Amid the dire predictions for publishing, the fumbling about with ebook pricing and the growing hysteria over book piracy, one thing has become perfectly clear: authors need to adapt.

What may not be so clear is that authors can get paid for their work without restricting either availability of it or readers’ convenience.

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Welcome to the first edition of Sunday Suggestions!

These are some of the web lit stories I try to keep up with:

• Courier’s Creed by GabrielGadfly
• The Apocalypse Blog by Kessbird
• Refuge of Delayed Souls by Miladysa
• Aboveground by am_harte
• The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely by FantonEsquire
• Addergoole by Lyn Thorne-Alder

I read an e-book sample tonight and while the characters and plot were entertaining, there were so many mistakes that I was continually jerked out of my enjoyment zone.

It was messy, as Rage would say.

Now I make mistakes. Everyone does. I have finally learned to pay attention to those red underlines MSWord points out my misspellings with. Yet I still make mistakes and will very likely continue doing so.

But from paper to computer, through re-writes, re-reads, beta readers and a trip to my lovely Story Tamer, I do my best to weed out those mistakes in order to present the best story possible when I publish a title for sale.

When I read something like that, it appears to me that the author doesn’t care. That he/she is just cranking the stories out as quickly as possible in order to make a buck.

This chaps my ass, people, because it gives indie authors a bad rap.

My feeling of ‘doesn’t care’ turned into ‘are you kidding me?’ when I visited the author’s website.

It was one of those pages that never ends, complete with loads of graphics, huge text and basically looked like something a newcomer to the internets would create using AOL’s free ’site building’ software.

But the real kick in the pants? This author’s titles are listed everywhere and there were several good reviews of them displayed.

Are you serious? Really?

As a writer, you come across a lot of blogs and web sites that emphasize how important writing well and presenting your work as professionally as you are capable of is.

All the writers I know strive to do just that. We work on things like not using certain words over and over again, proper punctuation, correct spelling, etc.

We want to present an enjoyable read that doesn’t have anything which will jar the reader out of their suspension of disbelief or warm, fuzzy reading place.

After seeing that, I have to ask: are we doing it all wrong?

Would we sell more if we were sloppy about all of that?

Color my mind blown, people.

I’m obviously going to have to stay away from e-book samples for a while. My inner critic needs both recovery time and to be reminded to focus only on my writing efforts, unless asked for her opinion.

Heading back to my corner now, but…

Are you kidding me?

Sheesh, maybe I don’t want that Sony eReader for Christmas after all.

Author’s Note: It’s late, maybe I’m overly critical. Maybe I should just keep working at honing my own writing skills and not worry about what others are doing. But really, knowing how hard the indie authors I know try to polish their works, something like that is way irritating.

I’ve an overwhelming urge to write horrible poetry to express my growing angst at how very little productive writing I’ve managed this year.

Don’t worry, I’m staving that urge off with copious amounts of coffee.

While the year’s not over, the end is in sight and I’m thinking I’m not going to have time to devote to readying The Silent One or finishing Hunter’s Edge for publishing before it’s over, between our home improvement project, NaNoWriMo and the holidaze looming ahead. Or to cross any other project off my list.

Yes, 2009 hasn’t been the year for my writing I would’ve preferred it to be. Life’s gotten in the way, not that I’m complaining. At least I was able to go see my mom, and it was super sweet of my life partner to surprise me with plans to build a space just for me, in support of my writing efforts.

He’s a keeper, ladies and gents.

Next year, I’m determined to concentrate on three items:

• Katarr Kanticles Press, my publishing imprint
• Writing
• Art & Design work

Other ideas that have been clogging up the old membrane will be tucked away for future retrieval, or allowed to fade away into the dark recesses. I don’t care which right this minute, to be perfectly honest.

I have re-opened my ArtWanted portfolio and am slowly adding my book cover designs and the imagery I think is my best from my seven years’ worth of creating.

Before the end of the year, I plan to sit down and make a graduated list of goals for those items. Let’s see how many I can accomplish before 2011 and my fortieth birthday rolls around, shall we?

I do have one goal to accomplish before the end of the year, and I don’t mean successfully completing NaNoWriMo 2009 (although I certainly intend to!).

It’s a new venue for my writing, which will be attached to the blog here. The blog will become just that – a blog. I’m excited with this idea and a little apprehensive about the results of it. I think it’ll do well, but that pretty much depends on me and the pressure…ooh, boy!

Since I’m not the Best Writer in the Universe and all, you know. However, feedback from readers tells me I can claim to at least be an entertaining writer, which certainly makes me a happy little camper.

By the way, I really appreciate that.

I’d better get back to the laundry and take some Advil for my aching jaw (had a dentist appointment yesterday. Can we say fun?).

Later, gators.

Apparently, the BBC believes that most people will have only read six books on the following list.

Yeah, right.

Instructions: Copy this into your blog. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ next to those you have read. Tag other book nerds. Link to me so I can see your response!

-  1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
x 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
-  3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
x 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
-  5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
x 6 The Bible –
x 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
-  8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
-  9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
x 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
x 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
-  12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
-  13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
-  14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
-  15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
X 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
-  17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
-  18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
-  19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
-  20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
x 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
-  22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
-  23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
-  24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
x 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
-  27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-  28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
x 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
x 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
-  31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
-  32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
x 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
-  34 Emma – Jane Austen
-  35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
x 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (also read the rest of  them!)
-  37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
-  38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
-  39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
x 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
x 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
-  42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
-  43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-  44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
-  45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
x 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
-  47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
x 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
X 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
-  50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
-  51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
x 52 Dune – Frank Herbert
-  53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
-  54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
-  55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
-  56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
x 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
-  58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
-  59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
-  60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-  61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
-  62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
-  63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
x 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
x 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
-  66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
-  67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
-  68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
-  69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
x 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
x 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
x 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
-  73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
-  74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
-  75 Ulysses – James Joyce
-  76 The Inferno – Dante
-  77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
-  78 Germinal – Emile Zola
-  79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
-  80 Possession – AS Byatt
x 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
-  82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
x 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
-  84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
-  85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
-  86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
x 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
-  88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
x 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
-  90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
-  91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
-  92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
-  93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
X 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
-  95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
-  96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
x 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
x 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
X 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
-  100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo