Welcome to the new LauraCarroll.com!

If you have been following me, you know that I’ve run this site, livetruebooks.com and laviechildfree.com for awhile now. 

This site has combined them all into one. My books, details on my communications services, and the ever growing LiveTrue bookstore are all here.

 And of course I will still be blogging on topics related to my books, services and reviewing the best in nonfiction LiveTrue books.

As always, visit often and join the discussions!

The post Pop the Champagne! appeared first on Laura Carroll.

Good sign #1: Late last year, the New York Times published a great review of Alan Sepinwall’s self-published book, The Revolution Was Televised.  USA Today also did an interview with Sepinwell,  Time magazine reviewed it as did The Huffington Post, and the New Yorker.

In a word, as Charman-Anderson says, “Sepinwall got the kind of coverage that “most traditionally published authors can only dream of.”

I agree with what she further stresses: the “idea of a division between ‘traditionally published’ and ‘self-published’ is becoming a ridiculous construct with no meaning whatsoever.”

In today’s book business, and as Sepinwell’s book demonstrates, indeed, the fact is “the best of self-publishing can compete on equal terms with the best of traditional publishing.”

So why don’t we see more self-published books reviewed like traditionally published books? Again, Charman-Anderson is spot on: “lack of infrastructure.” A lack of third-party infrastructure, that is.

In traditional publishing, the publishers have the relationship with reviewers. That does not automatically mean an author’s traditionally published book will be professionally reviewed, however. That depends on the book’s marketing budget.

Reviewers rely on publishers to ferret out at least minimum levels of good quality. When it comes to self-published works, more often that not, there is not this third-party between the author and reviewer.  And at least historically, reviewers don’t want to deal with authors directly.

I have to say that, as a reviewer for my LiveTrue Books collection, I don’t mind dealing with authors (of traditionally published and self-published works) directly. I make sure that authors know the parameters of review submission (e.g., it has to fit into the “livetrue” theme), and keep the communication to a minimum until I have read and written the review.

But there is also an argument to be made for the third party role.  With self-published works, so far we see Amazon and sites like Goodreads performing this role – sort of – because the reviews are made by readers, that, let’s face it, for the most part are not professional book reviewers.  These “reviews” are also “not a dependable substitute” because of how easy it is to fake or manipulate  them on these sites.

The problem is not a lack of quality in self-published works today, as much as it is lacking a way for more professional reviewers having go-to’s in “picking out the brass from the muck” for non-traditionally published works.

Could this need point to a new kind of business – a business opportunity? You bet.

However it develops, one thing for sure, the days of assuming “self-published” is automatically the “muck” are over!

Are you a self-published author? What book review experience have you had?

The post Signs of Positive Change for Reviews of Self-Published Books appeared first on Laura Carroll.

Knowlton was an influential member of the freethinker and social reformer community in the 19^th century… 

In An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of his Philosophy , Allosso takes us through the many challenges he faced throughout his life as he fought for social change.

In this man’s interesting life, we learn how his challenges start long before he’s an adult. They came as a boy when he was told he had a “disease.” Allosso tells us the tragic and almost unbelievable story of being treated for “gonorrheoa Dormientium.” Translation: wet dreams.

Allosso takes us down Knowlton’s road to becoming a medical doctor, which included some bold exploits. “Early 19th century science had only a partial understanding of how the body worked,” and we learn just how Knowlton went about finding out for himself.

Allosso also takes us into Knowlton’s life as a philosopher. Knowlton’s first book, Modern Materialism, presented radical ideas about the physical origins of thought and theories of consciousness which were met with great resistance. Allosso gives readers the hard picture of the prices he paid for trying to sell this book and have his ideas reach the public. Little did society know at the time that this book was ahead of its time in many ways, including contemporary psychologists saying that many of his psychological ideas closely resemble the 20^th century theories of behaviorism.

We learn how Knowlton was also ahead of his time when it came to being concerned about overpopulation and what he did about it. He came up with his own solution – he wrote Fruits of Philosophy: A Treatise on the Population Question, the first book on birth control designed for the masses to be able to limit the sizes of their families. It was the first book to hold mindset that parenthood could be a choice.

But like his first book, this one got major push back from religious and legal community, and Allosso gives us wretched tales of how Knowlton was prosecuted for pushing the envelope of social and sexual norms at the time. We also learn about his supporters who understood that the suppression of Fruits of Philosophy was, at the core, a fight for reproductive freedom and freedom of the press.

As a doctor we learn why “he lived a generation too soon to see empirical, scientific search for truth he advocated become the foundation for modern medicine” and “deserves credit for pushing his profession into the future.”

As revolutionary thinker, Allosso lays out in straightforward detail how Knowlton challenged social authority at the time, how he was punished for this, and why he has been largely unrecognized for his thinking.

As social problem solver, you’ll read what happened to Fruits of Philosophy after Knowlton’s death, and how it was the seed for birth control heroes of the future. He led the way for activists like Margaret Sanger, who like him, fought to bring “useful medical information and choice to regular people.”

Allosso says, “In order to raise a new generation to think for themselves, to be freethinkers in today’s age, we need to tell them stories about rebels.”And this is a story about one brilliant rebel indeed.This book tells the story of a man with the guts to live true to himself and the world, and who ends up making major contributions to society as we know it today.

The post The Life of Charles Knowlton: A Must Read Biography appeared first on Laura Carroll.

These days, many people think that writing an eBook is much easier than a traditional book. Not so. An eBook can be shorter than a traditional book, but not necessarily so. Even if it is shorter, it has to be tighter.  Streamlining content to be as tight as possible is a real art.

But before you get to this stage, however, there are two important things to figure out if you have an idea for an eBook and want to do what it takes to create it.

First, get very clear why you want to write it. Do you want to write your first novella? Create a book that will help people in some way? Will it assist the growth of a professional endeavor? Knowing your overarching goal is key to not only writing your eBook but its game plan for success.

Second, knowing as much as you can about your target audience is crucial. For example, if you want to write fiction, know the exact genre (s) of your eBook. If it is a self-help book, what are the specific characteristics of those the book is designed to help? If it’s to help your professional endeavor as a marketing tool, it means knowing all you can about your potential customers.

Next is where most people fail. Plain and simple, they may start the eBook, but don’t finish it. Why? Because often with other priorities in life, it becomes challenging to carve out the time to work on it. If you take this tip to heart, this won’t happen to you:

Treat writing time like any other important appointment or meeting.  If you have a very important appointment do you do everything you can to make that appointment? Yes you do. Treating writing time as just as valuable as other very important time is critical to completing your eBook.

No matter what kind of writing experience you have, once you have a draft of your eBook, the fourth essential is get professional editing assistance. Not a relative or friend who wants to help out, but someone with real experience editing books. These days there are many excellent editors out there…like me! There’s also a host of others you will find at sites like Elance.com.

And fifth, when it comes to book covers, there is the famous saying, “Cover is King.”You’re your eBook presents visually can make or break its success. Like obtaining professional editing services, the importance of professional cover art assistance can’t under-estimated. Like professional editors, today a Google search or going direct to sites like Elance.com will introduce you to a host of professional cover artists. Or go to covers you like, and find the cover artist who did it (they will be cited in the book jacket).

EBooks are just like traditional books. For both, clarity of purpose and die hard commitment to the final product are required for success.

The post Thinking About Writing an eBook? appeared first on Laura Carroll.

“Dr. Eben Alexander’s near-death experience is the most astounding I have read in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon. [He] is living proof of an afterlife.”

As near-death-experience (NDEs) stories go, Dr. Alexander’s sure is different than the rest. Unlike others who have experienced NDEs, his neocortex was not “temporarily inactivated” – instead it was completely “out of the picture.” As he puts it, “I was encountering the reality of a world of consciousness that existed completely free of the limitations of my physical brain.” Because of this, he believes he was able to “travel deeper” in his NDE “than almost all NDE subjects” before him.

This is an amazing story of how he “contracted a rare case of E. coli bacterial meningitis that no one could explain the origins of” (the first of its kind in medical history), what happened to him while he was “conscious in another dimension” for a week while in a coma, and how he captures his experience after the mystery of his complete recovery.

The chapters flow from what was happening in earth-based reality while he was in a coma to chapters describing his experience of another, “ultra” reality. A scientist writing from his heart, he convincingly explains how there’s the “sheer, flat-out impossibility of arguing from a medical standpoint,” that what happened to him in that other dimension could have been all fantasy. He makes this conclusion based on medical analysis of his experience, and his knowledge of the “most advanced concepts in brain science and consciousness studies.” With his scientist hat on, he gives nine hypotheses that could account for his experience, and lays out how all fail to explain it.

Before his NDE, in his words, he really did not believe that “something of us survives the death of the body.” In Proof of Heaven we learn how far from this position he has come, and why he feels he has been “privileged to understand that our life does not end with the death of the body or brain.”

Alexander still feels that there is a considerable “chasm between our current scientific understanding of the universe and the truth” as he saw it – He still loves physics and cosmology, and still loves “studying our vast and wonderful universe,” but now, he has a “greatly enlarged conception of what ‘vast’ and ‘wonderful’ really mean.”

And in that vast and wonderful is “God.” He uses this word more conceptually, and refreshingly does not attach it to a particular kind of religion. This also goes for his use of the word “heaven,” which is not necessarily interpreted through a Christian lens.

In that vast and wonderful are also our “true, spiritual selves.” But we don’t need to wait until the afterlife to find that spiritual self – Alexander leaves us with ways we can get closer to that genuine spiritual self now, here on earth.

Throughout the book, you can feel how much Alexander wants us to understand there is an afterlife – that death is “not the end of personal existence but only a transition.”

It’s an undeniably amazing story of one man’s journey to living true – in his case, being truly compelled to share his encounter with deeper realms of existence.

An excellent addition to the Spirituality Book shelf of your LiveTrue collection!

The post Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife appeared first on Laura Carroll.