A writer's journal about English words, books and writing ... with a techie touch
born with a pencil in my mouth ... printers' ink runs in my veins ... can't think without a keyboard ... can't wait to wireless thoughts
Reciprocity
PsybertronListings
AnswersShop & Compare Laptops at Bizrate
Garr Reynolds blog's focus is on building good presentations (another type of writing). I found Presentation Zen: Where to get quotations for presentations? a wellspring of resources that any writer can use. Quoting an authority can lend credibility to your writing, add insight, or illuminate complex material by providing a simple example. [writing]
So says Wendy Boswell at About.com in Web Search Engines. You can accuse me of having made snide remarks concerning About.com in the past, but this particular section seems to have hired an on the ball of fire, to mix metaphors. [research]If you're like a lot of people I know, you find one good Web search engine and stick with it forever, through the good and the bad and the indifferent. But did you know that there's a TON of Web search engines out there that you can use for all sorts of things?
Georganna -- [noun]: An alien 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com |
You may have noticed some red words in posts have a dotted underine. If you run your mouse across them, a title appears saying that by clicking on the word you can look up its meaning on Answers.com. I'm using this function as a dictionary hyperlink. Instructions for this service. [resources]Your blog has become an Answer on the Answers.com Blogger Directory. We are proud to provide information about quality bloggers and their blogs on our reference pages. I know that as a blogger, you are constantly seeking to increase your pages' readership. Being listed on a top reference site should help boost your efforts.
Some people have made careers of scrapbooking. I stumbled into a business devoted entirely to selling geegaws to customers who make scrapbooks as a hobby. "What is all this?" I wondered. A closer examination revealed materials that have sifted to the bottom of my sewing box, objects lodged in my painting supplies, and memorabilia stuffed all over my house in drawers and cupboards. "People pay for junk?" I wondered. Well, prettily packaged, color co-ordinated, uniform junk. Scrapbook your writing career is a novel scrapbook notion on Angela Booth's Writing Blog. Her writer friend said:"It started when I was clearing junk out of my filing cabinets and found the first article I ever had published -- the very first! I photocopied it so that it's tiny, and decided to save it, in a writing scrapbook. Why not? I want to be able to remember my career. When I've found a scrapbook that's portfolio size, I'll paste in the article, with some notes about how I felt when it was published," she said.I guess a scrapbook might be fun to make and review, but how to choose what to put in from the drawers and stacks of file folders? Nah, I don't want to look back on my career, I want to die still singing! [writing]
Since 1994, I have been developing an on-line resource entitled A Celebration of Women Writers. The Celebration links to thousands of pages about women writers, and more than 1200 complete on-line editions of published books by women writers. Editions of out-of-copyright works are also being put on-line at the Celebration by myself and others. In the fall of 1997, I began the Build-A-Book Initiative, soliciting volunteers via the web, selecting books, sending out chapters, and supervising completion of works as sections were returned. More than 200 volunteers are now engaged in collaborative development of on-line editions of works by women as part of this initiative. Over 140 on-line books are now available at the Celebration. [women writers]
If you're about to publish a book, you need to know about the shift to the 13-digit ISBN numbers. The most comprehensive information I've seen is at the BSIG website. I find it amusing that they even offer their own free eBook, ISBN13 for Dummies. I wouldn't even attempt to explain this shift, which also affects previously published material, except to say that 2006 is a transition year, and beginning January 1, 2007, books will need to display new codes. The International Standard Book Number provides a standard way to identify your books in global trade. [books]
Robert Scoble helps run Microsoft's Channel 9 Web site. He began his blog in 2000 and now has more than 3.5 million readers every year. Scoble's blog has earned acclaim in Fortune magazine, Fast Company, and The Economist. An Excerpt from Naked Conversations by by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel:
Composing in my best Ferlinghetti,Amusing doggerel, I know.
(tomorrow for dinner we must have spaghetti)
that holds ideas for use in places other than this blog alone. This, I'll admit, is a risky practice. I think I'm addicted to the ease of clicking on the Blogger symbol that's part of my Google browser toolbar to save a reference to a web page. It even allows me to make pertinent (or incoherent) notes to self, like "save to use in XX forum". The risk of losing all these resources comes from Blogger's glitchy behavior and the fact that the posts aren't on my server yet if they're still in draft format. Still, I find it very satisfying to have a collection of leads for cyberspace writing located out there IN cyberspace. OK, I'm officially weird.
Laurie Richardson of the San Diego Writers/Editors Guild . She has provided a handy chart explaining how to format mss. for short stories, nonfiction books, novels, and articles (nonfiction). The file is in .PDF format, requiring special software like the free Adobe Reader.
Istockphoto
She suggests they join online critique groups to obtain honest assessments, but I think that's a time-waster. What they need is to pay a professional to edit or critique their work and tell them the truth. You get what you pay for and tend to value it the same. [editing]1. Like the singers on American Idol....some people really think they can write well when they can't. And, since family members will rarely tell them the truth, they just don't know how bad their writing is.
2. They may know their writing is poor, but they hope the editor at their future publisher's office will fix their errors.
In honor of this, Women's History Month (see Events: Celebrate Women's History Throughout the Year!), I've been reading a super little paperback, Wild Women and Books by Brenda Knight. She's a San Francisco author of about a dozen books and a scholar of medieval lit and 
modern poetry. The Wild Women romp through the pages of recorded history, some of them being various firsts (a woman was the first writer!) Knight arranged the writers in some eclectic fashion that doesn't quite make sense to me, but it is still pleasing to read. 
Instead of meatier blogging about words and writing, books keep hijacking this blog. Now comes a story in the NY Times about a $13 million book deal, Religious Broadcaster Gets Rich Contract for Next Book.The contract does not adhere to usual format, with the author receiving an advance on future royalties and the royalty rate set at 15 percent of the cover price of each book sold. Rather, the Osteen contract is known in the industry as a co-publishing agreement, with the author receiving a smaller advance--perhaps $1 million to $2 million--but then being entitled to receive 50 percent of the publisher's profit on sales.Estimates of the value of the contract come from outside sources. More than just the one book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential is involved. It's the follow-on to his Your Best Life Now published in 2004 by Warner Faith. It sold more than three million hardcover copies, along with more than one million other products
.
Using good key words and phrases to attract search engines, and consequently visitors, is critical to a blog or website's success. More viewers still arrive alive via search engines than any other method. A free and easy software, Good Keywords: Find the best keywords for your web pages, helps automate the process. It's a quick download in the .EXE file format, so it's ready to use immediately. If you're used to visiting AdWords or what was called Overture to do this type of research, you'll recall it was a cumbersome process. The Good Keywords software purportedly offers other features which I've yet to explore. Hint: using popular keywords in a blog post title brings instant boings in visitors--but the body of the post had better live up to the title. The day I posted about "Google Analytics", viewership spiked by 1000%, most of those probably disillusioned to find my post was just another "what is this?" 
The Compulsive Reader :: A Haven for Book Lovers is running a poll on truth in memoirs. The results and comments page provide interesting points. The poll is in the lower right-hand column on both pages, and you can still vote. I'm sure what prompted this survey is the brouhaha over James Frey's fictional memoir (there's a new literary form for ya'). As a result of trying to pass off fiction as a memoir, Frey's lost credibility, his agent, his publisher, and maybe his career. Maybe. I think Carolyn Howard-Johnson's comment makes a good case for preserving the creative aspects of writing this form of nonfiction. She also touches on the effects of memory and a child's point of view on past events. Or an addict's skewed POV, I guess. As I made notes this weekend for a potential look back at my writing life, I realized that while I usually recall details of physical locations and the circumstances of events, I didn't tape-record conversations. Any dialogue I recreate will be based on a woman's innate sense of the emotional climate and the personal meaning and impact the other person, words, event had on me as I recall. It will also be filtered through the lenses of decades and following experiences. Good storytelling techniques will become paramount for success. [memoir]
The ContentBee Self Development Blog helps you to achieve your goals. Set goals for your life, your work, and your spirit. Discover who you are and share it with the world.
eBook publishers reported increases in revenue and unit sales over the same quarter the previous year (Q2 2004) with a 36% increase in eBook units sold and a 69% increase in eBook revenues. Also, publishers reported a 24% increase in titles published over Q2 2004.
Instead of watching the Saturday a.m. cartoon, Johnny Test, I'm watching a book cover test. That is, I'm testing the impact of a professionally designed cover against my own graphic fumblings. Behold the power of 3-D in the image to the right. Yes, it's the same new eBook that just debuted in December, but now it has a new cover by graphic artist, Bonnie Boots. She's starting a service for authors. Read all about it at WriteSideOut, or on the website she's designed for this new enterprise, Book Cover Catalog. This (reduced) image is just one of several Bonnie offers to publishers in an attractive package.In preparation, she came up with a glorious list of Suggested Exercises. I liked the following. Evoke a place, event, or person by using sensory description: sounds, smells, touch, taste, sights. Come up with a smashing book title and write an outline or treatment for the work. Quick! Give someone a really good picture of yourself in two minutes. [prompts]Inspired by the success of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), we thought it would be a great idea to designate some non-November time to "just doing it." But our writing time is open to all kinds of writers, not just novelists. Whether you write nonfiction, plays, poetry, screenplays, blogs, songs--anything--this weekend is for you.
After establishing Twenty Ideas for a Great Podcast in Notes to self about podcasting, FrogBody bullfrog, Carson McComas relents:If you have something important/valuable to say, get something out there. It may not be perfect, but if you've got great content, some omissions from the above list are tolerable.His advice includes suggestions to be brief (he says 30 minutes is too long), don't get too serious, add humor, find someone to help and someone new to interview, add music, etc. To reinforce the lessons, he lists a couple of podcasts that he thinks present good examples.
"Don't tell me libraries won't exist in the future," quipped a colleague when she learned I was writing a column for Searcher magazine about the future of librarians. Before I had even put my fingers to the keyboard to write my first sentence, I was already receiving strong, unsolicited feedback. And what did it mean? Was my colleague saying that I shouldn't say libraries won't exist in the future because she disagrees with the prediction? Or was she afraid to face an uncertain future devoid of printed books, where everything she's ever learned in 20 years of library work will have flown out the window?So begins David Grossman's column "What's next" in the Searcher ezine at Infotoday.
Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood introduced her device for signing books electronically from afar. The LongPen, as she calls it, records handwriting digitally, then zips the information across the world to be emulated by a robotic arm. From the stand of Bloomsbury Books, her publisher, Ms. Atwood chatted by videolink to a conference room in the fair complex, and then signed her books from a distance. The device malfunctioned at first, and during the 30 minutes of tweaking, Ms. Atwood was philosophical about improving the lives of writers, who 'will have other mortifications, such as the one you just saw.'Wired has a LongStory on it, but fails to mention the debut a year ago at which the device also failed to work saying only that "Atwood's democratic device underwent the most universal of experiences on Sunday: the last-minute technical hitch. Its first-ever public demonstration, at the London Book Fair, was delayed as project director Matthew Gibson and his crew engaged in some frantic tinkering."
And I still think we need to jury rig a connection with this virtual signing device to Kevin Smokler's virtual book signing tours in order for authors of virtual books to have book signings, too! I mean, let's be techie all the way. After all, this is Read an eBook Week. [booksigning]
This is the correct dash mark to use for material that will be printed. Although they don't refer to the em by name, Strunk & White's illustrations for using a dash are all em dashes. They say to "use a dash to set off an abrupt break or interruption, and to announce a long appositive or summary. A dash is a mark of separation stronger than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses." Because no one knows how to use colons anymore, I would expect to see fewer rather than more dashes, but, alas, few can write right.The Book Standard and Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, are sponsoring a competition for student filmmakers to create 30-second videos for three upcoming novels: 'The Thieves of Heaven' by Richard Doetsch, 'Stuart: A Life Backwards' by Alexander Masters and 'Shadow Man' by Cody McFadyen. In November, The Book Standard will launch a book video channel on the Web.
Talk about cross-channels promotion! Pretty soon you'll be reading teasers for new books on your cell phone. HarperCollins' Amistad imprint has already created its first music video to promote Lolita Files' Sex.Lies.Murder.Fame using actors as opposed to VidLit's slide show approach. How satisfying to see a traditional medium hijacking high tech to promote itself. [book promotion]
And what about entry fees for poetry contests? Ironically, these are considered acceptable in the literary world, as the $5 or $10 entry fees often support the judging and prizes. Before entering one of these contests, make sure that the prize includes publication in a periodical that has a history, a reputation or a significant circulation.I would differ from Marcia in calling all the schemes she covers "literary". Not all writing is literary, as we all know from one of the LitBlog's editors, "we know it when we see it." [writing scams]
