Publishing Consultation via Phone or Skype

It’s a budget-friendly way (only $79) to get started with your publishing process, building your platform and marketing your book(s).  Consider discussing your book with an experienced (30+ years) publishing and book marketing professional, in a personalized conversation.

This package includes a meeting of up to 3 hours – or two meetings of 1,5 hours via phone in North America or Skype (worldwide).  And if 3 consultation sessions, each an hour, is more convenient for you, that’s fine too.

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Great Benefit for Your Publishing Ambitions, if :

• You are you thinking about publishing your own book?
• Do you have a book you think will sell but don’t know how to market it?
• Do you want to start seriously publishing in POD (Print-on-Demand)?
• Do you want to learn all the in-and-outs of navigating Social Media?
• Do you want to avoid costly mistakes and time-consuming “trial and errors”?
• Do you want to do it right from the beginning, publishing in a professional way?

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How it Works:
As better you are prepared as more you will get out of our “meeting”.  Write down all your questions you might have in regards of publishing and book marketing.  Prior to our conversation, you’ll fill out a comprehensive questionnaire, designed to familiarize us with your opportunities and audience.  We will buy and read your e-book or go through parts of your manuscript if it is a print book only and study / evaluate the questionnaire, once it is filled out and returned to us.
After the consultation session you will get an analysis of your book and/or your publishing concept.

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Practical, Results-Driven Steps.
Your consultation will focus on your most effective strategies for your book marketing and will help you prioritize practical, results-driven steps to best promote you and your book.  If you haven’t published before we will help you to become familiar with all the possibilities available and their pro’s and con’s, so that you can make an informed decision and avoid the many traps that are out there.

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Topics We Will Discuss:
We will provide a comprehensive introduction to book marketing as well as more targeted feedback on specific concerns and questions, including but not limited to:

• Evaluating your cover art, cover copy, author bio, and pricing strategy
• Ensuring that your book looks professional, not self-published
• Having your book in print, e-book and audio format
• Building your platform and author brand
• Social media opportunities such as Google+, Goodreads, Twitter, FB, Pinterest etc.)
• Working with a traditional publisher or POD
• Where to get an ISBN, find editors, e-book formatters, lay-outers, cover artists
• Selling through Amazon and other online retailers
• How to get book reviews – before and after your book launch
• Book Distribution and direct book sales
• Public Relation and media campaigns
• Possibilities of translations or foreign right sales
• Getting bookstores and libraries to carry your book – worldwide
• How to avoid traps at “self publishing” and “vanity publishers”

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After your consultation, we will send you a follow-up guide with hundreds of tips and links that will help you with your future publishing and book marketing activities. This way you don’t have to get distracted by taking notes while we are talking, and you will always have a “blueprint” for future book publishing.

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Our publishing and book marketing consultation and coaching is appropriate for and can be tailored to writers who are going the traditionally or the self-publishing route.

A very affordable fee of only ***US $79*** allows every author to get professional advice and help.  Order secure and conveniently via PayPal.

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Key West for Writers

Key West Literary Seminar

Every year in January this literary seminar takes place, and several writing contests are running.  Key West was always popular with writers.  Key West was to have been just a stopping-off point for Hemingway when he arrived on the ferry from Havana in 1928. 

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Hemingway Did Not Plan to Stay Long.
But the Ford automobile that should have been waiting at the docks was delayed, so the embarrassed car merchant offered the author accommodations at the Trevor and Morris Apartments located above the dealership.  Soon after, Hemingway moved into a Spanish colonial villa at 907 Whitehead St., which was his home through December 1939.  Now a registered National Historic Landmark, the home is open to the public as a museum honoring the island's most famous literary resident.

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Tennessee Williams Worked in Key West Too.
During the years Tennessee Williams lived in Key West, FL, he swam at South Beach every morning before sitting down to write.  “I work everywhere,” Williams said of Key West, “but I work best here.”
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EMERGING WRITER AWARDS:
Poets and writers living in the United States who have not yet published a book with a major publisher are eligible to apply.  Three Emerging Writer Awards are presented each year:
- Poetry
- Short Story
- Novel-in-progress

Winners receive full tuition support for the January Seminar and Workshop Program, round-trip airfare, lodging, a $500 honorarium, and the opportunity to appear on stage during the Seminar.   Runners-up for each award will also be offered financial assistance packages.  http://www.kwls.org/awards/emerging-writer-awards/  

NO ENTRY FEE.

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Help to STOP Monsanto - Organic Consumers Assoc.

Reblogged from https://action.organicconsumers.org/content_item/oca-email?email_blast_KEY=1356594

You be the judge. If you could be “judge for a day,” which of Monsanto’s crimes would you take the most satisfaction in prosecuting? Would you hold the world’s most famous corporate criminal accountable for poisoning the people of Monte Maíz, Argentina—the “City of Death”—where glyphosate has caused a huge spike in miscarriages and cancer? Would you bring down the hammer of justice on Monsanto for making the lives of India’s farmers so desperate that nearly 300,000 of them have committed suicide? Or would you look closer to home, where here in the U.S. Monsanto's calculated infiltration of regulatory agencies resulted in the unleashing of cancer-causing GMO's into our food system without safety testing? Where non-GMO farmers whose crops are contaminated by nearby GMO crops are sued by Monsanto for “illegally growing” the company’s patented seeds? Where Monsanto's attacks on independent scientists and journalists have ruined careers? And most recently, where the Biotech Bully’s big spending corrupted our democracy to the point where Congress ignored the will of 90 percent of American citizens and instead, at Monsanto’s bidding, stripped Americans of the most basic right to know if our food has been contaminated with toxic pesticide-drenched GMOs? Monsanto’s crimes against human health and the environment, on a global scale, are well-documented. And yet, with great arrogance, diabolical planning and riches acquired at the expense of human suffering and irreparable harm to the environment, Monsanto carries on with business as usual, even as it looks to merge with yet another corporate criminal, Bayer. With less than a week to go, we are far short of our fall online fundraising goal. Fortunately, corporate heroes like Mercola.com and Dr. Bronner’s have stepped up with a matching funds offer—but we need your help to raise $85,000 by midnight Friday, September 16. If like us, you believe Monsanto has to be stopped, please make a contribution today.  You can donate online, by phone or by mail, details here. On October 15-16, in The Hague, Netherlands, a panel of five distinguished international judges and numerous lawyers will hear testimony from 29 witnesses representing five continents. OCA will pay for many of these witnesses to fly to The Hague, so they can tell the world how Monsanto has devastated their lives, their farms, their careers, their countries. The International Monsanto Tribunal is a citizens’ initiative. It is being organized by the people, to give Monsanto’s victims a voice, on an international stage. While the opinions that will be issued by the judges are non-binding, this tribunal, as has historically been the case with citizens’ tribunals, will create grassroots pressure on governments and the United Nations to hold Monsanto legally liable for its criminal activity. I am on the Monsanto Tribunal organizing committee, and OCA is making a substantial financial commitment to the tribunal, because we believe this initiative is a necessary step in bringing down what is arguably one of the worst multinational corporations in history. But the Monsanto Tribunal is just one example of our ongoing work to expose Monsanto and its allies. We have much more work to do. In 2017, OCA will work tirelessly to expose the health hazards of glyphosate and other poisons peddled by Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and the rest. We will test as many food products as we can, for as many toxic chemicals as we can find—and pressure the mainstream media to publish our results. We will go after the food companies that mislead consumers with blatantly false product labels. We will continue to provide financial support to US Right to Know, a nonprofit dedicated to exposing the lies behind slick PR campaigns by biotech, food and pharmaceutical companies, and attacks on scientists and journalists. We will launch a massive education and media campaign exposing the link between Monsanto and a factory farm system that produces toxic food, pollutes more water and air than any other industry, treats workers unfairly and inflicts unconscionable suffering on animals. It would be easy to give up this fight—especially after Monsanto’s masterful manipulation of Congress, which led to passage of the DARK Act. But giving up is exactly what Monsanto wants you, all of us, to do.

Why Staying in Hostels in Europe?

Take a quick view at the world's best hostels, and you'll see they've not only got bars, restaurants, cosy beds, pristine showers, and gorgeous wooden interiors, but they've got a slew of activities to suit a variation of travellers, and they're starting to have more of the extras you never knew you wanted, too... The bunk beds have dividers and curtains, and each bed in Lisbon's Home Hostel gives the sleeper a little ledge near their head with two outlets, so you can doze off while charging your phone or your iPad, and you don't have to worry about it getting stolen from the corner of the room.

At Lisbon's Home Hostel, the bar sells small and large beers for 2 Euros, and happy hour cuts those prices in half. You can buy a whole bottle of wine for 6 Euros, and the hostel's home-cooked three-course dinner comes with unlimited wine and beer... for 10 Euros total.

Cities like Lisbon, Porto, Budapest, Berlin, Corfu, Madrid, and Krakow have turned to hosting clean, beautiful, stylish hostels to entice frugal, under-30 backpackers and partiers.

In turn, the classics – cities like London, Paris, and Rome, where hostels can be great but aren't yet as established, common, or uniformly excellent – are getting stale.  They're not bringing in anyone new, because they've never had to.  Their appeal is historically documented and obvious. They're not creative and are lazy.  Why not try something new.

The "Hoscars" The Best Hostels in the World

Best Small Hostels:
1. Soul Kitchen (St. Petersburg, Russia)
2. Budapest Bubble (Budapest, Hungary)
3. Adventure Queenstown Hostel (Queenstown, New Zealand)
4. Hostel One Paralelo (Barcelona, Spain)
5. Mosquito Hostel (Krakow, Poland)

Best Medium Hostels:
1. Home Lisbon Hostel (Lisbon, Portugal)
2. Travellers House (Lisbon, Portugal)
3. Yes! Porto Hostel (Porto, Portugal)
4. Goodmorning Lisbon Hostel (Lisbon, Portugal)
5. Living Lounge Hostel (Lisbon, Portugal)

Best Large Hostels:
1. Tattva Design Hostel (Porto, Portugal)
2. Yes! Lisbon Hostel (Lisbon, Portugal)
3. M Montreal (Montreal, Canada)
4. The Cat's Pajamas Hostel (Berlin, Germany)


Best Extra-Large Hostels:
1. Wombats City Hostel Budapest (Budapest, Hungary)
2. HI – Boston Hostel (Boston, United States)
3. PLUS Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
4. Wombats City Hostel Vienna – at the Naschmarkt (Vienna, Austria)
5. Abraham Hostel Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Israel)

Follow here the yearly HOSCARS, the best hostels worldwide.

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Surprising Facts About Your Mac Computer

After a year, using my MacBook Air, got slower and slower, and the browser even froze. I checked out "All my files" and found out that most of my images where double, triple and some were even seven times stored! For hours and hours, I deleted images and files. Learning about your Mac computer, and using these tips from CleanMyMac will save you time and space on your Apple device - that I had wasted. Learn here about your Mac:
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Your Mac computer has huge “ghost” folders
System files on your Mac’s hard drive take up easily 60 gigabytes on average, according to MacPaw engineers. These files are mostly useless — logs, caches, and application leftovers (like iTunes junk). And what’s even sadder, you can’t access them even if you have admin rights. Due to system errors OS X may sometimes lose permission and needs a cleaning.
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Mac stores just everything
Every picture you viewed on Facebook or elsewhere on the web may stay on your Mac forever. Until you clean it manually. For instance, Twitter alone stores an image cache of many gigabytes within the depths of your Mac.  Even the most innocent websites store their cache in virtual memory, which means your Mac eventually gets slower.  And, the longer your apps work in the background, the more cache it generates.
Browsers are meant to collect cache data to give you a quicker access to the websites you’ve already visited. But very often this turns into real mess, resulting in browser freezing, persistent notifications, and pop-ups. Your Mac remembers everything you clicked, watched or even typed to your friends. Think of the chat history in your messengers. Some of them store data remotely on their cloud servers. To sum it up, a regular browser cleaning is a practice worth thinking about.
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Some Apps Drain the Battery
Junk applications or a stealthy malware running in the background can drain your Mac’s battery faster. Surprised? Yes, Macs do get infected with junkware and there’s no easy way to get rid of it. Ironically, this may happen after you’ve downloaded an antivirus software (some free antiviruses can be a nightmare to delete).
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Battery Issues:
Every application which heavily exchanges data with an online server is a potential battery-drainer. The same goes for numerous opened tabs in browser.  But if your battery dies too fast you shouldn't immediately rush to a store to buy a new one, there's still something you can do. First, go to Activity Monitor app and check which programs are using more power. Quit and uninstall all the unused vampire applications.
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Your Mac Loves Copies.
iTunes and Photos being generally superb tools, but have a strange habit of creating excess copies of files whenever they can. For example, if you keep your photos in the iCloud library, all your images are stored in the cloud.  But when you view these images on your Mac, Photos creates cached copies locally.  So even if you keep all your photos in iCloud, their local copies are still wasting space on your Mac.
iTunes has long-established reputation of a tricky application because of the Library issues.  After many years of use and back-uping, it may be out of order.  The music folders you deleted years ago may still be indexed and contain useless artwork and playlist files.  And, if your music collection is big enough, these junk files may result in gigabytes taken from your memory.
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Your Mac Stores Too Many Extra Languages.
Your Mac can speak nearly all Earth’s languages, but all those hundreds of localizations are taking a whole lot of space. Why keep these 150 language versions forever in your system?
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To keep your Mac cleaner and faster, consider using CleanMyMac 3  
Everyday it cleans 1 million Macs worldwide being installed on every 3rd Mac on the planet.  It helps you clean your entire Mac, runs basic Mac maintenance, monitors its hardware health, frees up gigabytes of memory on your drive by going through hidden system folders.  It wipes away large and old files, fixes errors and makes Mac work faster.  MacPaw offers free download for trial which gives users only one free scan and one free cleanup rather.  This means you can clean your Mac for one time, then you’d have to buy the license key for further using.
Some cautions however:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5672608?tstart=0

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