.com/horror-books

To quote one article:

Here at Dread Central we talk a lot about raising your kids to be horror fans, and one of the best ways to do that is through reading. But how do you keep them interested once they’ve outgrown the high school drama and simple romance of typical adolescent genre fiction? one option is Paul Dorset’s New Blood: Melrose.

Dorset, a British native who lives near Seattle, Washington, says it’s important to give young adults books that offer them something to chew on intellectually without being overly graphic, something that both parents and their young adult kids can have fun with and talk about – without blushing...

So, please click a link and take a look...

And then jump over to my author website to find out where you can get a copy of the book: http://pauldorset.com/NewBlood.html

The Dickensian Hippo - A Limerick

A few days ago I wrote a small limerick about a Hippo. It didn't take much time, and was a fun little project. I even got several comments from readers who enjoyed it. Well, in true fashion, a few days away from something often means you can come back to the project and make some improvements. The Hippo limerick proves the point. So without further ado, here's the updated version.

A Dickensian hippo named Roger
Moved into my house as a lodger.
We got along great;
'Til his payments were late.
So I ousted that fat artful dodger. 


Have a great day!

Pet Peeve - Twitter TrueTwit Validation

So as you know, I'm a fairly big and active Twitter user. I also make a point to @reply to people and follow them back to help them grow their network. It's what I do! In all honesty I wish I had another ten hours a day and then I could talk more and be more personal with my followers, but life is what it is and I do the best I can.

But there's one thing that really irks me about some people who use Twitter. And it's not those people who choose to keep their accounts 'private' (that's their choice). No the Twitter users that annoy me are those that use the TrueTwit service. Actually I thought at first that these people were in fact 'true twits' but maybe that's a little unfair! Why do I get peeved with these people? Well, quite simply a lot of them are people that initially followed me and I try to follow back. Seems straightforward enough. Instead, I get some email about having to validate myself in order to follow them. Well guess what, I never bother. Life is way too short to prove to someone that I'm a human being and not a bot of some description.

So nice friendly Twitter people - please, please, please, forget about this piece of software. Does it really matter who follows you on Twitter? Seriously?

Pet peeve over for the day!

How To Live a Synchronized Life (Electronically) - Part One

Part One - The Challenge

As some of you may already know, I live my alter non-author ego in the world of technology. Actually I think this is something that has helped me become a better Indie Author as the proliferation of self-publishing sites and software has evolved.

So today I thought I'd write a little about that other world I live in, in the hope that it is of some use to the rest of you out there. Let me start by defining my day-to-day problems. During a typical month I need to:

• Travel to an office 'day' job
• Continue writing upcoming novels
• Market existing books and generally keep up with Social Networking sites
• Travel for weekends away
• Check my email and calendar from anywhere
• Ensure that everything on all my electronic devices stays synced

It's a tough challenge and something that I am sure most of you are already familiar with. So how have I managed - someone who is supposed to be tech-savvy? Well first off, let me tell you that I still have not found the perfect solution. I live in hope of a fold-up PC with the power of a desktop, the closed footprint of a phone, and something able to give me, on demand, a screen that is at least 11 inches in size. Have I come close? Yes. But I'm still not there yet.

To give you a better understanding of why I need this synchronization, here are a few of my detailed challenges:

• I want to be able to edit my plot ideas from wherever I am and have them available to me when I get home
• I want to be able to write a page or two of my book if I suddenly get a great idea or I'm stuck somewhere with some time
• I want to be able to check and respond to all my emails wherever I am
• I want to be able to sit in a hotel room at 6 in the morning and crank out a chapter of my book
• I want to be able to read what other people are saying about different topics and maybe contribute some feedback to them
• I want to...

You get the idea. I'm no different to the rest of you out there. So that's it, the electronically synchronized challenge.

In the next post I'll give a little background to how I've tried to solve the problems during the past three years; what has worked and what hasn't. And then in the final post I'll write about the solution I currently use and the advantages and disadvantages to it all. I'm getting close to an ideal. Technology may soon not actually get in the way of real work!

Read Part Two HERE

New Blood - The Paperback

Did you know you can get my latest book, New Blood as a paperback? Probably not! And that's because I am always promoting it as an ebook. Well, believe it or not you can buy my latest paranormal thriller in real book form. And just for you today, I have a special offer for you. If you head to my New Blood page, buy the book and check-out using code YQF733H7, you can save $2.00 on the normal paperback price of $12.95. That's a pretty sweet deal!

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A single kiss can get a girl killed. But what if he's the most irresistible man you've ever met? What would you do?

New Blood (Melrose Part 1) - Genre: 16+ Young Adult Urban Paranormal Thriller

In a world where big corporations are controlled by a secret society, Beau is on track to have everything he ever wanted and more. And there is only one woman that stands in his way - As long as she can resist falling in love with the man of her dreams.

In this contemporary tale of power, greed, ambition, love and death, what would you be prepared to sacrifice to have it all? 

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Spotlight: Xannu - The Prophecy

This is the second in a series of spotlight articles on some of my books. Now that I have finally redesigned my official Author website, it's going to be much easier to point people to individual books I have published. Today the spotlight falls upon the first novel I ever wrote, back in 2003, Xannu - The Prophecy.

Although first published nearly ten years ago and published this year as an ebook, Xannu - The Prophecy continues to receive great reviews and calls for the later books in the series. So, what's the book about?

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Genre: Young Adult Epic Fantasy (approx 125,000 words)
Xannu - The Prophecy (Book 1 of The Southern Lands series)


Would you wake up in a hot sweat if you lived your night’s dreams as a soldier battling un-earthly creatures, witnessing powerful magic and fighting to save your own life on a daily basis?

English schoolboy Terry West does. Frequently. After digging up some rune coins near a roman road, he has been living in another world inhabited by warlocks, seductresses, priests and prophecy. There Terry is a soldier, Teern Truthbringer, who has been tasked with finding the Xannu - 'he who will lead the people into deliverance.'

If only it wasn’t real; but it is. Very real. When it all began it was even enjoyable, but now Terry’s life is getting very complicated. Somehow he involved his best friend Joe and although it had seemed a good idea at the time, the consequences had been dire. Then there is Susan, the leggy sister of klutzy school-friend Brian. Why does she keep sending him messages?

Terry is struggling to balance the two lives he leads and every day he is losing his grip on reality just a little bit more. He’s been forced to kill enemies; his companion, the magical woman Maria, is scaring him half to death with her abilities; and his parents are on his back about his school work.

How will he balance the two lives he leads, solve two sets of problems, and understand the lessons he receives from both? Only time will tell. But time is something Terry doesn't have too much of, as everything is unfolding in ways he could never have imagined!

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So, how much does it cost you ask? Currently it's a bargain at only $0.99 as an ebook. The full details are on my website. Why not jump over there and take a look. Just click the link HERE. Alternatively you can go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Smashwords and hunt it down. Also, remember, if you jump to Smashwords, you can read 20% of the book for FREE! That's not a bad deal!

Limericks - A Little Fun

I thought it was about time I did something a little different for a blog post, so today I'm posting a couple of Limericks...

Limericks are a good way to get the creative juices flowing if you're ever stuck with something to write. The form and the rhyming, force you to concentrate and also be succinct in what you write. So anyway, without further ado, here's my first limerick - a limerick based on my author name:

There once was an author named Dorset
Whose finger got stuck in a faucet.
He pulled and he pushed,
His finger got mushed.
The moral is gently; don’t force it!

Next up is a limerick I wrote about an unusual pet:

I once knew a hippo named Roger
Who happened to be my paid lodger.
We got along great;
'Til his payments were late
And I ousted that fat artful dodger.

So there you have it - limericks. Read this article at Wikipedia and have a go yourself. It's a fun way to spend a couple of hours!

Spotlight: How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel

This is the first in a series of spotlight articles on some of my books. Now that I have finally redesigned my official Author website, it's going to be much easier to point people to individual books I have published. Today the spotlight falls upon my How To for authors, How To Write & Self-Publish Your First Novel.

I initially wrote this book as a series of blog articles on this very blog. And then people kept asking me more questions, and then even more questions. In the end I decided to publish it as an ebook, and then a couple of months ago as a paperback. So, what's the book about?

Here's the introduction:

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Writing and publishing your first novel is tough. It usually takes a long time. Years for most people. It can be soul destroying too. You finally complete your manuscript; you send off samples to agents and publishers, and anxiously watch the mail for the responses. Then they come in, one at a time, rejection after rejection.

How do I know this? I've been there. Does this mean I was a bad writer? No, but I could have used some help in those early days. Sure, I had purchased a few books on writing and I had tried to pay attention to the advice they gave, but there were so many of them and sometimes advice seemed to conflict other advice. It was way too much to take in.

But I persevered with my writing and now I have been writing for several years and I have completed several novels and other books, and my writing is a lot better. My early novels could still do with some major re-editing (which they will be finally getting this summer), but my later works, oh wow I can spot the differences!

So, a few months ago I decided I would go the self-publishing route to getting my books out there in the big world. Things are changing in the book markets and so many people now have Kindles and Nooks and iPads and other electronic book readers. I thought to myself, why not do it myself? I know I can write; I have that confidence. Enough complete strangers have told me they like what I write, so why shouldn't I join that list of published authors? And why should I have to wait for some agent or publisher to take a chance on an unknown author before I get published? So I did it, and now I have the story to tell and the method you can use to generate your own success.

This ebook is a series of essays solely concerned with improving your writing skills and getting your first novel successfully self-published. It is written in a way that you can keep dipping into it, and keep coming back to parts of it, time and time again. It is concise and to the point and it is written from experience; thousands of hours of experience. Every essay in this book is relevant and has a purpose. Every essay will give you pause for thought.

Can I turn you into a bestselling author? No - only you can do that. But I can set you on a path to success. I can give you clear guidelines about what not to do, and how to do things better. And I can tell you exactly how to self-publish that novel. This ebook takes your novel from the beginning and leads you along a path of self-discovery. When you have finished reading you will be Writing for Success and be someone who has a better chance than most every other wannabe author out there of becoming the next Tom Clancy, JK Rowling, Stephen King, or whoever else is your writing hero.

Good luck!


The Book covers topics such as: Creating a good plot, writing in the first and third person, creating believable characters, writing dialog, show versus tell, and lots more besides. There are twenty-four essays to help you on your way to becoming a successfully published author.

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So, how much does it cost you ask? Currently it's $2.99 as an ebook and $8.99 as a paperback. The full details are on my website. Why not jump over there and take a look. Just click the link HERE. Alternatively you can go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Smashwords and hunt it down. Also, remember, if you jump to Smashwords, you can read 20% of the book for FREE! That's not a bad deal!

PaulDorset.com - Updating My Official Author Website

I spent a good deal of the weekend redesigning and updating my long forgotten official author website at PaulDorset.com. It's not that I didn't care. It's not that I didn't want to. It was really a case of making the time, knowing it was going to take me several hours (Hmmm, maybe several, several hours!).

A lot has happened this year and the original focus of my website was purely around my YA Fantasy books, Xannu. The website was fine until recently. But I now have 7 published books (with more on the way) and it was time to turn the website into something more representative of everything I do. So I bit the bullet and did the work.

I am very pleased with the end result. The website is now a showcase for all my books and it is easy to navigate your way around and find the details on any of the books I have published. What's more, there are direct links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords for each of my books. I also added buttons to follow me on Twitter, Facebook and direct links back to my blog.

So, if you have a couple of minutes today, please click on the picture below and head on over. Oh, and please don't forget to leave me a little feedback. Do you like the new look? I'd love to know.

How To Promote Your Twitter Followers (with Paper.Li)

It’s always nice to get your tweets re-tweeted by someone else, isn’t it? It’s also nice when other people @message you. It makes you feel special.

But what about making other people on Twitter feel special? And what if you could do it with very little effort? Now you’re talking!

If you’ve been using Twitter for any amount of time you’ve probably discovered, or even use, Twitter lists. They’re really easy to set up and I’m not going to go into the details here. (Just remember, you can only put 500 people in each list and there’s a 20 list maximum for each Twitter user). But what do you use these lists for? If you’re anything like me, probably for filtering your friends’ tweets into manageable chunks. Still with me? Okay, now what if I told you there was also a way to use these lists to promote your Twitter friends?

Meet Paper.Li, your Twitter followers’ friend! Paper.Li takes a Twitter list as input and then once a day publishes a digital newspaper based on your friends’ best tweets that have links attached. Want an example? Then click HERE. Impressive eh? What is more, when the paper is published Paper.Li automatically sends a tweet to your timeline referencing the digital newspaper AND highlighting a few of the contributors it has chosen. Wow! Automatic Twitter friend promotion! Your followers will love it and re-tweet the link and probably thank you in a tweet as well. Then, as an added bonus, you can always click the link and get a day’s digest of your friends’ tweeted links.

Writing this post has already inspired me to go create some extra lists and newspapers. I guess I’ve got even more promotional work to do now! For the rest of you, head over to Paper.Li and set up an account there. It’s straightforward and very self-explanatory. Then let their website do your Twitter friend marketing for you. Your followers will thank you. They will think you are performing tirelessly on their behalf. Maybe you won’t want to spoil that illusion for them. Or maybe it’s a secret you do want to share. I’ll leave that part up to you.

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This article was first published as a guest post on Molly Greene's blog.

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Xannu - The Prophecy: A Wonderful New 4 Star Review

Yesterday I received a wonderful new 4 Star review of Xannu - The Prophecy, the first novel I published back in 2003 as a paperback, and subsequently released this year as an ebook. You can read the original review on Amazon and Goodreads. Sometimes, when the going gets tough as an Indie author, it's wonderful to read that you touched someone with something you wrote. Like I've said before, you can't please all of the people all of the time, but it don't half feel good when someone likes what you wrote! Why not try it out? It's only $0.99 on Amazon!!

Here's the review I received:

Xannu - The Prophecy is further proof that commercial publishers have no monopoly on writing talent or writing quality. This is a good read with believable and entertaining characters, and a plot that pulls you along. 

Dorset sets up a YA fantasy that follows many of the conventions of the genre: an invented world where countries have strange names, technology is at the level of the middle ages and magic works. Strange monsters plague humanity. At first, that was a turn-off for me. I am looking for something different. But I found that right at the beginning of Xannu - The Prophecy when the main character has a conversation with the Power Almighty. 

Dorset also inserts another twist on the fantasy trope with characters who travel between his invented world and a very prosaic, middle-class suburban reality. That's not really new, of course - think CS Lewis - but I really identified with Dorset's homey characterizations. He is very good at breathing life into his characters. 

All his characters are fallible and funny, even the Power Almighty and his opposite, the power of evil. There's a lot of humour, from the personality of the bumbling warrior-hero, to the frustrated ire of the Power Almighty (not so almighty, it seems), to the name of the tall quasi-humans, "Upthairs." 

Now, personally, I was a little dismayed by the appearance of the princess and other royalty in this book. Maybe that's just me, but I enjoy stories about regular people far more. Still, in this plot, the royalty makes sense. And again, they are believable characters in their roles. 

The quality of writing is very high in this e-book. There were no more typos or formatting errors than I have seen in typical print books from the biggest publishers. With books like this available on e-bookstores, there's no way that the big publishers can claim to be better than any independent author. 

There is only one drawback: to get to the end of the actual story, I have to buy the next book in the series!

Second Book Signing Event - New Blood

Yep, tonight is the second book signing event for my latest novel, New Blood. 11/1/11 it was JJ Mahoney's, an Irish Pub in the city of Redmond, WA, and tonight, 11/3/11, it's the turn of The Three Lions Pub in the same city. Why these pubs you ask? Well quite simply, they are featured in the book! A little notoriety if you will.

So, if you live in or around Redmond, why not come on down to the pub tonight at 7:00pm and pick up your own signed copy of the book. It'll be a fun evening.

In the meantime, in case you've forgotten about the book, here are the details. See you later.

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A single kiss can get a girl killed. But what if he's the most irresistible man you've ever met? What would you do?

New Blood (Melrose Part 1) - Genre: 16+ Young Adult Urban Paranormal Thriller

In a world where big corporations are controlled by a secret society, Beau is on track to have everything he ever wanted and more. And there is only one woman that stands in his way - As long as she can resist falling in love with the man of her dreams.

In this contemporary tale of power, greed, ambition, love and death, what would you be prepared to sacrifice to have it all?

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Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords for only $2.99