Category: about books

  • The NEED to Edit – Part 3/6

    The other choice is to edit your own work with some help from friends as I did.

  • The NEED to Edit – Part 2/6

    If the avid reader is distracted by too many mistakes, do not expect this audience to be forgiving.

  • The NEED to Edit – Part 1/6

    Writing, revising and editing are part and parcel of an author’s work, especially if she doesn’t have a contract with a traditional publisher.

  • Ten-Thousand Dreams

    By the end of 2008 (my first year as an indie author), My Splendid Concubine had sold 221 copies so I FAILED to reach my first goal by 279 books that no one bought.

  • The Secrets to Getting More Book Reviews—even if your book is already out

    Bloggers get hundreds of books mailed to them by publishers on a monthly basis, while book review departments in newspapers have either shrunk or been removed entirely.

  • The Self-Annihilation of Credibility – Part 6/6

    While Hart worked in Ningpo, as you may see, the concern of the Chinese and Westerners had little to do with the Taiping Rebellion and more with pirates and crime.

  • The Self-Annihilation of Credibility – Part 5/6

    Tilly, in claim six, ever the historian as she says in her Readers Cafe review of The Concubine Saga, points out that the Santai Dynasty mentioned in chapter four was not the oldest known dynasty when in fact the oldest was the Xia. She is correct but wrong at the same time.  The Xia (or “Hsia” as Lin Yutang (1895…

  • The Self-Annihilation of Credibility – Part 4/6

    In Tilly’s opinion, castrations only took place after a man was hired to work in the Forbidden City … She was wrong!

  • The Self-Annihilation of Credibility – Part 3/6

    No one knows what Hart actually paid for Ayaou or Shao-mei because Hart did not mention the price paid anywhere in his surviving journals

  • The Self-Annihilation of Credibility – Part 2/6

    Tilly claimed that Robert Hart could not have been raised to respect women as equals in Victorian England.