Blog Book

Here we are at the end of a whole year of blog entries. Someone suggested I turn them into a book. Not a bad idea, because the most current writing information is buried in the blog. Aye, that's the rub--buried. Despite the cool search tools, it's still darn difficult to find a particular post, due to this system's lack of a categories feature. Adding Technorati's tagging has helped somewhat, but I'd never want to just convert the whole blog to book format as some, like LJBook (Turn your blog into a PDF Book) advocate. In fact, in *michael parekh on IT*: ON TURNING A BLOG INTO A BOOK the now old Blogbinders gets slammed. Ooof! Add to that J. Wynia's extended rant on PDF DRM, Why Ebooks Haven't Taken Off and How I Wasted $150 in Time on a $9 Ebook. Incidentally, my latest eBook, Be a Successful Writer remains on sale only through midnight tonight, Pacific time. [books from blogs]

Writers Reading

A good writer is an observant reader. Abandon any notions that reading is a luxury--the writer reads in order to write, Linda Busby Parker says in a February Writer's Digest article, Read Like A Writer. I used to feel that I was the only person who read and paid attention to bylines, until I started hanging with other writers. When you cover small town new with seven competing media, bylines and deadlines rule your life. Writers also need to read fiction with a eye to plotting, character development, and developing transitions. Parker quotes Tom Clancy: "Examine the way your favorite writer uses language--because this is the key to communicating your characters and your scenes to the reader." [writing]

Debut Poetry

Read contemporary poetry from Poets&Writers, Inc. for free to get an idea of what's happening in that corner of the writing world. Does free verse still reign supreme? Are punctuation and capitalization rules thrown out the window? Will rhyming schemes ever come back? I hope so. The first poetry I loved, aside from Mother Goose, was that of Ogden Nash, who sadly informed me that men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses.

[poetry]

Women Writers

From the sometimes caustic and, um, crude Miss Grace's Salon, STATISTICS ON WOMEN WRITERS

Women writers still only make up, in general, about 20 percent of the bylines at our top publications in American letters. This is true even at many of our favorite young fresh upstarts. Miss Grace suggests that you make it a habit of counting bylines, and remember that bylines translate into having a writing career or not, health insurance or not, that kind of very basic survival for women writers.

This reminds me of my first full-time employment as a staff writer. One week a male newbie let slip the amount of his paycheck. I discovered all male reporters received 20% more pay than the females, who were mostly single mothers. Explanation given: men have families. New millenium, new way to discriminate, I guess, at a higher level. [women writing]

Splogs

I've been splogged! Repeatedly. Oh God, I feel so used and abandoned. At least, I am now enlightened as to what those enigmatic websites are on which snippets of Writer's Edge postings appear, sometimes with completely unrelated material. They're automated processes stealing content from other websites to draw visitors, hoping they will click on the advertising displayed. I'd noticed these incidents for several months, recently increasing in frequency.

It wasn't until I read the hilarious The Ten Evilest and Mostly Unethical Blogging Hacks in A Jack of All Blogs that elements began to click (!) together. A few minutes later, I came across the term defined and discussed in January Wired magazine's article on "click fraud." Author Charles C. Mann explains how "Other enterprising scammers manipulate the affiliate system by creating phoney blogs--spam blogs, or splogs." It's a great article. Read it for insight on how advertising works on your own blogs or websites.

Now I feel like Homer Simpson twiddling his fingers, prancing, and whining, "What to do? What to do?" On one hand, I want visitors to come to my website and click on my advertising if they're going to click anyplace! On the other hand, someone might arrive alive here by clicking on the link in one of these splogs. On the third hand (remember Niven/Pournelle's The Gripping Hand and The Mote in God's Eye?) I don't like the idea of someone skimming my content without even asking. There's probably nothing to do anyway, but if I make the decision to take no action, I might feel better about being splogged after all. [copyrights plagiarism]

Tsunami Anniversary

tsu·na·mi (tsu-nä'mē) pronunciation, n., pl. -mis. A very large ocean wave caused by an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption. Informally, we also call it a tidal wave. Whatever it's name in your language, the one which hit southeast Asia a year ago today puts all other disasters in perspective, for me, at least in terms of human destruction. The number of Americans dead in Iraq: 2000. Less than that were killed in hurricane Katrina, I think. Number of Iraquis killed in the current warfare: maybe 10,000. Dead from the Pakistan earthquake: 80,000. Lost to the tsunami: 200,000. The numbers of people homeless, children orphaned, those without work are proportional to the magnitude of the disaster. As writers, we need to be able to keep an event and its effects in perspective.

Free Gift

The spirit of the holiday season finally caught up with me. I'm offering you a free gift of all the links from my new eBook, Be a Successful Writer. Don't confuse this with a "free gift offer" which usually requires you to buy something in order to receive the gift (only the offer is free). This is a legitimate present from me to you. You don't have to buy the book to get the valuable hyperlinks to online resources to help you succeed as a writer. Let me know if you want them as a text, MS Word, or .PDF file by email to:

Saint Nikolaus

From The Writer's Almanac 12/22/05:

In 1823 the famous poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" was first published. It begins, "Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

Fourteen years after its first publication, an editor attributed the poem to a wealthy professor of classical literature named Clement Clarke Moore. In the last few years, new evidence has come out that a Revolutionary War major named Henry Livingston Jr. may have been the actual author of "The Night Before Christmas." His family has letters describing his recitation of the poem before it was originally published, and literary scholars have found many similarities between his work and "The Night Before Christmas." He was also three quarters Dutch, and many of the details in the poem, including names of the reindeer, have Dutch origins.

[poetry plagiarism]

Twingine Search

If you want to compare search results from Google and Yahoo without having to save pages or open multiple windows, try Twingine. This garage band version of hacking search engines began life as "YaGoohoo!gle" and promptly ran into legal difficulties from both top search companies. When I see the name "Twingine", my brain translates it as "twin engine". What the service does is perform duplicate searches and display the results into two vertical frames within your browser. Developer Asgeir S. Nilsen says

you can have Twingine use your localized versions of Yahoo and Google. To use this, you can use the url http://twingine.com/?CC where CC is your country code. I have tested it for no, se, fi, dk, de, uk, and in, and they all work.

[research]

Check Plagiarism

If much of your writing appears on the web, you might be interested in Sree Sreenivasan's experience using Copyscape to Check for Plagiarism. I think an important element he pointed out is that:

Not all items you find this way will necessarily be stolen articles. You might also be led to citations and other ways people are spotlighting your work.

Some folks are adamant about defending their work on the web and use one of the many banners and badges Copyscape provides. I'm kind of sorry to see the service has added a green ribbon motif for a Global Web Rights campaign. We certainly don't need more images of ribbon scraps slapped up on our cars or our websites, do we? [copyrights]

Happy Holiday

From today's The Writer's Almanac:

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It's officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Google Librarian

Gads! Will this girl ever get off her Google kick? No, as John Batelle says, Google is Web 2.0! From the first librarians' newsletter Google just sent, Google Librarian Center offers insight as to how writers can raise their web pages' rank in search returns. Read the whole short article for a deeper understanding of indexing and how you can work the index.

As a rule, Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we'll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to. Still, we'll often elevate a page with fewer links or lower PageRank if other signals suggest that the page is more relevant. For example, a web page dedicated entirely to the civil war is often more useful than an article that mentions the civil war in passing, even if the article is part of a reputable site such as Time.com.

[Google]

No SEO

In a provocative piece, Performancing co-founder, Nick Wilson, explains Why Bloggers Don't Need SEO:

The most valuable link you will ever get is a positive recommendation from an authority blog in your niche - mostly. This means a link in the body of a post, not on a links page, or in a blogroll, but a genuine recommendation, or positive reference to your blog -- preferably to a single post, not the homepage.
With that, you get:

Traffic - real people, predisposed to liking your blog
New Feed subscribers - Gold
More links - Yep, links breed links, and so do Feed subs
And guess what? You'll also get Search rankings [blogs]

Web 2.0

If you have a website and you're tech savvy, you might know about Web 2.0, recent darling of the geek crowd. It involves social networking, tags, FOAF and the like. I'm not sure if the validator is supposed to be realistic or a joke.

Web Two Oh, boo hoo hoo! Only 8 out of, uh, a moving target! Web 2.0 Validator : We're the dot in Web 2.0

[Web 2.0]

FindArticles

When you're researching online, try FindArticles. The service provides both free and fee access in a wide variety of topics. Use the advanced search mode for narrower results. You can choose to receive results from either or both free and premium sources, though I must warn the fees are high.

We provide articles from thousands of magazines, journals, news sources and other publications, featuring current issues and archives dating back to 1984. That means you get to search for exactly what you need from millions of articles not found on any other search engine. Unlike other online collections, many of our millions of articles can be read and printed at no cost. Other articles may be previewed in abstract form, and are available in their entirety for a fee through our partners.

Tip: if you find a premium article, note the citation, then search Google plain and Scholar to find free access. Or you might find the publication available through your local public or university library system. [research]

POD Podio

The Truth Behind POD Publishing: Print on Demand, POD, Vanity Press, Subsidy Press or whatever you want to call the pay to be published publishing industry, it's all the same.

This 7 part series gets to the bottom of the multi-billion dollar "pay to be published" publishing industry. Publishing Basics Radio Show Host Ron Pramschufer interviews the presidents of Author House and IUniverse, the top two online "pay to be published" publishers as well as the former VP of Finance, the third largest. Between these three companies they have over 50,000 active titles. Also interviewed is Mark Levine, copyright attorney and author of The Fine Print - What Print-on-Demand and E-Publishing Contracts Really Say. Jan Nathan, the Executive Director of PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Association finishes the series by talking about who is a publisher and who is not. The listener is left to draw their own conclusions. Anyone thinking of publishing a book should go no further without listening to these interviews.

And an 8th selection features Jenna Glatzer, the head of one of the largest writers groups in the country regarding feedback she has received from her members regarding Publish America. There is no gray area in her opinion.

Requires WMP [self publishing podio]

The Number

A new review leads the top of the Book Reviews page buried deep inside this website. I mention it here in the interest of reciprocity to author Lee Eisenberg for contacting me personally and offering an ARC of his nearly-published The Number. He has a website, The Number, that mimics in appearance the book's cover. Embedded in the website is a blog about the book. The website is managed by a professional, and it shows. Eisenberg, of course, is a pro from way back, displayed through his mature, courteous marketing demeanor to the meticulous research performed for his book. Behaving professionally in your writing career reaps rewards. Of course, it helps if your products are useful and well-written, as The Number demonstrates. [book marketing]

Google Update

No, it's not another new service (that I know of) from the indexer of the world. I'm just trying to play catch up with some pertinent posts on Google. The first two come thanks to Tara Calishain, proprietress of Research Buzz. First she wrote about all the blogs concerning the multitude of services in ResearchBuzz: Google Blogs Everywhere! and also tried creating a Cloud Tag on them with as little success as I obtained using that service. Then she was all worked up over the renamed book scanning service: ResearchBuzz: Google Print is Now Google Book Search:

Part of the reason the Open Content Alliance is so exciting is that they're considering expanding into other arenas, into periodicals and non-book printed items. Google's not going to do that? All books? No magazines? No government reports? There are so many more printed materials out there than books, and it seems to me that the ephemera can be more rare, harder to find, and more important to archive!

Finally, more info on Google Rocks the Analytics World from Websiteservices, the online home of a new magazine with opportunities for writers to sell articles on, what else, websites. I got my Google Analytics on, and the results are marvelous to behold. It scrutinizes activity on a website up the wazoo and spits out pretty Flash pictures. You can slice and dice the data six ways from Sunday. I can see how this free service is meaningful for heavily commercial sites. [resources]

Mal Mail

Well, I spoke too soon, or last month was a fluke, because as soon as I posted eMail Call, the bad guys were back at work. In one week alone these came in:

*phishing expedition for Amazon account
*phishing for eBay account on demo website
*renewal reminder for a newsletter I've never subscribed to
*bulk-mailed request for an internship from N. U. student
*6 spam comments from "Netpowersoft" (Ravish Kumar of Punjab, India?)

Where's my partridge? Where's my pear tree?

BellaOnline

Looking for more online fora (my plural for forum) to monitor, I ran across BellaOnline, which bills itself as "The Voice of Women". I liked that tagline, so I rummaged around until I ran across the section on Writing Help and Information. The website is creaky and slow (I recognize a resemblance to yours truly), but the owners promise they're upgrading that aspect. It looks like you might find some useful information here among the numerous ads. [writing resources]

Telling Tales

I used to say that when I try to tell a story, rather than unfold, it unravels. I can always remember punchlines to jokes, but forget how to set them up. Pursuing an education in stories, I found at down the writer's path: It's a Whole New Mind in the world according to Pink. Vikk cites Daniel Pink in The Whole new Mind:

He believes that storytelling is on the rise. Changes brought about by technology and globalization will cause successful people and organizations to number storytelling in the top six most valuable aptitudes needed to be successful.

I'll grant that fiction writers are more story tellers than those who report the news or develop feature articles. Still, the creative nonfiction proponents advocate adopting good fiction techniques for nonfiction, and I'm thinking this includes stories, especially when they're used as metaphors. So, a priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar ... [creative nonfiction stories]

Unlawful Abroad

While tooling through a list of websites linking to Writer's Edge, I found a new website service called Silktide. It had evaluated this place giving it good ratings on marketing, design, visitor experience, and a user rating (thanks, you) with an overall rank of 8.1 (out of 10, I presume). However, the big red Very Poor accessibility rating gave me pause, even though blogger.com is responsible for the template:


Silktide: Sitescore Results:

British legal requirements All pages were found in violation of the current W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

This website is probably unlawful in Britain from the 1st October 2004. The British Disability Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service provided to members of the public - including websites.

Show error details (1317 errors found over 5 pages) ...
Webpage http://www.writers-edge.info
616 errors found - only displaying first 10 ...
Line 6, column 67: end tag for 'meta' omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified
Line 6, column 0: start tag was here
Line 7, column 17: there is no attribute 'language'
Line 15, column 14: there is no attribute 'profile'
Line 15, column 38: element 'HEAD' undefined
Line 17, column 11: there is no attribute 'name'
Line 17, column 32: there is no attribute 'content'
Line 17, column 39: element 'META' undefined
Line 18, column 46: element 'META' undefined
Line 451, column 6: end tag for 'META' omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified
Line 18, column 0: start tag was here ...

I must admit to wondering about the lack of meta tags in the blog page's template, but it is so touchy to change, I think I'll risk British charges of discrimination rather than risk throwing the baby out with the bath water. Must back up this template starting nnnnow!

Storytelling Tips

I've been reading about story telling lately. I pick up tid-bits wherever I find them, like this from Susan Harrow at Sixty Second Secrets Vol 50:

Anne Lamott Style Storytelling

The best stories are about truth telling or truth twisting. The have 6 common elements.

1. They make people feel less alone.
2. They make people feel better.
3. They make people laugh.
4. They make people cry.
5. They make people take themselves less seriously.
6. They have insightful morals that are not preachy.

[stories]

Inside Information

For those struggling with questions and issues over agents for your priceless prose, I have some info from inside sources. The first is a free listing of more than 400 "trustworthy agents who represent almost every kind of book imaginable" compiled by the people at Authors Team. Ordinarily you'd have to register for their industrial-strength marketing program disguised as a newsletter to get the link to the agents list. The .PDF file is arranged alphabetically and provides contact and agency names, address, phone number, email address, and website (if all that data are available). Use information from the last three columns to find out if the agency handles your type of writing, is taking new clients, requires queries, and how to submit material. Do NOT waste your time and money on unsolicited scattershot submissions. Do the homework first for best results. To get an peek into an agent's selection process, read Agent 007 at Backspace, where Writer's Edge is now listed as a "Literary Blog". [agents]

Help Online

It is my position that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you need both to talk and to walk the walk, in Twelve Step code speak. Communicating correctly is as important for your self image as it is for your projected image. It helps good writing style to become ingrained and eases the burden when you're doing more serious work (say, for pay.) Writing everything as if you are a writer means at the most fundamental level that you compose messages in acceptable grammar and syntax and use standard punctuation. Do I have to mention correct spelling? Emails and board/forum postings are not the same as text messages where time and space are vital constraints. A writer needs to be as bilingual as a translator. Posting a plea for help on a public forum in anguished English suggests a lack of serious intent. Why be surprised if it's not taken seriously, or you're taken to task for mangling the language? [writing]

Amazon Groups

Amazon claims to have groups to discuss books and products. From the Amazon Customer Discussion Guidelines:

On a product page, you can read the first three messages posted in a discussion to get a sense of its topic and direction. The first line of each post is visible; click the 'More' at the end of the line to preview the whole message. If the discussion seems helpful or interesting, click 'See all posts in this discussion' to read through the rest of the conversation or to add your own reply.

However, I can find none for books. I even looked at the iPod page, thinking people would be talking about the hottest toy of the decade. Nada. A prize goes to the first reader who spots a page with discussion group links and sends it in.

Selling Online

A recent Pew report about Selling online says: About 25 million people have used the internet to sell something. That's about bout 1 in 6 internet-using adults, according to Pew people.

The move to online transactions not only has been a boon to people trying to clear out their attics, but it has enormous implications for one of the major revenue streams for newspapers: classified ads. Data from comScore Media Metrix show that the number of Americans using online classifieds has shot up 80% in the past year, led by the rapid growth of the sites organized by Craigslist.org.

That reminds me of a recent suggestion for writers to place ads for their services on Craigslist. You'll have to renew it every week, and I'd think advertising in the large city nearest your physical location might garner more responses. I'm also trying to figure out how to use Google Base (finally working!) to benefit writers. Of course, if you just want to slap a sample of your writing up on the web, that's a no-brainer. My personal efforts include discovering if I can send the RSS feed of this blog to my Base page. [craigslist Google Analytics]

Writers Affirmations

From Michael Geffner's newsletter. Subscribe at:
mikeswritingworkshop-owner@yahoogroups.com

10 Affirmations to Write By

I allow myself plenty of time for my writing projects, no matter what.

I write clearly and effectively and easily.

I make writing a priority.

I love that writing has a way of making me feel so fulfilled and at peace with myself.

I understand my needs as a writer and I do everything possible to meet those needs.

I know my deadline and I organize my life in order to make myself hit that deadline.

I know that when I revise my work it gets better and better.

I use my outline to guide me as I write, but I allow myself to be inspired outside the boundaries of my outline.

I use a dictionary, thesaurus, and other important tools to help me write well.

I read works by writers whom I admire, not only as a way to inspire but to show me the way to greatness.

Publish Poetry

"Got Verse?" asks Timothy Bovee at DayPoems.

Submit your poem to DayPoems. Post your work to the submissions section of DayPoems Feedback. If we like it, we'll add it to the permanent collection.

And there on Tim's forum, see his poignant post on why writing poetry in English is so hard:

English poetry is hard, the writing of it, more difficult perhaps than in any other literary language on the planet.

Why should it be that way?

I find it to be an important question in my struggles, as a poet wannabe, to get the craft right. I think the reasons are embedded in the history of our marvelous tongue, which seems at times to be an oddball collection of rickety chairs and old car parts, long cast away and held together with strands of fraying twine. [poetry]

Literally Blog

Literally, A Web Log

Nitpickers after my own heart! Read a few of the posts to get the drift of this pretty and well-done blog. Visit the "About this blog" page for details. Is this what we word-lovers need to do to re-educate the rest of the world about the English language, devote an entire website, literally, to a single misuse? The possibilities boggle my mind. Hey! I wonder if there's a website devoted to Boggle?
[words]

Earl Name

From the Guide to Grammar and Writing:

An URL-hyperlink without that 'www' (which is what the all-too-fallible Yahoo search engine will give you, no matter how often I advise them of this change!) will no longer work.

Honey, it's pronounced YOU ARE EL, not Earl, so it's "a URL". [grammar]

Copyrights Online

Will Online Book Publishing Rewrite Copyright Laws? ask Wharton University professors. This article is a good roundup of the many online services as well as traditional publishers beginning to peddle digital wares. It also elaborates on the controversies of copyright issues raised by technology.

What's at stake for book publishers could be the economics underpinning the industry for the last 150 years, says Daniel Raff, a Wharton management professor. The book industry depends on producing books, building inventory and then selling it. In between, wholesalers, retailers and publishing houses take their cuts. If digital delivery -- through Google, Amazon or otherwise -- becomes common, the industry could move from producing books ahead of demand to making them on demand ...

12/03/05 Update: I should have included the following link to a piece from The Economist: Putting books online raises a volume of issues.
12/04/05 And this one: Authors Could Emerge as the Winners in Digitization Wars
[ebooks copyrights]