Tacoma Reads Together

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I’ve been the chair of Tacoma Reads Together for 3 years. I think this year’s book is the best so far. Wonder is a Young Adult novel by R.J. Palacio. Her novel tells the story of a young man born with a severe facial deformity who, at the age of 10, leaves the safety of his parents’ homeschooling and begins the 5th grade. My name is August, by the way. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking it’s probably worse. You can read the book very quickly, but I think it will stick with you for awhile. Read more…

A couple quick notes

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I’ve added a “tag cloud” to the side of the blog. Previously it was hard to find any archives on the site without sorting by month, so this gives a quick way to go back and find old posts by category. It’s kind of ugly, but it works. I’ve also created a new “project” to track the presidential biographies I’ve read. In case you missed the smiling face of George Washington on my homepage, there you go.

Old Hickory

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My Presidential reading list got waylaid for a little while last year with Andrew Jackson and American Lion. This book sat on my nightstand for too long, but I finally finished it over the weekend. President’s Day weekend no less! So. Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory. Generally, I enjoyed the read, but Jackson didn’t jump out at me as I would have thought. His story before becoming President is fascinating. Born from truly humble origins (no one is 100% sure which state he was actually born in, it was that humble), courageous as a boy during the Revolutionary War when he Read more…

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Mutlicare Health System commissioned this infographic from Side x Side to give helpful information about heart health. Easy to share on Pinterest or Facebook, infographics are great tools for communicating a lot of information at once. We were very excited about how this one turned out. Happy Valentine’s Day from Side x Side Creative!

Meet your next favorite book

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Years ago I signed up for Goodreads.com. For some reason, I got out of the habit of posting there. I think that I thought I should go through my bookshelf and add every book I’d read. I also was temporarily lured away by Google Books, which had an incredible feature: you could search within books that you’d read. It turns out, though, that while that feature sounded awesome in theory, I rarely used it. And in the meantime, I stopped updating the books I’d read on Goodreads. When I started publishing my own books, I got back into Goodreads to Read more…

Reading “the Classics”

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On my first day of freshman year of high school, my English teacher–Mr. Dudas–gave us a pop quiz. It was a take-home quiz, and it wasn’t a hard one. There was only one question: “What books did you read over the summer?” Being a bookworm, and eager to make a good first impression with my teacher, I went through my bookshelf and started listing them. I had read so many books that summer! Adult books even, like Michael Crichton novels. I had read so many books over the summer that I had to finish listing them on the back of Read more…

Side x Side’s site has launched!

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Very excited that the new Side x Side Creative site has launched. As tends to happen, our own site got put off in favor of working for clients. But we were two months past our launch party in November and we were getting a little of just having a temporary page up there. So it’s finally live! Check it out, look through the portfolio, and see what all I’ve been doing to keep busy these days!

Ask An Author: “How do I get reviewers to read my book?”

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Getting people to read a book from an unknown author with no track record is hard work. When I published The Saints Go Dying, I uploaded the text, the cover, and poof, I thought I was done. Only later did I realize how much more work I could have done. It turns out that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of bloggers out there who are interested in reading new independent fiction. Many are focused on narrow genres: romance, paranormal, young-adult, etc. Some have much wider interests. When I saw the potential of getting early readers, I got serious. Three Read more…

Finally live on the iBookstore!

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For months I’ve been working to get my books onto Apple’s iBookstore. I’ve worked through a number of systems, formatting, and I’m finally glad to say that The Saints Go Dying and The Marinara Murders are both live in the store (plus the audiobook of The Little Book of Gold–the ebook version of it will be coming soon). Apple has become a big platform for book sales, and–in many ways–it was Apple that spurred me to self-publishing. When I read about the iPad, I wanted to get The Saints Go Dying on there when it launched. I never made it, Read more…

Frank Herbert: Son of Tacoma, Father of Dune

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When I was young and delving into science fiction, I discovered this dense, rather difficult novel called Dune. It was hard to get into as a 6th grader, because it used lots of made-up works, but I really enjoyed it. I was surprised to find on the author flap that the author was from Tacoma. I didn’t know anyone famous had come from Tacoma. It was always in the back of my head that Tacoma had this famous and groundbreaking author from here. Last year I investigated that a little bit more in the research room at the downtown library. Read more…