For a great many years, the sharing of stories, mythology, fables and legends has helped to create and maintain the unique cultures all over the world.  Over time, these stories have been passed down from grandparents to parents to children, and this has always been an important way to preserve culture and heritage.  We can see very early evidence of this in rock paintings by indigenous people around the world. Effectively, fairy tales and nursery rhymes serve the same purpose. As time goes on, new stories and memories continue to be created. This is often true when a family leaves their country of origin and move elsewhere in the world. Their children are brought up as "locals" and can sadly lose the essence of the own culture and heritage. Whilst integrating into your new homeland and the local culture is important, it is just as important for your kids to have some kind of connection to their country of origin; be it by birth or family heritage. Man...

Savvy self-published authors understand that publishing their book is just the start of their journey. Most authors have written and published their book with the intent of it being read. They usually have an idea about who they wrote it for (the target audience), but effectively sharing the fact that their professional quality ebook exists is the purpose of book marketing/publicity. Sometimes your affordable book publishing service will be able to organise book marketing/publicity support for you, just as they would with book cover designs and their book typesetting service. But often authors will need to either source their own book publicist or look after these functions themselves. The place to begin, when creating your marketing and publicity plan, is with determining your target reader audience and where to reach them. For example, if you have published a children's book, you will promote it very differently than a business book. Whether available via Print on Dem...

At this time of year, many of us take the opportunity to look back over the year that has passed, and take account of what we feel we achieved in the various sectors of our lives.  A bit of a break and distance over the Christmas break rewards us with some perspective about what we wish to achieve in the New Year. Perhaps you finished writing your book during the course of the year. That's a fantastic achievement. Or was it completed a few years ago, and is still hidden in your computer files? Many aspiring authors have already made a great start on their fiction or non-fiction book, and may even have finished it, but are unsure about the next step. Therefore, they don't take any action and another year passes without being able to say they are the published author of a Professional quality Ebook. During the next few weeks, as you take some time out from your normal occupation or daily routine, I encourage you to create an achievable plan that will put you on...

When creating your novel, there is an abundance of information to be found online about book cover designs, manuscript assessments/copy editing/proofreading, as well as practical tools such as book typesetting services and essential topics such as book marketing/publicity. But the practical parts of publishing, like print on demand and Ebook distribution, are just part of the puzzle to creating and publishing your first novel.  Most of the real blood, sweat and tears takes place at the start, when drafting and writing your novel and a lot of it comes down to character. When you've spent months, or indeed years, slaving over your novel, there is nothing worse than a reader saying that your characters were 'thin', soulless or otherwise unbelievable.  Writers could learn a lot from actors, who use tools such as 'Method Acting' or the 'Michael Chekhov Acting Technique' to achieve robust, deep and authentic characters. Several world class actors ...