u/Ok-Mortgage-3236

Howdy all I've decided after many years of using WordPress for my own personal websites as well as client sites that I want to shift away from it entirely if possible. I don't want to do that in the form of an alternative CMS platform like Drupal for example. Instead what I'm exploring is building my own custom one of one contact management system that's entire build process so far has been directly attacking the things that as a developer I have had problems with when dealing with WordPress. Whether that's the security vulnerabilities, the plug-in nightmare market, things breaking with a simple PHP version update, etc I've been slowly building something that's starting to take shape into a pretty capable content management system that's not quite ready to replace any legacy content management platform like WordPress. But it's getting pretty darn close to being something that I'm comfortable with utilizing at least at this point for personal projects, hopefully client projects in the future.

I want to make sure that I'm hitting the mark here and would just be interested in hearing from other individuals familiar with WordPress and it's at this point legacy problems whether that's focused on its vulnerabilities, it's capabilities, it's ease of use... Etc. I would love to hear from developers who've used WordPress at the deepest level and just to get a list of ideas or features or improvements I can make upon in my system that I haven't thought about yet. I look forward to hearing from everybody about your ideas.

Hey all, first time posting in here so bare with me if I botch the format.

Quick context: this is my 9th book (I self publish, no agent, whole DIY operation) but its the first one Ive been nervous enough about to actually want outside eyes before I put it up. So, here I am.

Blurb — this is rough, not my final back cover copy, just me explaining the thing:

Near future. When you die you get uploaded, except the servers arent free, so the poor end up paying rent on their own afterlife by deleting their memories a piece at a time until theres barely anyone left of who they were. The ones who cant pay get put to work — they become the "judgment layer" for the living, the part that decides what actually matters when a machine cant tell signal from noise. So basically the living outsourced their conscience to the dead they're charging rent to, and nobody up top wants to think about that to hard.

Ralph Hartley has spent eleven years selling off pieces of himself to hold onto one thing, a single gold-lit afternoon in a kitchen with his daughter. When the dead realize they've got one power left — they can stop — he ends up in the middle of the first strike the afterlife has ever had, and building the thing that might actually get them free. What it costs him at the end is kind of the whole point of the book and im not going to spoil it.

Its litfic first, SF second. Long sentences, slow burn, way more about grief and labor and what you'd give up than about the tech. If dense prose isnt your thing this one probly wont be either and thats fine, no hard feelings.

Comps, loosely: Black Mirror if it slowed down and got sadder, with a little Never Let Me Go in the dna.

Content warnings: grief, death, a child character dies (its not gratuitous but its there), poverty/debt as a major theme, some heavy existential stuff. No on-page sexual content and nothing graphically violent.

DM me if interested and we can arrange getting you my current draft file

What im looking for: honest gut reaction over line edits. Does the middle sag, do you actually care about Hartley, does the ending feel earned or just mean for the sake of it. My biggest worry is the long-sentence style wearing people out, so tell me straight if it does, I'd rather know. Dont soften it for me.

Timeline: no rush at all, anytime in the next few weeks works fine, read at whatever pace you want.

Swap: yeah happy to swap. I read litfic, SF, horror, bit of fantasy, can return up to ~90k or so. Romance isnt really my lane but I'll still give yours a fair read. Tell me what you got.

Thanks for getting this far, appreciate it —

Traditional publishers give their authors a machine that points readers to the right book first. Indie authors dont get that. We get a page full of covers and a stranger with maybe nine seconds of patience. And it gets worse the more you publish, because once you're past two or three titles a new reader has no real reason to open any one of them, and every buy now button asks them to gamble a whole evening on a writer they've never read.

so i built the routing part myself. Its a one minute "which character are you" quiz that points you to the book you'd probably click with. Underneath it i score every character on five sliders, and each one runs between two traits that are both fine to be (not good vs evil):

Reason↔Feeling, Duty↔Freedom, Hardened↔Hopeful, Solitary↔Loyal, Justice↔Mercy

The quiz drops the reader onto those same sliders and finds whatever character sits closest. kind of like your phone finding the nearest gas station except its personality instead of a map. And because theres no "wrong" answer the result reads like it gets you instead of judging you, which is what makes people trust it. The real trick is swapping the commitment ask for a curiosity ask. People will spend a minute on themselves way before they'll risk an evening on some author they dont know, and then the pitch isnt "buy my book" anymore its "read the one with the character you are."

anyway, where i'd love you to poke holes: is five axes the right number or too blunt? Is "closest character" the best thing to match on, or should it be tone/mood instead? How would you keep something like this from feeling like a gimmick, and what about a reader who clearly belongs to two totally different books at once? If you've fought the "get a stranger to just start somewhere" problem i'd value any thoughts.

Hi everyone. I'm a lifelong writer but a first-time published author, and a software developer by trade. I don't have much time to promote my books, which makes self-publishing a bit of an uphill climb—but what I wanted most was simply to get my work into readers' hands and let it succeed or fail on its own merit.

After spending time in author Facebook groups where most replies were people trying to sell me a service—a website, a book trailer, you name it—one thing became clear: I needed to think bigger about how I present my work if it's going to find the right readers.

I started with an author website. The KDP profile gives you almost no control over how you're presented, and the template-based site builders I looked at felt too limiting—simple to a fault, with little control over features or design, and usually behind a monthly subscription. So I built my own as a WordPress theme from scratch.

It's a mostly single-page site with anchor navigation, plus a dedicated page for each title that links out to Amazon and Goodreads. A few of the features I've built in so far:

Book club PDF generation that creates discussion blurbs and thoughtful questions for groups reading a given title

An educator and librarian contact form for teachers and libraries to inquire about a book or arrange a classroom visit

ARC (advance reader) and newsletter signups to build a direct line to readers

That last point matters to me. Amazon doesn't hand you your readers' contact information, so I wanted to build that list myself. The educator page is similar—I want to support local schools and libraries, and giving those professionals an easy way to reach out felt like the right approach. I didn't find anything comparable on the off-the-shelf services.

I've got more planned: embedded atmospheric playlists for each title (the music I listened to while writing), plus features for SEO, ranking, and better visibility into how visitors find the site.

I'm new to the publishing world but a veteran on the software side, so I'm under no illusion that I've thought of everything an author site could or should have. If you have a few minutes, I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback—and even more, I'd love to hear about features you wish existed but haven't found anywhere. If there's interest, I may eventually offer the theme as a free white-label option for other authors who want to set up a site of their own.

You can take a look at LJBorland.com.

My standalone adult literary fantasy The King's Winter is free on Kindle June 17–21. King Aldric governs like the falcon he flies — from height, from distance, certain that distance is the same thing as wisdom. By the tenth year of his reign the last five have been an unbroken winter: no sun, no thaw, and a growing belief among his people that the curse is the king's own fault. When his commander Voss betrays him and leaves him to die in a frozen waste so far north that survival is supposed to be impossible, Aldric loses everything that made him a king — his throne, his name (erased from the records, treason to speak), and the certainty that ruling from above was ever the same as understanding. What saves him is a wolf pack, and an Alpha who leads from the ground, inside the danger, in a way Aldric never has. The book is the long argument between those two kinds of leadership, and it builds to a confrontation where the question isn't whether he can take his throne back but whether the wilderness made him a man who should. Slow, cold, morally serious, with mercy as the hard road rather than the soft one. Free through June 21st. If it lands for you, an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads genuinely helps a new book find readers.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H55KT4D4

My literary gothic fantasy The Monsters We Keep is free on Kindle through 6/18. If you like dark, atmospheric fantasy that's really asking a hard question underneath, this one's for you. Wren is a Warden in the fog-drowned city of Aldwick, and she's good at the worst job there is: she walks into the Wood and "Completes" the strays — the faceless, half-there things that wander out of the dark. It's framed as mercy, and she believes it. She has perfect memory; she keeps everything. Which is exactly why she's the only person alive who can see what's actually happening — because the strays aren't monsters. They're people. The kingdom strikes thin-tied names off its rolls twice a year and calls it cleaning, the sweep hollows them out, and the killing itself wipes the Warden's memory of having killed, so the willing stay willing. Everyone forgets. Wren can't. When a clerk slips her a struck record-leaf and a half-erased man teaches her the thing the kingdom most wants buried — that remembering someone brings them back, at a real and bleeding cost to whoever does the remembering — Wren stops being the machine's blade and becomes the thing it can't survive. The high floor knows it, too. They're already building a trap with her name on it, set to play out in the great square in front of the whole city. It's a quiet, eerie, slow-burn kind of dark — less swordfights, more dread and revelation. Underneath it, it's a book about memory as a moral act, about the people a society decides are disposable and what it costs to refuse that, about how caring can hunger and still be worth it, and about how no one keeps anyone alive alone. There's a personal thread waiting at the center of the trap that I won't spoil. Free through 6/18/2026. If it stays with you, an honest review means the world for a book like this. Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H54Z46KX

My adult portal-fantasy novel Ring Keepers and the Quest for the Dragon Stone is free on Kindle 6/15 thru 6/19, and I'd be grateful for honest reviews.

Mike Stone is sixteen, overlooked, and quietly in love with his best friend Kelly. The most interesting thing in his life is a box his grandfather has kept hidden for sixteen years — and inside it, a leather journal sealed with a clasp that opens only for Stone blood, etched with five overlapping rings and the words Property of the Ring Keepers. When the journal starts growing rings overnight, Mike, Kelly, and their loud, loyal friend Johny are pulled across into Etheris: a world of hollow mountains and wrong-colored skies, where a whole season can pass while barely a day goes by back home, where the realm's ruling council is split over whether to train these newcomers or simply put them to death, and where the elemental arts — earth, air, water, fire, metal, and a forbidden sixth — can save a world or break one.

Because the last person to reach for all of them was David. Fifteen hundred years ago he was the most gifted Ring Keeper alive, and he tore a wound in the world that never healed. He didn't die. He's hunting an artifact called the Dragon Stone, and if he finds it first, nothing in Etheris can stop him — which leaves three half-trained teenagers as the only thing standing in his way.

It's a big adventure — a disgraced master haunted by the students he lost, an immortal library-keeper, a silent knight and his winged mount, a quest through a mountain range that eats your memory — but underneath it's about quieter things: the kid everyone wrote off, the cost of carrying everything alone, the difference between being needed and being loved, and a choice that arrives in a single breath, at the cost of the world and the cost of the heart.

Free through June 19th. If you read it, an honest review means the world to a self-published author. Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H5526M55

My literary space opera A Field of Sleeping Doors is free on Kindle through June 19th. If you like big-idea science fiction built around a found-family crew and a real moral question, give it a look.

In this far future, the vanished "makers" engineered humanity into many kinds — each shaped for a different world, then abandoned when the makers died and locked their grave behind them. Rook is an Earther: a thief from the one human branch the rest of the galaxy despises, the feral planet that killed its gods and can't be trusted with anything. He's "the hands" aboard the smuggler ship Mudlark, crewed by people every other world had a reason to leave behind. Neith is Desert-line — the eldest stock, shaped first and closest to the makers themselves, a lapsed believer who can still read their dead script. Issa is Dusk-line, bred for a sunless world: she sees in total dark and goes blind in daylight. Brann is Heavy-world, a giant laid down under crushing gravity, gentle, whose one rule is that you don't put crew off the ship just because crew got strange. Vell is Deep-line, from a drowned, lightless world — lidless unblinking eyes, and a habit of speaking the cold math aloud. And Sered, their patient captain, is High-air, bred thin and unhurried.

Robbing a tomb, Rook lifts a relic that wakes in his hands and says two words no dead maker-thing has ever said: Welcome back. The whole galaxy has waited an age for "the key" — the one who'll reopen the makers' door. Everyone decides Rook is him. He isn't. He's the opposite: the warden, the single hand bred to hold that door shut forever — which makes the faithful's messiah the one obstacle between them and everything they've died for. Hunted by the Reach, who want him dead, and by the Anchoress, a cult mother who's learned you don't threaten a warden — you gather the people he loves and wait — Rook gets driven toward the last place he swore he'd never return: home. Earth. The door buried under it.

It's a book about being needed versus being loved, about who gets left at the bottom of a world, about a crew that refuses to leave each other, and about whether "no" can be an act of love. There's a turn at the very bottom of it I won't spoil.

Free through 6/19/2026. If it lands for you, an honest review genuinely helps a new book find readers. Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H59PL5VR

My supernatural western The Bones of Skeleton Canyon is free on Kindle through 6/19/2026. If you like a treasure hunt with a ghost in it and a conscience underneath it, give it a look.

Addie Boucher is thirteen, and her family is about to lose the only home they've ever had — a hundred-year-old house at the top of ninety-three steps in old Bisbee, Arizona. Then she finds a box in the attic: nineteen letters from a great-great-great-grand-uncle who rode with the Cochise County Cowboys, a coin from Mexico, and half a hand-drawn map to a fortune in stolen church silver buried out in Skeleton Canyon a hundred and forty years ago. The dead outlaw begged a Boucher to come get it. Addie decides to be the one who finally does.

She doesn't go alone. Gabe is her fearless, loyal best friend; Marcus is the new kid who reads maps and rock like scripture; and Sam, whose Chiricahua family was driven out of that country and walked back to it, is the one who keeps asking the question that turns the whole story: whose hands did this pass through before it got to you. Against them is Dell Hunt — a smiling relic dealer who holds the map's other half and has spent fifty years waiting for exactly this.

What the kids walk into is bigger than gold. The canyon is haunted — not by the treasure, but by the taking — and reaching it nearly costs them everything: heat, a flash flood, a search party combing the desert, and a pull on Addie that wants her to stop being herself. The real question isn't whether they find the fortune. It's whether, standing over the most cursed pile of silver in Arizona, they'll do the one thing nobody in a hundred and forty years has ever done.

It's an adventure with teeth — about friendship, about the people history robs, and about who you decide to become when everything you need is finally within reach. There's a twist about that dead outlaw, and about the only Boucher who ever came before, that I won't spoil.

Free through 6/19/2026. If it grabs you, an honest review genuinely helps a new book find readers. Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H51QHMF2

My literary gothic fantasy The Monsters We Keep is free on Kindle through June 18th. If you like dark, atmospheric fantasy that's really asking a hard question underneath, this one's for you.

Wren is a Warden in the fog-drowned city of Aldwick, and she's good at the worst job there is: she walks into the Wood and "Completes" the strays — the faceless, half-there things that wander out of the dark. It's framed as mercy, and she believes it. She has perfect memory; she keeps everything. Which is exactly why she's the only person alive who can see what's actually happening — because the strays aren't monsters. They're people. The kingdom strikes thin-tied names off its rolls twice a year and calls it cleaning, the sweep hollows them out, and the killing itself wipes the Warden's memory of having killed, so the willing stay willing. Everyone forgets. Wren can't.

When a clerk slips her a struck record-leaf and a half-erased man teaches her the thing the kingdom most wants buried — that remembering someone brings them back, at a real and bleeding cost to whoever does the remembering — Wren stops being the machine's blade and becomes the thing it can't survive. The high floor knows it, too. They're already building a trap with her name on it, set to play out in the great square in front of the whole city.

It's a quiet, eerie, slow-burn kind of dark — less swordfights, more dread and revelation. Underneath it, it's a book about memory as a moral act, about the people a society decides are disposable and what it costs to refuse that, about how caring can hunger and still be worth it, and about how no one keeps anyone alive alone. There's a personal thread waiting at the center of the trap that I won't spoil.

Free through June 18th. If it stays with you, an honest review means the world for a book like this. Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H54Z46KX