Happy World Book Day everyone! To celebrate I invite you to spread the word about your own book. Please leave a link below so readers can learn more about your writing.
KLCK Bloggers Network, a bloggers networking group aimed at the Kildare/Laois/Carlow/Kilkenny region is a supportive network of bloggers and business people who meet once a month to share ideas on using social media to promote their business.
Their next meeting in March is one that I think many of you reading this will be interested in.
We have a panel of bloggers who will share how they are achieving publication, writing books based on their blogs and securing work writing columns for newspapers and magazines. It’s probably the dream of most bloggers – to write a book from a blog and Carol Tallon, Mark Graham and Fiona Dillon will be sharing how they achieved same ~ Amanda Webb, KLCK
Carol Tallon of Buyers Broker published her first book Irish Property Buyers Handbook in April 2011 with the second in 2012 and a third in the making. Much of the information for her first book was already available as blog posts but had to be rewritten in a slightly different format and style. Carol is now also a columnist with the Sunday Business Post.
Fiona Dillon of Hunters Lodge Living has been writing columns for some time, including for Irish Country Magazine. She was recently approached by Orpen Press to write a book and the good news is it will be on the shelves before Christmas! The working title is Food From An Irish Garden. Fiona will share with us how her blog acted to secure her a book deal without her even having to look for one.
Mark Graham’s face is well-known at Irish festivals as he continues his quest to attend 3 festivals a week – every week and recounts his adventures in his A Year of Festivals in Ireland blog. Mark has been writing his ‘Festival Fit’ column in the Irish Times every Friday for some time and will share how his blog led to this opportunity.
So if you would like to join KLCK for what promises to be a great evening, you will find all the details you need at https://www.facebook.com/klckbloggersnetwork and the good news is the welcome blow-ins (like myself) from all parts of Ireland.
You might also like to read:
Don’t just plan to write—write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style ~ P.D. James
Have you written an ebook? Are you looking for more ways to promote your ebook?
I came across a useful post from last December on the MediaBistro blog which shares a list of websites for self-published authors to promote their ebook for free. Listed alongside the name of the website is a brief discription of what the site offers. You can access the directory of websites here.
Of course, just adding your ebook to a directory is not going to work unless you have a well thought out promotion plan in place. These directories should be just one step in your overall marketing plan. I will be discussing the essential elements of your book marketing plan in more detail in forthcoming posts here on the Virtual Book Tour.
- Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
- Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don’t yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
- Read Keats’s letters.
- Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
- Learn poems by heart.
- Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.
- A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
- If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.
- Don’t worry about posterity — as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed ‘What will survive of us is love’.
The Kindle has transformed the way people read books. But one thing was missing – the personal touch readers got from having their book autographed by the author.
Seattle developer Evan Jacobs (@evanjacobs) decided to provide a solution through creating the Authorgraph, a personal, digital inscription for an e-book. It is sent directly from an author to a reader’s digital reading device.
In this short video Jacobs explains how his concept works and you can also learn more at Autorgraph.com
We sometimes think of writing as an art, but it is more helpful to think of it as a craft
I stumbled upon the quote above on the writetodone blog, along with the following tips on how to develop the craft of writing – very helpful advice which I am passing on to you today.
- Use simple, declarative sentences.
- Avoid passive voice.
- Limit your use of adjectives and adverbs.
- Keep it simple.
- Don’t overwrite.
- Go easy on descriptive narrative (settings, people, etc.).
- Re-examine every word that’s three syllables or longer and see whether it could be replaced by a simpler word.
- If you have a sense of where you want your piece to wind up, start there instead and see what happens.
- Avoid these three weak words – unless absolutely necessary: Ifs, Buts, and Can’ts.
- Practice monotasking. Set a timer for uninterrupted writing.
- Work on brilliant headlines.
- Start with metaphors and stories.
- Write the opening sentence or headline last.
- Write solely from the heart and shun copying others.
- Think before you include an expletive.
- Ask, “Can it be turned into a list?” Think of at least five things you can list about it.
- Use the mini-skirt rule: Make it long enough to cover everything, but short enough to keep it interesting.
- Write in small paragraphs in order to get to the point immediately.
- Visualize the person you are communicating with: What do their eyes reflect as they read this? What will the first thing they might say in response?
- Do what works for you.
- Always call a spade a spade. It’s never a long-handled gardening implement!
When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.- When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
- Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
- Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
- Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
- Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
- Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
- Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
- Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
- Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films.
Ted Hughes' book 'Poetry in the Making', first published in 1967, is a compilation of a series of BBC radio programmes that he wrote and presented for an intended audience of ten to fourteen year olds. It contains the following advice on how to 'capture' an animal in poetry which, to my mind, also captures the essence of how to get that first draft written and how to build up writing confidence whatever the writing genre or age of the writer.
