Category Archives: Marketing

Priorities: Writing vs. Social Media

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An old reporter once told me about writing a newspaper column (a primitive version of a blog). It’s like being married and having a mistress. You no more finish with one and you have start immediately over with the other.

Typewriter keys

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Writing fiction and staying in touch on social media (blogging, for instance) represents that kind of unending challenge. I note that a number of published authors I follow online face the same dilemma.

I figure I can either write fiction or keep up with social media, but not both.

So I’ve been converting The Passenger into a graphic novel and rewriting (for the umpteenth time) Black Orchid Demon and Return of the Black Orchid Spider. And I have a backlog of stories that need some editing attention as well.

Next week, I’m heading into v. 6 of Black Orchid Demon to incorporate six pages of feedback I received from a tough editor I hired to critique my work.

So I’ll be sticking with the wife (fiction) and neglecting the mistress (social media).

But do keep in touch. I do email all the time. (No handy sexual reference available unless you believe in puns.)

Agents Behaving Badly

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Every writer wants an agent. Someone to take their cause, fight their fight, make them money. (Let’s be real here, people.)

Well, probably almost every writer, given that e-publishing allows writers to become their own publishers.

Maybe perhaps a lot of writers want an agent, because all the big writers have them.

All right, already, I want an agent. I need a tutor in publishing and book marketing, a mentor in the business of selling fiction.

So thank you very much, James Scott Bell, for your piece on The Kill Zone blog about Agents Behaving Badly.

Dousing oneself in ice water appears all the rage these days.

I just wish I had an agent to wonder about.

BTW, Bell’s piece should be mandatory for all writers seeking an agent. It’s a business, people, not just art.

Steps for Writing a Book

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I’ve written three books now and am negotiating with myself on what No. 4 should be about.

If you are curious about what that involves, or perhaps you’re planning to engage in this insanity yourself, I recommend two primers to get your started.

Melissa Donovan, writing on the Writing Forward blog, identifies these 10 steps is a brief, succinct post.

Stefanie Newell, over on The Write One Blog, rounds up nine steps but provides more depth and detail in her All The Necessary Steps To Write A Book For Newbies!

There is obviously overlap.

And for the record, I’m still looking to publish any of the first three. Just wanted to be clear that writing, as satisfying as that can be, is not publishing, which I suspect is thoroughly unsatisfying until it happens.