Happy Friday, SEers! This month is one of the few this year that has five Fridays rather than four. It doesn’t happen often enough for us to have a “themed” post scheduled, so we decided these special Fridays will become group posts.

This particular fifth Friday we thought we’d catch you up on what we currently have going on in our writing lives.

In first-name alphabetical order:

Craig

Oddly enough, I have something going on right now. I’m holding free days for my book, The Enhanced League. This is a collection of short stories and micro-fiction, that carries an overarching story. It’s set in a professional baseball league where performance enhancing drugs are not only allowed, but encouraged. You can pick up your free copy here.

The Hat is still doing well, but sales have slowed. If a paranormal superhero kind of story, filled with tons of snarky banter…

Hi, SEers! Mae here today with a topic I hope will be beneficial to a number of readers. Many of you may already know this trick, but I hope you’ll indulge me for those who don’t.

Recently, I did a cover reveal, single day blitz of my upcoming release, Cusp of Night. I had sixteen blog stops in a single day. When the book releases, I’ll prepare individual posts for the wonderful bloggers gracious enough host me, but in this case, I was splashing the same content everywhere.

To make it easier on my hosts—and okay, me too—I sent everyone a pre-formatted HTML post. All sixteen blogs were sharing the same content, so I was able to create a template that everyone received. Basically, “look at my sparkly new cover!” Afterward, several bloggers emailed me to inquire how I had created the post.

It’s amazingly easy. Although the steps below…

KDP COMMUNITY FORUM UPDATE

Amazon recently updated the community help forum at Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/?language=en

It seems like it has gone unchanged forever, until now. I can remember visiting it 9 years ago.

What has changed?

• The look is different. The layout and design changed significantly.
• The forum topics have been consolidated into a single column. These used to be divided into separate groups.
• The recent announcements are easy to find and (for now) they are updated. Presently, I see announcements regarding the latest version of the Kindle Previewer (which now has a helpful Auto-Advance View and a Thumbnail Pane), the KDP Select Global Fund for the past two months, and an announcement about taxes.
• The search option has changed. After doing a search, there used to be an advanced option. Also, the search used to default to the current year only (which severely limited the number of…

Hi gang, Craig here again. We take turns on Fridays, and the assignments are rotating. This time my task is to pose a writing question. Seems simple enough, but I also want to get some comments flowing. Here we go:

What writing tools do you use? Why do you prefer them?

I write on an Apple iPad Pro. The original oversized one. I like the ability to use the split screen. It helps when I’m writing the interviews I host on my site. I have the Smart Keyboard too. This has no batteries, and attaches magnetically to the iPad. It parasites power from the iPad.

I know I’m already different, but I write with Apple Pages as my word processor. There was a learning curve, but I’m content with it. I can copy and paste with my finger on the iPad and type on the keyboard. It allows me to…

Don’t touch that dial. You’ve landed on Lisa Burton Radio, coming at you with 1.21 jigawatts of power all across the cosmos and beyond the veil. I’m your host, Lisa the robot girl, bringing you characters from the books you love.

Today we’re going to have a little chat with Danny Caruso, owner of Nightforce Security, a new-ish company in headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania whose employees have rather impressive skillsets.

“Welcome to the show, Danny.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Ma’am! Such formality. Call me Lisa.”

“Sorry. Old habits die hard. Thanks, Lisa. Uh, glad to be here.”

“Don’t sound so enthused. This is supposed to be fun.”

“I know. I’m just not much of a showboat. I do my best work out of the limelight.”

“Then why’d you agree to come on the show today?”

“Because my employees insist I need to do more publicity. We haven’t been taking on the…