Post #54 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
I like lists. I think people, generally like lists. Lists help us condense information, focus on the highlights and they make skimming easy. Lists also appeal to our desire to order and classify information. But here’s the funniest fact about lists. We like lists because we can argue about them. Ask a group of friends to create a Top Ten list of the best movies. They won’t be the same, and everyone will defend their list against all the others. Here’s my list of lists for you:
Meredith Greene’s Top TEN Tips for Newbie Fiction Writers is posted on Scribd, and her 10 points are all equally good reminders for memoir writers. She also has a lot of fun with the titles of her tips. Here are a couple: “How Did Who Go Where, and Why?” And another: “To Speak, To Drawl No More…” I particularly like her “Starting Out” tip to create “individual, successive chapter notes.”
Angela Hoy’s WritersWeekly.com gives us a useful list that compares the pros and cons of SEVEN Publish on Demand (POD) publishers. A real plus: She tells you about things you can do to save money and includes some tips for preparing your files.
Freelance web designer Joanna Ciolek loves lists as much as we do. Here’s one of her most recent: 30 Best Web Design Resources for Freelancers–August 2010. It’s filled with links to design ideas, special fonts (which I just love), other design blogs, business cards and ideas for using color. I bring this to your attention because even as writers, we need websites and marketing materials to promote our published works. And if you self publish, you will need to hire a designer to create your cover. It’s always best to go into these relationships with some idea of what you want or like. Joanna’s site may help focus your ideas.
I know, we all wish we could just write our books and leave the promotion and sales to others. But this is not the world we live in. Most authors “get it” that they have to create a website (or better, blogsite) to support and promote their books. But creating a site is not enough. It must have visibility; authors need a web presence. One of the best ways is to get your site onto the first page of Google for your keywords. Here’s John Paul’s list of 9 Proven Steps to Improve Your Google Rankings. Read it…apply it, please.
Here’s a list of 46 Writing Wrongs. Jerome Doolittle–former journalist, author, columnist and Harvard instructor–is now a blogger. His “Bad Attitudes” blog is a good read. He says this list of 46 Do’s and Don’ts is something he used to hand out to his students. Here are a couple:
- Keep constructions parallel.
- Can your subject do what your verb says it can?
- Don’t make the reader watch you shifting scenery.
There is one, however, that as memoir writers we must ignore. He says, keep yourself out of the story. We’ll forgive, Doolittle; he is, after all, a journalist.
Okay, it’s not a list, but I love this from Twitter. @TheSingleWoman tweets: Stop fighting your Past & start writing your Future. What u didn’t do isn’t as important as what U STILL CAN!
Here’s a book I recommend you buy: Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 Weapons for Selling Your Work. Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of Guerrilla Marketing, published his original book in 1984. He’s been producing industry-specific versions ever since. Although Guerrilla Marketing for Writers is out of print, you can buy used copies through Amazon for just a couple of dollars. Do it! And check out the 177 free articles on Jay’s site. All authors need to be guerrilla marketers.
By the way, Rick Frishman, one of Jay’s co-authors on Guerrilla Marketing for Writers, reminds us that even the hugely successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series was NOT an overnight success. It took 18 months to make the bestseller list. Authors Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen kept their dream alive through workshops and radio interviews.
This isn’t a list, but I’m going to share a lot of numbers. The headline on the email I received read, “Internet Kills the Oxford English Dictionary.” That’s a stunner and, I think, a bellwether. Here’s an article you can read: Oxford English Dictionary ‘will not be printed again.’ So I promised you some numbers. I think these will help explain why the printed volume will be no more: A team of 80 lexicographers have been working on the third edition of the OED for more than 20 years, and it’s still only 28 percent finished. It’s not expected to appear for another 10 years. Now the second edition (20 volumes and CD-ROM) sells on Amazon for $1,290. But here’s what’s happening: The OED website is receiving more than 2 million hits a month from subscribers. Here in the United States, subscriptions cost $295 annually.
Matilda and I were talking about this development, and we both acknowledged that while we have good (big) dictionaries we never consult them any more. Online services–free and paid–are more convenient, easier to search and more helpful when you don’t know exactly how to spell a word.
Bookmark this! It’s called Word Lists for Writers, and it’s better than a thesaurus. It’s not a replacement for a thesaurus, but it’s a fabulous list of words (many unusual) for various topics. Explaining it is difficult so I’ll just give you a couple examples, but please do yourself a favor and check this out. Do you need an adjective of relation? Well, how about:
- blattoid…of, like or pertaining to cockroaches
- butyric…of, like or pertaining to butter
- georgic…of, like or pertaining to agricultural or rustic affairs; rural; agrarian
The list of adjectives of relation goes on for 26 pages. But that’s just the beginning. Here’s the complete list of topics:
- Adjectives of Relation
- Bearing and Carrying
- Carriages and Chariots
- Causation and Formation
- Color Terms
- Contour Lines (Isolines)
- Dance Styles
- Divination and Fortune-Telling
- Ecclesiastical Terms
- Fabric and Cloth
- Favorite Words that No One Uses
- Feeding and Eating 87 Fighting and Combat
- Forms of Government
- Forms of Worship
- Forsoothery
- Grammatical Cases
- Killing and Killers
- Latin Adverbs and Prepositions
- Love and Attraction
- Manias and Obsessions
- Names for Names
- Nautical Terms
- Numerical Prefixes
- Words that end in –ism
- Phobias
- Pretenders and Dabblers
- Rare Three-Letter Words
- Sciences and Studies
- Scientific Instruments
- Shapes and Resemblance
- Stones and Rocks
- Styles of Speech
- Unusual Animals
- Words of Wisdom
Bang the Keys: FOUR Steps to a Lifelong Writing Practice. I’ll wrap up this list of lists with writing coach Jill Dearman’s video book trailer for her craft book Bang the Keys. Oh, one more thing, “bang” is an acronym for Dearman:
B is for Begin with your strongest idea.
A is for Arrange your material into a concrete form.
N is for Nurture your project with love, so that others may love it too.
G is for complete it and let it Go out into the world to live independently.
book marketing
getting published
writing tips
