Friday, October 30, 2009

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY

THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY
by James Welch
I had to push myself through THE DEATH OF JIM LONEY (Harper & Row/1979). This was Welch's third novel and a pretty shabby work in comparison to what he would produce in the future (meaning FOOL CROWS and THE HEARTSONG OF CHARGING ELK). I consider Welch one of the best writers I have read. The protagonist, Jim Loney, is a loser from the outset, who in the end is shot to death by an Indian policeman for a killing which was accidental. The novel is primarily a character study of the low-lifes around an Indian reservation in Montana. Loney is a half breed, torn between two cultures, and is an uneducated, aimless wino. He has a sister, who wants to rescue him as does his attractive girlfriend, a white school teacher from Texas. He doesn't want to be saved because of the emptiness of his soul. He has never recovered from being abandoned, along with his sister, by his reckless mother and his drunken father. Had this been the first Welch book I read, I would have skipped the others at a great loss to myself since his later books are wonders to be treasured.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

New Indie-author outlet

Like most Indie authors I am always on the outlook to expand the distribution network of my novels, for sale and for free. Recently, I discovered obooko, a year-old free eBook site based in Great Britain. The process of uploading your book onto obooko is very simple indeed. Obooko distributes novels, nonfiction, and poetry worldwide on the PDF platform so that the potential audience needs only a computer rather than an eBook or Kindle-type device.
Adding to the pleasure of finding obooko onto which I loaded my novels, THE DREAM DANCER and THE JYNX, I discovered a link to BookCoverPro, which sells modestly-priced programs to rather easily create your own book covers. I went through some agony in the past trying to figure out a means of designing book covers transferable to the web for full-cover paperbacks and front cover eBooks. I failed to find any that would do the job for a reasonable cost.
BookCoverPro was the answer to my cover-creating crisis. Like most authors, my computer skills are limited. I spent a couple of weeks struggling through the process of the first cover. I did the second cover in half an hour. I bought the program with the intention of doing covers for six novels so the price didn’t put me off: there are two BookCoverPro programs, the standard for $97 and the deluxe for $187.
In a future blog, I will provide my guide for the Indie-author with limited computer skills, like me, to put together a cover with the BookCoverPro program.

A suggestion: My novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.