A Blog About Accessibility, Digital, Marketing, and AI
How to Get Into Blogs, 101 is a great starter article for those who are not familiar with blogs and blogging. If you're not using Bloglines or another reader to read RSS blog feeds, you should read this very basic, step-by-step blog reading guide. Reading from a news aggregator is a quick and efficient way to read blog posts, will alert you instantly when new articles appear, and will give you a competitive edge as a writer.
Online retail giant Amazon.com has acquired BookSurge, which maintains a catalog of thousands of print on demand book titles.
Greg Greeley, vice president of media products for Amazon.com says:
Print-on-demand has changed the economics of small-quantity printing, making it possible for books with low and uncertain demand to be profitably produced
Is this a good thing for writers? Depends. Often the perception of Print On Demand books is they are self-published, poorly edited books rejected by mainstream publishers. But this in not necessarily true. Best sellers such as "Rich Dad Poor Dad" and "Chicken Soup for the Soul" were originally self-published. Most of these successful self-published works were non-fiction pieces the authors marketed heavily. What about fiction? There are some success stories, but they are few and far between.
Greeley continues:
BookSurge makes it possible to print books that appeal to targeted audiences, whether it's one copy or one thousand...thanks to print-on-demand, 'out of print' is out of date.
In general, don't self-publish fiction if you think it will enhance your resume. But if you're writing a highly-targeted non-fiction book and you don't mind doing all the marketing yourself, this can be a great medium.
Christian Writer's Blogs for Dummies, anyone?
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Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor, 1995) mentions how how she uses index cards for more than just composition:
I have index cards and pens all over the house—by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won’t look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don’t even know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers—as if it has just come back to me—and I take out my index card and scribble it down.
Quote courtesy of mleddy.blogspot.com.
Some examples of melodrama that annoys, from The Master's Artist. My favorites:
Coincidences that supposedly matter.
Courtroom confessions.
Trite sermonettes that ignite weepy epiphanies.
The judo chop to the neck that drops the villain.
Joel Miller--senior editor at Nelson Current--just posted an entry called, “Book Publishing and the Market.” In it he says,
Because I have so few publishing slots, I’m supposed to be the king of cynics, the Simon Cowell of books, e.g.: “I’m sorry, but it’s really bad. Really, really bad. Honestly.” Sentiments to that effect are communicated all the time. I’m nicer than that, of course. But book proposals are many, actual slots on the list are few. My job is similar to Cowell’s; I’m supposed to filter through the many to find the few. But it’s right at this point where everything gets difficult.
Movie makers have many cinematography options available to set mood and tone -- from the tight camera angle used to create fear and suspense, to the musical score playing in the background, to other elements such as lighting and cross-dissolves.
In writing, you're usually restricted to black characters on a white page, with only bold and italic characters to highlight your phrases. There are many other elements the writer can use to set tone and mood, and to convey to the reader the emotion you want to represent on the written page.
One technique is something I call the 'offset phrase.' Imagine having the page queue a dramatic crescendo of music, or adding a yellow highlighted underline to a word or sentence. We don't have those elements, but we do have the ability to offset a phrase.
Like this.
When you want to make a point or highlight words, don't let them dangle, lost at the end of a lengthy paragraph. Add in the paragraph break and put the few words, often a sentence fragment, all by themselves on a new line that is a standalone paragraph.
Take this phrase from my short story, "The Glass Kiss":
Even after identifying the body and fighting the shock and tears, she couldn't come to grips with the awful truth. Kevin was dead and wasn't coming back. Ever.
So she'd thought then.
At which point the reader's imagination cues the Norman Bates' shower scene shrieks made famous by Alfred Hitchcock.
Vickie McDonough on the value of critique groups:
I can say without a doubt that I'm published today because of the help I've received from my critique group partners. They've encouraged me when I wanted to give up on writing. They taught me to show, not tell. I learned point of view from them, and they've become my friends. Most of my experience with critique groups has been positive, but that wasn't always the case.
Especially helpful are Vickie's list of the key things you want critiquers to look for in your manuscript.
Read full article at the Spirit-Led Writer
To garner interest and anticipation for her latest novel, author Susan M. Brooks is revealing one page per day on her author blog.
Most authors or publishing houses wouldn't dream of putting their works online for no charge, but Small Dogs Press and author Susan M. Brooks are trying a different approach to building interest and anticipation for Brooks' second novel, "Collecting Candace." Brooks is posting one page of the novel per day on her author blog, at http://www.susanmbrooks.blogspot.com.
Susan Sabo, publisher at Small Dogs Press, says:
"We don't see this as a way of giving away the books. The book is 200 pages long, so this will go on till the end of the year. If someone is really bent on not paying for the book, I suppose they could visit the blog everyday and print it out, but I seriously doubt anyone would want to read a book that way."
By visiting the blog, readers can read each entry (named by the page number) in sequence or out, depending on their need for continuity and linear action. But the main idea, says Brooks, is not to get people to visit everyday and read the entire book, but to be enticed by the few pages they might read into buying the book.
"Unknown authors have a really tough time of selling books," says Brooks. "So free content, like teasers, are essential to building an audience." Although there are dozens of ways an author can blog a novel, Brooks likes the idea of the slow tease of one page per day. "It can really build a lot of interest and anticipation," she says, "when you're in the middle of some really exciting scene, and you're cut off by a hyphenated word!"
For those of you lucky enough to be on a Mac, here is a great Mac 'service' that you can install, that gives you many new and useful text formatting options in a variety of applications, including MS Word. Features:
Reformat, Remove line endings/multiple spaces/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/light, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps & lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date & time/time/contents of path, Speak native/german text, Statistics.
Take a look at this quote from the recent Library Journal survey:
The popularity of genre fiction also continues unabated, with Christian fiction the runaway favorite in terms of increased interest (it was claimed by three-quarters of LJ's respondents compared with 60 percent for mystery).
Read more at: Library Journal - Book Buying Survey 2005--The Turnaround