Inspired by Dane Golden's guest post on YouTube videos, I have begun a new series of YouTube videos, the second of which answers the question "Should all authors (published or not) blog?" Check out the video below for my answer. Also, one announcement: Litquake, San Francisco's literary conference, is introducing Digi.lit, a one-day digital publishing conference that will take…

Oh the things you'll find while stalking your teen's social media accounts!

The Vagina Shirt

You probably know that Amazon bought GoodReads at the end of March. A week before that, I had the pleasure to meet Patrick Brown, Director of Community at GoodReads, when he came to lunch at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Brown spoke about the…

Blogs, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook… My guess is you are familiar with and use at least one of these formats of social media among,perhaps, others. I also have a hunch if you are a writer you are at least somewhat savvy about the concept of building a platform. According to Christina Katz, author of…

Hi girls,

Earlier this month, the London Book Fair hosted all sorts of exciting events for authors.  If you have 45 minutes to spare, I have put a link here to a seminar at the book fair, entitled 'How to Get a Literary Agent'.  It is an up-to-the-minute…

Niche Over Numbers

by Karen Dodd

If you are a newly or soon-to-be published fiction author, chances are you are feeling overwhelmed by the what, why and how of building your author’s platform.

Let’s start with the…

An essay that ran in Salon Tuesday titled “I’m a self-publishing failure” recounts how one writer, John Winters, spent countless hours and dollars promoting his book online only to sell a handful of copies. Where did John go wrong? How can you avoid becoming a self-publishing failure?

1. First of all, start early.

Seth…

"Dash it all!" This thought sometimes springs to mind when I am reading or editing something. I can't blame the writers – I believe that a majority of English speakers overuse hyphens because they're easier, although many simply do not know the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes.



As an American editor living in the UK, I had to make an adjustment in…

1. Use your name/brand as your Twitter handle. For the same reason that you want your name on your blog and your Facebook page, people won’t realize that Kiala Givehand is “supercoolwriter,” whose Tweets they follow and love, when they see her book in the bookstore, and they won’t buy it. Unlike on Facebook,…

In the old days, publishers sent out bound galleys or proofs to a limited number of reviewers, journalists, film and translation scouts, and booksellers in the hopes of drumming up early interest in an upcoming title. Now there is Net Galley, a platform where a publisher can upload an electronic version of the galleys that provides early access to reviewers, bloggers, journalists, librarians, booksellers,…

For those of you who were intimidated by the thought of marketing yourself on YouTube, here’s a video tool for you.Vine, Twitter’s new social media video app, allows you to make short videos on your computer or mobile device and easily upload them to your Vine, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. The catch? The videos are limited to…

Today I'd like to welcome guest blogger Dane Golden of Hey.com, who is here to talk about how writers can use YouTube to build their author platforms.…

How many times should you try something before you give up?  I tell my seven year old that he needs to try a new food three…

As writers, we are very prone to the latest social networking craze that comes our way. How many times do we rush out to learn about a new tool someone has recommended to us? Do you know how many social networks you are on? If the answer is more than four, has it ever occured to you that perhaps you’re on too…

Let's call it what it is: The new shaming of bodies.  Especially women's bodies.  The shaming isn't new but the focus and tactics are.  If I am not ideally perfectly thin and healthy, it says, I am taking money out of the pockets of everyone, through higher insurance rates.  Which makes me not only a glutton but a thief.  Gone are the halcyon days of size discrimination when I was only going to hell for one mortal sin, when my body was an object of pity and revulsion, sure, but not yet…

There are certain words in the English language that, through no fault of their own, are constantly misused and abused. They are innocent bystanders that get caught in the crossfire between a deadline and the rush to get things done quickly without proper revisions. Who will stand up for these downtrodden victims of our modern haste? Will you?



Words that are misused due to typing errors or confusion over the differences in their meanings: Complement/compliment, accept/except,…

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are great for connecting with your friends and your fans, but how can you expand your reach to people who have never heard of you? Self-publishing stars like Amanda Hocking know the…

Considering the number of social media resources people can find on the internet, one can truly say that sentiment analysis has recently gone big. If you will try to put the search term sentiment analysis on Google Trends, you’ll see a vast growth from September 2006 up to the present. You’ll even see how Google forecasts the trend and still see a good growth fluctuation from it. This just means how…

A couple of years ago when I started marketing my first novel, Guardian Spirit my publicist gave me a list of “must do’s”: I must set-up a Facebook page. Not just one but two, one for my personal use and one to use strictly as an author page. Not just set the pages up but try and attract hundreds of friends. And we all know to get friends you’ve got to be one… that takes a lot of time.

Another “must do” was I had to set-up a twitter account and start tweeting. Tweeting…