Jen's Writing Journey

• The Business of Writing
• Craft
• Fiction
• Freelancing
• Platform

The Business of Writing

Digital ARCs Make Progress
Novelist L.J. Sellers looks at the move toward digital review copies. How will that affect writers.

Backlist Title Dilemma
How should authors deal with their less than stellar backlist releases? Shrug and hope their loyal readers see the progress they have made? Remove all poorly written pieces from circulation?

Seth’s Promotion
Bob Lefsetz distills Seth Godin’s book promotion wisdom into an instructive post.

Agents for Multiple Genres
Agent Jessica Faust responds to a blog reader question about whether a writer needs multiple agents for books in multiple genres: Don’t get ahead of yourself, and focus on one book at a time.

Gender Issues
The founders of Men with Pens admitted to being slightly less than masculine this week. Here are two interesting posts that share their different sides of the story.

• From a Man with a Pen to a Lady with a Laptop
• Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants

It is obvious that these two have some bad blood between them, and the back and forth is not that interesting. But, the exploration of gender and pay issues is fascinating. Does gender still matter? Or will good work win out no matter what?

Craft

5 Quick Tips for Clear, Effective Writing
Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen provides good tips for writing and editing to create better prose.

7 Tips for Dealing with Distractions
Anne Wayman’s post is a nice follow-up to the article I included in last week’s roundup about technology tools to keep you focused. Sometimes, you need to make yourself focus rather than depend on emulation tools on your computer.

Portrait of a Multi-tasking Mind
I’m a multi-tasker from way back, and I know that it has had a negative effect on some of my work in the past. I have been trying to be more mindful and focus on one task at a time. This article gives me more impetus to keep that up.

Warrior Revisions Revisited
Jeff Posey shares the lessons he learned while editing the work he created during NaNoWriMo. How can we all apply these lessons to our own writing?

Fiction

It’s All in the Details
Elspeth Potter visit Victoria Janssen’s blog to talk about research and the level of details necessary to write a believable novel.

Can You Use Dialogue to Spark Your Stories?
What can you do if you’re feeling blocked? Robyn Campbell suggests listening to what people around you say and then letting your mind wander down dark and twisty paths of inspiration based on their words.

Conflict in Every Line
Author Camy Tang guests over at Seekerville, sharing tips for achieving the goal of conflict/tension in every sentence.

Freelancing

Magazines Get Ready for Tablets
Finally, old school publishers are learning that they need to adapt to the new technologies sooner rather than later. A few magazines are releasing iPhone versions, and more are planning for the future of tablets (maybe even that rumored Apple iTablet). How will that affect the work that we do as freelancers? We will need to keep in close contact with our editors to find out what they need, and we will have to keep reading these electronic magazines to see how story structure is changing.

5 Best Article Writing Posts
Freelance Writing Jobs posted a top 5 list that should provide some great ideas to we freelancers.

Platform

Promoting Your Book with Twitter
This week’s Writer’s Weekly included a nice marketing piece by Steff Green. She offers some great tips and warns against some of the obnoxious behaviors that make you lose followers faster than Typhoid Mary.

8 Tips on Creating an Army of People to Market Your Book
Tony Eldridge gives some great marketing tips in this post. He echoes some of the tips I heard from Caroline Miller’s speech at the Willamette Writers November meeting–sometimes you need to call in a little help from your friends/colleagues.

Free Selling Your Novel PDF
Bob Mayer has links to some great free downloads to help you better sell your work.

Related Posts:

• Writing Roundup, June 25
• Writing Roundup, June 18
• Writing Roundup, June 4
• Writing Roundup, May 28
• Writing Roundup, May 14