Jen's Writing Journey

It is easy for writers–especially new freelance writers–to agree to too many projects. The result is either missed deadlines, shoddy work, or a really crabby and tired writer whose family can’t stand to be anywhere near him or her.

But what is it that leads to over-committing and under-delivering? There are usually a few reasons.

1. Lack of a plan
    
   A lot of us begin our writing businesses without a sense of what it will take on the business end. As a result, we take projects as they come in, with little planning. That leads to an erratic stream of work. When we don’t know when the next job is coming, we are less likely to want to turn projects down because of lack of time.
    
2. An Inaccurate Estimate
    
   Sometimes, we don’t have a good idea of how long a particular job will take us or what effect our other obligations will have on our ability to complete our work.
    
3. Fear of the Word “No”
    
   I hate being told no. So, when I have to tell someone else no, I start to think about how they will feel when they hear it. I can go through a whole range of emotional responses in my head in mere seconds. All of this emotional backflipping makes me feel very bad about declining.

A little business planning can address all of these issues.

First, create a simple business plan and a desired work schedule. Break your work day into the component tasks, allocating at least half of your time to marketing, billing, and other office tasks–the rest is your billable time. Ensure that your rates match the amount of billable time you have allotted. If not, adjust your rates so that your billable hours won’t need to bleed into your non-billable time, which would then need to bleed into your family or leisure time.

Then, make sure you are keeping an accurate count of the hours you spend on each project. Use those counts to determine how much time similar projects will take you in the future. This will allow to provide appropriate estimates and schedule your work time appropriately.

After completing these business tasks, you may notice the shift in attitude that will help you address the last issue: You should be viewing your writing business with less emotion. And that will help you realize that saying no is a business decision, not a personal affront to your current and potential clients. You are not doing your clients any favors by taking on more projects than you can do well or on time. In fact, telling the truth about your availability and suggesting a different time line or even a fellow writer who could help is the biggest favor you can offer.

What do you do when you are overwhelmed? Do you just say no? Do you have a network of writers to whom you can refer overflow business? Do you subcontract rather than turning down jobs? Or do you just work extra hours to get things done?

Related Posts:

• What to Do When You Are Overwhelmed
• Book Review: Full Time Income in Part Time Hours, a Freelance Writing Book by Gretchen Roberts
• The Glamorous Life of the Writer
• More on Writing in the Cloud
• Writing in the Cloud

Lots of good stuff out there as we look toward the fall.

The Business of Writing

How a Book Gets Published
Agent Nathan Bransford gives a great, easy-to-follow description of how a book goes from finished clean copy on the author’s desk to a shiny new book on the shelves.

Ask Daphne: What about Contest Sites?
Are contests a route to get an agent? Kate Schafer Testerman says, no, not directly. She doesn’t visit contest sites looking for new authors to represent, and she doesn’t imagine that most other agents have time to do that either. I believe contests are still viable ways to gain buzz for your work, and they might be a nice entry in your query letter, though.

Passion and Confidence in Publication, Part 1 of 11
Rebecca Emrich begins a new series on the role of passion and confidence in your writing. Does your writing reflect your passion? Are you following your dream when you write, or are you simply trying a different career path?

What We Agents Talk about when We Are Talking about Auctions
Agent Kristin explains the different types of auctions that may be involved when your agent is selling your work.

Stanza and the Future of Ebooks
Author JA Konrath shares his thoughts on the format wars for digital books. He includes a bit of the history of format wars for music and video, and he concludes with his recommendations for writers who are planning how the shift to ebooks will affect them.

Craft

Dear Diary: A Bit on Journaling
Rebecca Emrich shares a conversation she and a friend had about journaling. Would-be writers have long been advised to keep a journal to build their daily writing habit and increase their skill. Do you journal? How has it helped you hone your craft?

School of Write
Writing can be an expensive undertaking, if you attend every conference, buy every writing book, and complete a master’s program in creative writing. And the expense of all of those options can be overwhelming, especially when your writing has not yet brought any income. But, agent Rachelle Gardner reminds us that learning can come cheap–there are many low-cost writing resources out there, including all of the great writer and agent blogs–and it is essential if we want to earn more money from our writing.

Revision in Action
Writer Jennifer Hubbard uses an excerpt from her own work to show how she revises. She discusses the idea of when you might want to kill a phrase you love to make your story better, which I touched on in my post about prologues on Wednesday.

Fiction

Urban Fantasy: Science Fiction’s Future?
GalleyCat looks at the bright economic prospects of the urban fantasy genre and how it might affect the rest of speculative fiction in the future. Also read the follow-up discussing the difference between urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Writing F/F(/M) for the Female Gaze
Kristin Saell guests at Victoria Janssen’s blog to discuss how to write sex between two women that will actually appeal to straight women. The advice she offers reminds us of the importance of keeping the reader’s perspective in mind when writing. She also draws on the feminist theory of the male gaze to show why mainstream romance readers haven’t enthusiastically embraced F/F romance. After reading this, think about whether your fiction is based on reality and speaks in the language of your ideal reader.

Don’t have an ideal reader? Here are two posts that will help you understand why you need one and how to create one.

Freelancing

Job Posting: Quartet Press Editorial Positions
Quartet Press, a new romance publisher, is hiring contract content and copy editors.

60 Tips for Getting Started in Your Freelancing Business
Deb Ng shares the lessons she and other freelancers have learned the hard way. Use their combined wisdom to ensure that you start (or continue) your business on the right foot.

Which Freelance Writing Services Should You Promote the Most?
Jennifer Mattern gives tips for choosing which services you should promote on your web site and networking. Hint, you probably want to promote the services that pay your bills so you can afford to spend time doing the one’s you love. Mattern reminds us that we freelancers are first and foremost a business, and a business must be run with a balance between passion and practicality.

Platform

We’re Even Crowdsourcing Bookstore Appearances Now
GalleyCat reports on a contest being held by Melinda Blau. She is asking her Facebook friends to visit their local bookstores, ask strangers to take their pictures with her book Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter…But Really Do, and submit them to her. Other authors have done similar contests. How can you use social media and crowdsourcing to build your platform?

Get Known Before Your Book Deal
Christina Katz shares her platform-building wisdom at the Under 30 CEO blog. Of particular interest is her answer to the question of mistakes made by writers when trying to build their platforms.

Fun Stuff

The Things They Don’t Tell You When You Sign the Contract

Very funny–and accurate–things you need to know about the writer’s life. I have been a victim of the Non-Einstein-ian contraction of the space-time continuum. Where’s Doc Brown when I need him?

Hey, Where’s the Doggies of Publishing Go?

Desperate to share photos of your dog? GalleyCat shares a few opportunities and a fun video about Dean Koontz’ dog.

More Links

Thursday Midday Link Roundup
The ladies at Dear Author post a daily collection of links about the industry that is worth adding to your Google Reader. Be warned, though, that this is an active site, so you’ll see your unread count increase quickly.

Related Posts:

• Writing Roundup, August 21
• Writing Roundup, December 4
• Writing Roundup, October 23
• Writing Roundup, September 11
• Writing Roundup, September 4

I’ve been hearing all of the agents and editors talk about how much they hate prologues.Why did I care? Well, my WIP has a prologue.

I couldn’t imagine how my story would work without that preamble, so I kept it. I thought about calling it Chapter 1 so the entire prologue problem would be avoided. I mean, the events in the prologue take place only five days before the events in the main novel. Chapter 2 can just begin with italic text: Five days later… Right?

Then, at the Willamette Writers Conference, Charlotte Cook led attendees through the first page of potential submissions. She described everything that she doesn’t like about prologues, and dammit, all of those elements described my stupid prologue. Whether I called it Prologue or Chapter 1, it had everything Cook said was wrong with prologues.

So, finally, someone convinced me of the evils of prologues. What was I going to do now? The central crime of my novel is described in the prologue. Would the rest of the story even work without that?

I’m still working on that, but I’ve come up with some ideas that I hope will elevate the tension and make the novel better in the long run.

The lesson here is not just that agents and editors (and ultimately readers) are anti-prologue. The real lesson is that sometimes we can’t allow our love for our prose to blind us to what our stories need.

You may love the names you selected for your characters, but you may find that they are too similar and your readers are confused. Unless you intend to follow every copy of your published novel to their new homes to explain that Lisa and Lauren are not the same person, well, you better change at least one of the names. (Yes, this, too, is an example from my WIP.)

You may absolutely adore a character who your beta readers find extraneous and stupid. Your story may be better if you completely expunge that character from it.

And, yes, you may love your 3,500-word prologue so much that you would marry it, but if your readers will just skip over it so they can get to what they perceive as the actual story, you are doing your novel a disservice by keeping it.

Ultimately, you may have to kill your darlings to save your story. And that’s okay.

Related Posts:

• Short Stories Can Improve Your Writing Skill
• Writing Roundup, July 22
• Writing Roundup, June 24
• Writing Roundup, June 10
• Writing Roundup, May 9

Finally! Here is a tidbit I picked up from the Willamette Writers Conference.

A few months back, I questioned whether writers can work on short and long pieces at the same time. Published writer Eric Witchey says not only can you, but you should.

Witchey offered some great ideas in his session Short Fiction for Fun, Money, and Skill. The fun is obvious–short fiction allows you to play without a huge time commitment.

The money is also pretty self-explanatory. Write the stories, then sell them to paying publications. Witchey gave us some URLs to find sources for our shorts. He has posted these links on his website. He also advised going to the highest-paying publication first, rather than trying to build street cred (aka, a publishing history) through lower-paying publications. Everyone seems to have their own opinions about this, but Witchey’s thought is that the story is what sells you, not your previous credits. Write a good story, and keep submitting it until it gets published.

The skill part is the piece I hadn’t really thought of before. A short story allows you to experiment with a different style, focus on improving a particular facet of your writing, and practice your craft on something you will finish in a reasonable amount of time. If you begin an experiment on a novel, you may not know how it works for you for six months or a year. With a short story, you could know within a week or two, depending on the length of the story and how fast you write. And, if the experiment doesn’t work out, you can set that story aside and go on to the next with the lesson learned. And all of the lessons you are learning by writing short stories can be applied to your novel.

My big objection to the idea of writer promiscuity is that I will be taking away from my larger project by doing the smaller side projects. Witchey’s presentation helped me shift my thinking. By honing my craft with shorter pieces, I am ensuring that the time I spend on my novel is more focused and incorporates all of the stylistic improvements I learn from my shorter pieces.

If you get a chance to attend one of Eric Witchey’s presentations or to take one of his courses, I recommend it highly. He is a dynamic speaker who invites audience participation and works hard to meet their needs. And he is funny–which was a nice break in the middle of the conference.

Related Posts:

• Death to All Prologues
• Writing Roundup, July 22
• Writing Roundup, June 24
• Writing Roundup, June 10
• Writing Roundup, May 9

We’ve got a lot of interesting news posts this week in addition to the regular blog suspects.

The Business of Writing

The Limits of Control
This article from the American Journalism Review provides a good synopsis of the ethics policies and guidelines major newspapers are asking their reporters to follow when using social media. Are these policies enforceable when the journalist is acting as a personal user? What decisions do you make when you interact with others using social media tools?

Who Are You Online?
Another piece exploring the personas we put out on the web. I have three Twitter accounts that I use for different purposes. @jenroland is to discuss writing and romance issues. @pccurmudgeon is to discuss pop culture. And @EdTechJen is focused on educational technology–because I thought teachers might be turned off by the occasional tweet about the peen.

Tech’s Heavyweights Put Google Books Deal in the Crosshairs
Microsoft, Yahoo, and others have come together to challenge the Google books settlement, arguing that it gives Google an unfair copyright advantage that other businesses would be unable to match.

Angela James Joins Quartet Press
Angela James has been a heavy hitter in the e-publishing segment of the romance market for a while. It was announced this week that she is joining Quartet Press, a new publishing company “founded on shared principles to create a high-quality, community-centric, and reader- and author-friendly digital publishing house,” according to its press release.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Kindle
Nathan Bransford shares his thoughts on the various e-reading options out there. He, like me, prefers using his iPhone to read books.

Lucienne Diver: Agent and Author
Lucienne Diver, who was taking pitches at the Willamette Writers conference, shares the crazy hectic life she leads as both author and agent. Of the most interest is her description of why she is not her own agent.

Craft

Your Advice Needed
Agent Janet Reid plans to meet with some beginning authors who need a lot of guidance. As such, she asked her readers to share the best advice they got when they were first starting out. And boy, did they bring it. The comments are a treasure trove of time-tested and useful tips.

Weak Verbs One and Two
Writing mentor Mary DeMuth discusses the need for strong, active verbs rather then weak, boring helper verbs.

Fiction

Does Size Matter?
At Dear Author, Janet explores the rumor of shrinking page counts. Does a shorter book mean less value for the reader? Or does it mean a higher-quality, better-edited work?

Tighten Up Your Manuscript
Agent Rachelle Gardner offers tips to help you cut your word count to fit the new, shorter mindset.

An Unusual Take on Conflict
Jennifer Hubbard shares the lessons she learned from reading Guru by Jeff Griggs. We writers often hear that conflict is an essential component of our fiction. However, Griggs suggests that the relationship between the hero and the villain is richer and more interesting than their conflict. How can you apply that idea in your writing? Will you ensure that your villain is as fleshed out as your hero? (Or, if you’re like me, will you go back to the draing board and breath more life into your protagonist?)

Freelancing

For Publishing Companies and Their Suppliers, a Surge in Bankruptcies
Many magazine publishers are in bankruptcy or will likely file bankruptcy soon. This article from Folio discusses what those bankruptcies mean for the industry. We writers need to know what it means for freelancers. Will there be an increase in freelancing opportunities as magazines more to even-more-bare-bones staffs? Or will freelance pay drop to ensure the magazines financial success?

Save Time. Organize Your Space. Now.
Freelancer Julie Steed reminds us of the importance of proper organization. Can you take a few minutes now to ensure that your writing time will be productive for at least the next few months? Why waste your precious writing time looking for pencils or paper clips?

30 Day Marketing Boot Camp
Jennifer Mattern is planning a marketing boot camp on her Query-Free Freelancer site in September. The Query-Free Freelancer is focused on helping freelancers build a business that doesn’t rely on pitching for low-paying jobs on job boards.

Platform

Writing for a Blog Tour Versus Writing for a Book
The Blood-Red Pencil has been focusing on promotion this week. Here, Marvin Wilson discusses the differences between blog tours and book writing.

Book Tours and Book Reviews: When to Give up Control
And here, guest blogger Elizabeth Spann Craig shares her experience with interviews about your book.

Promotion Routines for Writers
Finally, Camy Tang talks about her promotional tools. Her big tip for writers: Only market in ways you are comfortable with. If you can’t bear the thought of wasting time on Twitter, don’t do it. If you can’t keep to a regular posting schedule, don’t blog. If you shudder at the thought of standing in front of a classroom of writers hungry for the knowledge you can share, don’t teach.

Fun Stuff

Apparently I Like Vampire Books. Who Knew?
Amanda Brice shares her new-found love of certain vampire books with the ladies at Fictionistas. I have always loved everything vampire. How about you?

Are You a Cat or a Dog?
December Gephart shares a couple fun quizzes. In case you needed some further ways to procrastinate.

Looking for more? Andy Shackcloth presents his own list of writing posts on his site. I suggest bookmarking it or adding it to your Google Reader.

Related Posts:

• Writing Roundup, August 28
• Writing Roundup, December 4
• Writing Roundup, October 23
• Writing Roundup, September 11
• Writing Roundup, September 4

I got a wonderful comment on Monday’s blog post from Rebecca Emerich, whose blog Living a Life of Writing has been featured in my weekly Writing Roundup quite a few times. Rebecca is a prolific blogger who maintains three distinct blogs and posts on her writing blog daily–even on the weekends. And she has two children and a non-fiction work in progress.

Rebecca selected this blog and six others to receive the Kreativ Blogger Award.

I was thrilled that Rebecca holds my blog in such high esteem. Thank you very much, Rebecca!

Here are the rules for the award:
1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting. (see below)
5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers.
6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know they have been nominated.

1) I am obsessed with the show Friends. Nearly every thing that happens in my life leads me to think, “That reminds me of the episode where…” I have learned only to think that statement, not say it out loud

2) I have a veritable menagerie in my home: a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, a Bernese Mountain Dog, a Miniature Dachshund, four cats, a couple tropical fish, a husband, a mother, and a brother-in-law. You are free to make your own judgments about who is the hardest to care for.

3) I learned to read when I was three. My parents sent to a Montessori school that was run in a woman’s garage, and I learned at my own pace in the three years I was there. By the time I was five, Mrs. Rose was making monthly trips to the bookstore to buy me new books to read.

4) I quit reading in college. I felt guilty every time I read something that wasn’t for school, so I read only in the summer and on spring break. Like most habits, once you stop reading for pleasure, it is hard to start again. Thankfully, a friend got me back on the path of novel worship a couple years ago, and the books she loaned me to read were the ones that sparked my desire to write fiction.

5) I have season tickets for UO Ducks football. I never liked football until I had been dating my husband for a few years. And I really only tolerated it until we started attending Fan Day and meeting the football players. They are charming, shy, and goofy, almost as if they are real people who just happen to have preternatural athletic abilities. That human connection is what I needed to help me begin to enjoy the game–that and tailgating.

6) I dream of being even half as funny as my comedy idol, Janeane Garofalo. I will watch almost any TV show or movie she is in, just to see her sardonic delivery of her lines. Seriously, I even watched part of Larger Than Life to see her.

7) I don’t understand women who are afraid of stating their age. Age is only a number, and really isn’t getting older better than the alternative? Now I’m 36, so I might feel differently when I get a few more years under my belt.

Here are my seven Kreativ Blog nominees, in no particular order:

• Kristine Meldrum-Denholm: Stories of Life: One Writer-Mom’s Odyssey
• Multiple Writers: Rose City Romance Writers Blog
• Camy Tang: Story Sensei
• L.J. Sellers: Write First, Clean Later
• Multiple Writers: Pop Culture Divas
• Marta Acosta: Vampire Wire
• Julie Steed: Emerging Author

It was ridiculously hard to narrow it down, and I wish I could have nominated 8 or 9 or 10… Anyway, what are your favorite blogs?

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Today, we’ve got a post from novelist and writer’s writer Roz Morris. Roz is here to tell us about a tool she has developed to help her writing: The Beat Sheet. It allows you to boil your novel down into a manageable chunk and assess how well the whole thing works. The Beat Sheet not only can help guide revisions, but it will be a huge help as you polish your synopsis and query letter.

Now, I’ll turn it over to Roz so she can explain the tool and how it can help you troubleshoot your first draft.

Your first draft is probably a bit rough and chaotic, right? You know there are lots of things you need to fix. Where do you start? Is there a smart way to manage it all at once?

Personally I find if I just start at the beginning and feel my way, I don’t get the most out of the story. I might sort out the flow and the language, but I’m still not tackling the structure, or knowing if the pace is varied enough (or if it varies too much), if the crescendos build and are in the right places or if some of my threads disappear. Indeed some characters may fade off into the background and never return to complete their stories! Or other story threads that are lovely may be irrelevant and should be saved for another book. It may take several passes to sort all these problems out – and some of them I simply won’t see unless I stand back.

So I make a document that assesses the entire manuscript in as summarised a form as possible. Hollywood scriptwriters do something similar – they call it the beat sheet. That sounds cool to me so I call it that too – although I’ve developed it more. Not only is it a way to assess your novel at a glance, it can be used as a mission statement for your revisions.

I’ve used it for short novellas and big, sprawling literary epics. It makes the most daunting revision job into a piece of cake, no matter how long or complex the book is.

It’s quite fun to do – you write a short summary of each scene, assessing its purpose in the story. You use coloured pens for each story thread or group of characters, emoticons as shorthand for the mood of a scene, leave a column down the side so that you can work out the timeline with pinpoint accuracy. You use another colour to draw in where you’re going to swap scenes around, add new ones in or adjust the content. (For more detail, see The Beat Sheet – Your at-a-glance revision blueprint)

It might take you a day or two, and the result might look like childish scribble, but it’s a seriously useful piece of work.

You can make all sorts of creative decisions with the beat sheet. For instance the emoticons might indicate you’ve got too much tension building – so you might rework the order of scenes to give the reader a breather. Or you might rewrite one of the tense scenes to make it lighter. You might feel the narrative has got bogged down in a repetitive loop – and looking at the beat sheet will show you where you can trim the flab.

You can use it to assess character development too – as you will see from the emoticons and your summary of the scenes if your people are being put under more pressure and changing the way they behave.

Another great thing about the beat sheet is it also puts me in a positive frame of mind about my first draft. Any problems I come across, I put on the beat sheet and figure out what to do about them. Quite often, it will be clear whether I need to reorder, delete – or maybe expand.

Once I’ve played with the story on the beat sheet, I’m confident it will work on a structural level. Then I can dive in and edit with purpose and pleasure. I know where I’m going and I’ve got all the information I need to bring the best out of the story.

Roz Morris is a novelist and ghost writer who provides critiques and consulting services to her fellow writers. You can find out more about Roz and the books she’s written, including the recent Nail Your Novel, at Dirty White Candy.

Related Posts:

• Outlining Redux

When you decide to set up a blog for your students or to share your latest thoughts on education, you have a lot of choices about where to host it. Here is a comparison that can help you choose the right host for you.

Blogger

Blogger’s free hosting service is great for beginning and experienced bloggers alike. It requires some level of HTML coding skill, however, to customize it.

Blogger is part of the Google family, so it is easily accessible from your Google account, and it integrates nicely with Feedburner, if you want to offer an email subscription to your blog. It allows Javascript, so you can easily include interactive widgets, and embedded multimedia, so you can add You Tube videos and podcasts to your posts.

W. Chamberlin, who keeps a blog up for his students, prefers the flexibility of Blogger over other tools.

Edublogs

Edublogs uses an easy content management system that let even a novice Internet user set up a free blog in just a few minutes. It allows embedded multimedia content and 100 different design templates to choose from. It’s offerings are pretty standard for free hosted blooging tools.

But it offers support and community features that help educators connect with one another and use their blogs to best teach their students. There is a forum where teachers can share their ideas and ask questions. The help system is easy to search.

One drawback of edublogs is the limited storage space–only 20 MB.

Live Journal

Live Journal is a community-building tool that not a lot of educators are using for classroom purposes. (Many may have personal journals hosted there.)

Blogging is only a part of the tools offered by Live Journal, and you might find that your students are using it to connect with each other and with like-minded people who watch the same TV shows or movies, listen to the same bands, or have some other interest in common.

Live Journal has strong privacy controls, which would be good for a classroom community that you wanted to keep closed to the rest of the Internet.

WordPress.com

WordPress’s free hosting arm offers an extremely easy to use blogging platform. Even the most novice users can have their blog up and running in a matter of minutes. WordPress allows very few customization options, which is why it is so easy. You don’t need to know any HTML to customize your blog, because the pieces you can customize are done through widgets and appearance options.

WordPress does not allow Javascript or embedded video, so it is best suited for text and still photo entries. This makes it a less than ideal choice for a teacher who uses multimedia materials in their teaching.

However, WordPress does have two good points. It offers good privacy so that you can restrict your blog to current students only. And it cross-pollinates with links to related postss on other WordPress blogs. This little tool can help you connect with real-world materials related to your teaching.

Your Own Site

When you host your blog on your own site, you have the most freedom to post the content you prefer and to integrate advertising. But, it will require more work on your part than the free hosting services. You will need to register your domain and pay for hosting. You will have to choose your blogging content system–Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, among others. And you will have to integrate all of the tools you want to use within your blog.

Your School’s Blogging Platform

If your school or district has a preferred blogging platform, this may be your best option for your class blogs. It will be easy for your students and parents to find it, and you may even be required to use this tool and no others.

If you have any questions about blogging platforms or tips to share for creating and using blogs with your students, feel free to share them in the comments.

Related Posts:

• Review of The Best of L&L
• A Call for Financial Education
• Background on the Book
• Winners + One Drawing Still Open
• How Are You Celebrating Banned Books Week?

So many great resources, so little time. Thus, I avoid preamble and move directly into this week’s links.

The Business of Writing

5 Reasons Pitches Can Be Detrimental Rather Than Helpful
Jane Friedman, who took pitches at the Willamette Writers Conference, offers a little advice to writers making pitches: Don’t pin all of your hopes on that 10 or 15 minutes.

The Myth of “Just an Author”
Agent Nathan Bransford discusses the role of an author in publicizing and marketing his or her book. It seems to be very clear to non-fiction writers that they are their platform, and they must spend a lot of time building their reputation to ensure good sales. But, it is murkier for the fiction writer. We understand the need for book signings and events like that, but we don’t always enter into our writing life with a strong idea of how we will be expected to market our work and our selves.

Can Self-Publishing Damage Your Career
Agent Noah Lukeman addresses a writer’s question about self-publishing. I am still of the belief that rejections are opportunities for you to polish your manuscript and make it more publishable, so I would be reluctant to suggest using a POD publisher to get a book contract. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work for some writers.

The Future of BEA
Publisher’s Weekly captures the changes you can expect to see at next year’s Book Expo America. It sounds as if it will be pretty much the same–the changes are mainly tweaks. This article serves as a nice description of what goes on at the conference for those of us who have never been.

Mystery Author Sandra Brown Answers Your Questions
It’s hard to write a summary of this–the headline sums it up quite nicely. Ms. Brown discusses rejection, getting that elusive first book deal, conferences, and more.

To Agent or not to Agent. That Is the Question.
Debbie Mumford answers the question of when you need an agent.

Craft

Research Junkie: When Is Enough, Enough?
Minnette Meador discusses the fine art of research. When should you keep going, and when should you sit down and start crafting your story? She suggests using real-life research instead of a bunch of boring fact searches.

Take Time to Edit
Stop with the queries and the pitches! Instead, take the time to ensure that your story is edited and polished before you send it out. So says Elle Scoot at Writing Advice for the Absolute Newbie.

Training Our Inner Editor, Part 3b
The Blood-Red Pencil comes through again. Linda Lane provides an example scenario written from omniscient POV and from the POVs of two central characters. This exercise is important in helping writers decide which POV is the best for telling the story and showing how to use the POV you choose.

Fiction

Reasons to Make Your Delivery Date
Moonrat reminds we writers that when we are on contract, we need to meet our deadlines. When we are writing for fun, we can be leisurely and procrastinate until we feel like it.

More Tips on How to Present Backstory
Camy Tang gives us more tools for giving the dreaded backstory. Yes, long gone are the days when we writers could begin a book with a line such as “I am born.” Instead, we must start in the middle of the story and find artistic ways to include the necessary backstory without boring our readers to death. (Also read her first set of tips on presenting backstory.)

How to Stay Motivated as a Writer
Lonnie Ezell guests on the Publishing Guru blog with nine tips to help you keep your motivation up, even during the boring middle of your novel.

Freelancing

Don’t Let Your Good Ideas Go to Waste
Jennifer Mattern has been running challenges to freelance writers to help them keep their businesses moving forward. In this one, she asks you to take an old idea and do something with it.

Finding Time to Be Yourself and Stay Sane
In a guest post on L.J. Sellers’ blog, author Pam Ripling shares her tips for knowing where you  spend your time. Once you know that, you will be able to better allocate your writing time and estimate project costs for your clients.

Caught in the Time Warp
Sue Lick reminds us of the need to ask questions before we write a piece. We don’t want to waste our time writing something that won’t be used–we are trying to make a living here, after all.

Platform

Do You Blog for Yourself or for Your Readers?
Jessica at Racy Romance Reviews discusses her philosophy to blogging. She tries to ensure that her posts provide something new to the world, but she often wants to comment on things others have said on their blogs. What do you look for from the blogs you read?

2010 GLA Excerpt: Blogs, Facebook, and Social Media
In this excerpt from Ron Hogan’s article in the 2010 Guide to Literary Agents, we writers are instructed not to start a blog just to promote your book. Instead, Hogan argues, blog if you want to blog, and write your posts about things that interest you. Readers will see through a thinly veiled advertisement every time.

Fun Stuff

Vampire Romance: Mortal Men No Longer Cut It
Apparently, Twilight has ruined all hopes for any of us to have normal relationships. Damn you, Stephenie Meyer and your sparkly mens. (I was alerted to this story by a post at Marta Acosta’s Vampire Wire blog. Marta writes the hysterical Casa Dracula books.)

iPhone and Smart Phone Apps for Writers/Bloggers
This post at the Pen & Muse collects a bunch of super-cool apps to help us do our jobs better. As you know, I’m in love with my iPod Touch, so I am now officially in love with this post, too.

Unleash Your Story
Help raise funds for cystic fibrosis research and treatment, just by writing? Yes, through the Unleash Your Story program, you can raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. This post at Novel Journey provides a great summary of the the program.

Looking for more? Andy Shackcloth presents his own list of writing posts on his site. I suggest bookmarking it or adding it to your Google Reader.

Related Posts:

• Writing Roundup, October 23
• Writing Roundup, September 11
• Writing Roundup, September 4
• Writing Roundup, August 28
• Writing Roundup, July 31

I’m going to share some session recaps from the Willamette Writers Conference here on the blog later. Today, I’m going to share the tips I learned about the nuts and bolts of attending a conference.

1. Volunteer

You can save a lot of money on registration by volunteering–as much as 75% off the cost of attending. You can apply your savings to your travel costs or to consults and pitch appointments.

In addition, volunteering can put you in face-to-face contact with the editors and agents you might be pitching to later in this conference or at another conference in the future. In addition, you can see what works in a pitch and see just how exhausting a day of listening to pitches can be.

2. Pitch Only at the Right Time

Don’t corner an editor or agent in the hotel, at a meal, or, god forbid, in the bathroom to pitch them your book. Purchase a pitch appointment. If you are talking with an editor or agent outside of a consult appointment, only pitch them if they ask you to. And, no, I didn’t see the bathroom thing happen at the conference last weekend, but I did read a tweet yesterday from agent Colleen Lindsay about the time she was followed into the bathroom.

3.Don’t Ignore Opportunities

Acquisitions Editor Charlotte Cook hosted a session where she critiqued the first page of volunteer’s stories. She read the page aloud, sharing her thoughts and stopping at the point she would stop if she had received the page as a submission at work. I learned a lot from that session, but I would likely have learned even more if I had brought my own pages to be read.

Opportunities for free critiques, pitch practice, and other feedback abound at a conference, but hey are only going to help you if you take advantage of them.

4. Talk to People

Yes, writers are a shy and retiring bunch. But the face-to-face interaction with our peers is one of the most valuable components of a writers conference. Set a goal to talk to one new person in each room you enter. You might find that you like that so much that you talk to two or three people in each room.

Each time someone asks you what you are working on, you can practice your pitch. When you debrief a session with another attendee, you get a second perspective on what you learned and help cement your new knowledge. And you might meet a new friend you can bounce ideas off. Volunteering also helps with this, as you will likely be in a situation where you will need to talk to quite a few fellow attendees.

I had a great time at the Willamette Writers Conference last weekend, and I will definitely be going next year. Have you been to a conference? What tips might you share with conference newbies?

Related Posts:

• My First Writers Conference
• Death to All Prologues
• Short Stories Can Improve Your Writing Skill