strange-worlds-publishing

Big news for new fiction writers (and your wallet)

Sat, 09 May 2026 11:32:24 GMT

If you’ve ever thought, “I’d like to write a story, but I don’t know where to start,” this is for you

I’ve just dropped the price on all four of my Beginner’s Guides from $2.99 to $1.99 each.

These short, focused guides were designed for new or struggling writers who want help without wading through a 400-page doorstop. They’re meant to be practical, fast, and immediately usable.

Here’s what you can grab a copy for $1.99 apiece right now:

Beginner’s Guide to Developing a Plot – How to find your plot problem, build a believable plot path, avoid meandering stories, and keep readers turning pages with conflict, tension, and rising stakes. It also digs into things like the plot cloud, inciting incident, and why your hero needs multiple failures before the climax.

Beginner’s Guide to Basic Book Marketing – The essentials: landing pages, blurbs, pricing, keywords, basic platform building, and why marketing is more like buying a lottery ticket than winning one. Perfect if the word “marketing” makes you want to lie down.

Beginner’s Guide to Creating Genuine Characters – Step-by-step character development with templates, questions, and AI-supported examples so your characters stop feeling like cardboard and start feeling like real, flawed people.

Beginner’s Guide to Publishing a Book – A plain-language walk-through of your publishing options (traditional, indie, hybrid, self-pub), what self-publishing really means, and the basic steps to turn your manuscript into a quality book package.

These are short, targeted toolkits, not massive reference tomes. You can read one in an evening and start applying the ideas the next day—plotting a story, sketching a character, planning your first marketing steps, or sorting out how you’ll publish.

I’m writing three more Beginner’s Guides:

Beginners Guide to Planning a Story
Beginner’s Guides to Designing Scenes
Beginner’s Guide to Author Business

These will all be available by the end of the summer.

New Review: self-publishing a book in 10 steps

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:10:30 GMT

This review just showed up on Goodreads

S elf-publish a Book in 10 Steps (Author Blueprint #6) by Hank Quense is a practical and straightforward guide designed to help aspiring authors navigate the self-publishing process with clarity and structure.

The book breaks down publishing into a step-by-step framework, making what can often feel like a complex journey more manageable and organized.

What stands out in this book is its simplicity and focus on actionable steps. Rather than overwhelming the reader with theory, it emphasizes a clear path forward, covering the essential stages of bringing a book from concept to publication. This makes it especially useful for first-time authors or those looking for a structured approach to self-publishing.

The tone is instructional and supportive, offering guidance that encourages readers to take consistent action rather than getting stuck in planning or uncertainty. It serves as a practical roadmap rather than a deeply theoretical discussion of publishing.

Overall, it is a helpful and accessible guide for authors who want a clear, step-by-step process for successfully self-publishing their work.

Available on Amazon

Otter wants to know

Mon, 04 May 2026 12:05:46 GMT

Does anyone know . . .

where I can get a paw-friendly keyboard. It'll make me a lot more efficient

AI Boom Unleashes Scammer Onslaught on Authors

Fri, 01 May 2026 13:07:31 GMT

One result from the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence is an unexpected explosion in the number of scam artists contacting authors.

It should be obvious to all authors that scamming is a growth field. For that to happen, it must be lucrative and that means authors must be falling for hoaxes and that is regrettable.

In my case, I used to get a few scam emails every week, but that has dramatically risen to a several per day now. Some of them are quite sophisticated. Many of them are identical to others as if they are all using the same AI app and writing identical queries. Or perhaps some master scam site develops new scams and sells them to others. Maybe, it's a subscription service.

Let's's take a look at the scams that are prevalent at the moment.

Book clubs

This is a popular scam these days. The introductory email says the club wants to put your book in front of its members. If you respond, additional emails will inform you that the members love to write reviews and it is customary to 'tip' each reviewer $50.

A curated publication on Medium (whatever that means)

This is another annoying email that always starts off with the identical opening line. "I almost kept scrolling, but something in your writing made me stop—and I’m genuinely glad it did."

There are many others of this ilk that have one commonality: they never mention the title of a book indicating they have only my email address and nothing else.

Agency queries

The scammers are getting increasingly sophisticated in their approach. I got one claiming that a European agency want the film rights for one of my novels. I checked the agency name and the agent name. Both are real. What wasn't real was the email of the "agent" who contacted me: it was a gmail account. If the email came from a real agent, the email would have come from an agency email server, not gmail.

Phony celebrity endorsements .

How thrilling! Stephen King will promote my books for only $100. So will a dozen other best-selling authors. Please! Give me a break. This one isn't even creative. It's dumb.

Get more reviews

This one offers to get you a set number of reviews for a fixed price. Once you sign up for X reviews (and pay), the scammer will take your book description from Amazon, feed it into an AI app and tell it create X reviews. The AI all will happily do that in a few seconds.

Have you come across a new scam? if so, please write a quick description here.

Otter Wants To Know

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:20:16 GMT

My editorial assistant . . .

wants to know who likes humorous scifi?

Like Zaftan Entrepreneurs and Zaftan Miscreants?

Beginners Guides

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:02:36 GMT

More Beginner's Guides

My Beginner's Guides series is getting expanded with three new titles planned. The four existing titles are:

Creating Genuine Characters
Developing Plots
Publishing a Book
Basic Book Marketing

The new titles will be:

Planning a Story
Designing Scenes
Author Business

I hope to have the new guides available before summer starts, That way you can pick up a few, read them on the beach and get started on your book.

How to idenfiy scammers

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:26:37 GMT

Scammers are getting ever more sophisticated

Scammers are getting ever more sophisticated these days. Now they come up with excellent imitations of agencies and publishing companies to try to suck money out of authors and writers. I’ve witnessed two of these scams recently. One used at the names of an agency and one of its executives to try and get me to bite. The second used a similar ploy using a publishing company and the name of its acquisition editor, In both cases if you searched for the agency/publisher name and the person, you’d get responses that said both company and person are the real deal.

The tip off that you received a scam is the email address used. Typically, the address is from Gmail or AOL and companies don't use commercial emails accounts. They have their own internal email servers.

This is the email I received from an “agency” (I removed the person’s name): name.agency.book.film@gmail.com . the email said “name” was a member of the Pontas Agency. The legitimate business email for this guy is name@pontas.com . Notice the differences in addresses.

For the publishing company, I received an email from skyhorse.publishing@aol.com . The email said it was from the acquisition manager and gave her name. A search reveled the publishing company is real and so is the name of acquisition manager. But Skyhorse publishing does not have a public email address. If it did, it would look like name@skyhorse.com

It should be noted that the initial emails contain very realistic imitations of the cooperate logos.

AI Writing Assistants

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:17:35 GMT

Here is a list to 10 articles on this topic

The articles are listed below with a link. Choose the topic that interests you and click the link.

12/27/25: I ntroductory article

1/6/26: Article 1: Why Writers Need an AI Assistant

1/13/26 Article 2: Getting Started With AI as a Writer

1/20/26: Article 3: Breaking Through Writer’s Block

1/27/26: Article 4: AI for Research, Fact‑Finding, and Organization

2/3/26: Article 5: AI for Editing, Rewriting, and Style

2/10/26: Article 6:A n AI Assistant can come to the writer’s rescue

2/17/26: Article 7: Brainstorming With AI Like a Pro

2/24/26: Article 8: Artificial Intelligence For Publishing And Marketing

3/3/26: Article 9: Your AI research hub explained

3/10/26: Article 10: AI drawbacks and conclusions

If you are looking for more information about AI as it refers to planning, writing, publishing, marketing and author business, get my Author’s AI Tool Kit .

Join my Facebook group:

Hank Quense’s Readers and Writers Circle

Freebie of the Month

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:14:25 GMT

Don't try to self-publish with this checklist!

Exciting news for aspiring authors! I've launched a new " Freebie of the Month " page , where you can download valuable resources absolutely free – every single month. No strings attached, just pure value to supercharge your writing journey.

April’s gem? My comprehensive Self-Publishing Checklist – packed with over 30 essential tasks to manage your project from start to finish. This checklist keeps you organized and on track. It's battle-tested from my own indie publishing adventures, helping you avoid common pitfalls and hit publish with confidence.

Why use it? Think of it as your project manager in checklist form. Tweak it for any genre – fantasy worlds or memoirs – and watch chaos turn into a streamlined launch.

Head to the Freebie of the Month page now and download it instantly

Creativity

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:52:18 GMT

A Creativity whiteboard

I've always been fascinated with creativity and have read a number of books on the topic. A while back I stated a whiteboard to hold interesting information I found about creativity. Here is a link to the whiteboard. https://padlet.com/hanque/creativity-3afb5elqfurdt47q

You can visit it without change. Enjoy!

Welcome to my new website

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:58:51 GMT

I'm excited about the design!

This website replaces the one I've been using for a year. The URL for the old one is hankquenseauthor.com and the URLfor this new one is hankquenseauthor.org. Notice the subtle change after the (.).

I abandoned the old one because of cost and technical difficulties. This new one offers me more opportunities to be creative and I intend to take advantage of this. You should bookmark this new site to keep with my whacky mind.

I also initiated a Facebook groups called Hank Quense’s Readers and Writers Circle. Consider this as your invitation to join the Circle even if you haven;t read one of my books (yet).

Tips for writing great posts that increase your site traffic

hankquense@icloud.com (Hank Quense) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:26:06 GMT

Write about something you know. If you don’t know much about a specific topic that will interest your readers, invite an expert to write about it.

Speak to your audience

You know your audience better than anyone else, so keep them in mind as you write your blog posts. Write about things they care about. If you have a company Facebook page, look here to find topics to write about

Take a few moments to plan your post

Once you have a great idea for a post, write the first draft. Some people like to start with the title and then work on the paragraphs. Other people like to start with subtitles and go from there. Choose the method that works for you.

Don’t forget to add images

Be sure to include a few high-quality images in your blog. Images break up the text and make it more readable. They can also convey emotions or ideas that are hard to put into words.

Edit carefully before posting

Once you’re happy with the text, put it aside for a day or two, and then re-read it. You’ll probably find a few things you want to add, and a couple more that you want to remove. Have a friend or colleague look it over to make sure there are no mistakes. When your post is error-free, set it up in your blog and publish.