Jen's Writing Journey

[digg=http://digg.com/educational/How_Are_You_Furthering_Your_Writing_Career]Tiffany Colter, the Writing Career Coach, had a great post last week: Do You Own It? It offered a no-nonsense kick in the pants to all of us who play-act at being writers.

I have purchased her Writing Career Coach courses on Creating a Writer’s Life and Building a Platform, but I haven’t finished it. I own that. I want to finish it. The lessons are wonderful, and the feedback is valuable. I have put at least one idea from each lesson into practice, and it has helped me approach my career in a professional fashion.

I am thankful that her post came during a week when I had set goals for the month and had come to some decisions about how I would achieve them. It also came during a week when I had submitted four short stories for consideration to various print and online publications, including a stand-alone excerpt from my current WIP. I feel as if I have really worked my writing career over the past week.

To help me better focus my writing time, I have taken a pseudo-vacation from Pop Culture Curmudgeon. I know that by posting less frequently, I risk losing some readers. But I need to put my paying projects and potentially paying projects first. And I will keep posting during the coming month.

I will be maintaining my regular schedule here, with posts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Wednesday, I will have a list of my indispensable tools. Friday, I will have the usual writing roundup.

What about you. What do you need to do to further your career? Do you need to set new goals? Create benchmarks? Find tools to help you better organize your time? Learn how to say no?

Related Posts:

• New Year’s Resolutions
• The Glamorous Life of the Writer
• More on Writing in the Cloud
• Writing in the Cloud
• The Importance of Backups

My goals for this month:

• Finish my two nonfiction books
• Write 10K words on my novel
• Finally create the submission tracking spreadsheet I keep talking about

So that is what I need to accomplish this month. It’s a lot, but I can do it.

What are you planning to achieve in June?

The Business of Writing

Effectively Combatting Piracy
DRM is a contentious issue in publishing. Many industry bigwigs seem to think that crack-proof DRM will stop piracy. But how well has that worked for the usic industry? At Dear Author, Jane presents her plan to combat piracy.

Stepping up Your Game
I love that agents go out of their way to tell us how to get their attention (in a good way). And I love that Nathan Bransford channeled his inner Coach Taylor to help we writers work through the despair this economy may be causing for us. (I’m a huge fan of Friday Night Lights.) Right now, money is tight, and editorial standards are tighter. We need to work even harder and polish our work even more to help it stand out.

Some BEA Observations
Agent Kristin shares her experience at BEA last weekend, with a articular focus on how spartan it seemed because of the economy.

Rules for Writing
An honest and amusing list of the rules we all need to follow. I would add another rule that had something to do with drinking copiously, but maybe that’s just me.

Craft

Does Editing a Manuscript Help It Get Published? Part 1
Robyn begins another good series on her blog, this time focusing on the importance of editing.

Developing Your Writer’s Voice
Voice is that certain je ne se qua that sets you apart from the myriad other writers out there. But developing it and describing it can be a real challenge. Camy Tang shares a series of posts on the topic of voice.

Fiction

I Scrapped It and Skinned It and Scored!!
Inez Kelley tells the story of cutting out more than half of her current WIP, cutting out the hero entirely. It sounds really scary, but it was the right decision for her story, and she is ready to rock with it now. I’m actually leaning toward cutting out one of my characters–it was an idea that came to me while I was listening to Philip Margolin speak on Tuesday–so reading Inez’s story was very useful to me this week.

Romance: The Same Old Same Old?
In this guest post at the Novel Journey, romance novelist Cheryl Wyatt discusses how she keeps her books from just being the same thing over and over again. It is particularly challenging in romance, where we all know there will be a happy ending, but her tips apply to other genres as well. I’ve certainly said that there are no ideas, just new ways of presenting them.

Freelancing

Monthly Marketing Mix: June 2009
Ugh, marketing. Who wants to market when the great late spring weather makes us all want to go outside and have fun with friends and family? Certainly not Jennifer Mattern, who provides us with easy ways to market our freelance services and have fun this month.

30 Sites Every Freelancer Should Visit and Utilize
The folks at Freelance Folder have compiled a good list of resources for freelancers. The only thing I don’t love about this post is that they listed their site first. I mean, come on, at least bury the blatant self-promotion. Well, that, and use “utilize” when “use” would have done just as well. The copy editor in me will never shut up about that one.

Happy writing!

Related Posts:

• Writing Roundup, October 23
• Writing Roundup, September 11
• Writing Roundup, September 4
• Writing Roundup, August 28
• Writing Roundup, Aug. 14

On Monday, I talked a little about the stigma attached to vanity presses.

We all seemed to be in agreement that self-published books are not viewed with the same level of respect as traditionally published books, even if the writing is of the same or better caliber. Writer’s Digest has pulled together a guide to self-publishing that can answer any questions you might have about that method of getting into print.

I mentioned in my comment that I believe many vanity presses are predatory, taking advantage of authors who have met the sting of rejection. These authors are not willing to look at their book and objectively assess why it was rejected. If you get a rejection, especially if the rejection includes specific feedback, please take the time to look at your work again and see if there is any further work that needs to be done to help you get that all-important acceptance.

Many of you pointed out that decision of whether to publish a book is a business decision, based on the quality of the writing, the depth of the story, and the current and projected market conditions. For some writers, that means their book may be rejected even if the writer has done everything right–polishing their prose to a diamond-like sheen, developing rich and believable characters and plots, targeting the right agents and publishing houses, and building a solid platform.

Yes, this is another way of saying that rejection isn’t always about you. We writers are a lot like actors–we may do our absolute best work ever, yet it doesn’t quite fit for some other reason completely out of our control.

All we can do is begin work on the next project, which may be the one that gets us published.

Related Posts:

• If a Book Is Good, Does It Matter How It Was Published?

[digg=http://digg.com/arts_culture/If_a_Book_Is_Good_Does_It_Matter_How_It_Was_Published]With the hullabaloo about the SterlingHouse Publishers booth at BEA last week, I started thinking about how important the publishing house is to the success of a book.

Publishers provide important services (editing, design, production) and the access to online and bricks-and-mortar stores that the average self-published book simply won’t get.

And the dangers of self-publishing, with its high price tags and the virtual impossibility of getting those books into stores where consumers could actually buy them, are well documented. (Writers Beware is one source of information, but there are certainly others. A quick web search will net a wealth of information.)

But, if a book is good, does it really matter whether it came from a vanity publisher or a traditional publisher? If all other variables were controlled, would a good book that came from a publisher notorious in the industry for releasing unedited crap stand a chance? Would reviewers throw away their review copies unopened, unwilling to waste their and their readers’ time on a book that is obviously junk? Would readers take a chance on a new author from a publisher that had a bad reputation? Or from a self-published author who had done all of the due diligence of a traditional publisher?

My inclination is that it would still matter. Even if the author was the next great national treasure, he or she would always be tainted by the reputation of the shoddy publisher or the vanity press. The distribution variables simply can’t be controlled. A traditional publisher has a much greater ability to distribute books than a single author has. And, really, what good is a book if no one reads it?

Related Posts:

• Writing Roundup, July 22
• Writing Roundup, June 24
• Writing Roundup, June 10
• Writing Roundup, May 9
• Writing Roundup, May Day-ish Edition