10 Web 2.0 Sites for Writers
Below is a list of 10 Social Media Sites specifically for writers. On these sites you can upload, share, bookmark and market your books (be sure to check out their policies before blatantly marketing your books. Follow proper netiquette). Social Media Sites are a hot book marketing tactic.
Social Media Marketing is getting big. Even large book publishers like Random House/Crown Publishing, Harper Perennial and Putnam are starting to use Web video and social media to market their books. Just take a look at this episode at The New Media Minute for more details.
Social Media Marketing brings higher rankings and more targeted traffic. Give it a try and let me know what you think in a comment. If I missed a Social Media Site that you think would be useful for writers, post it in a comment.
I’d also like to thank @MargHamp and @sduffyphotos for their suggestions.
Here they are in no particular order …
http://www.shelfari.com/Create a virtual shelf to show off your books. Connect with your friends. Discover exciting new titles. Voice your opinion. All for free. Read. Share. Explore.
http://wordsy.com/
Strongly inspired by Digg.com. You can vote on stuff, and if more people vote on something it’ll get promoted to the homepage. There are many places on the web to find stuff about books and reading - like reviews, previews, discussions, newspaper articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts. Wordsy is a place to put it all together. And let you be the judge…
http://www.scribophile.com/
Scribophile is a community of writers just like you. Publish your works and get valuable critiques and feedback from their writing community. Read the works of other authors and write helpful critiques. Interact and grow with a vibrant community of authors and poets. And, when you’ve put the finishing touches on your work, publish it as a PDF eBook.
http://ficlets.com/
A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world. Once you’ve written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. In this manner, you may know where the story begins, but you’ll never guess where (or even if!) it ends.
http://www.facebook.com
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
Note: When you sign up for Facebook, send me a friend request. I enjoy connecting with writers.
http://beta.booklamp.org/
BookLamp.org is a system for matching readers to books through an analysis of writing styles. Similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music. Do you like Stephen King’s It, but thought it was too long? The technology behind BookLamp allows you to find books that are written with a similar tone, tense, perspective, action level, description level, and dialog level, while at the same time allowing you to specify details like… half the length.
http://issuu.com/
Issuu is the place for online publications: Magazines, catalogs, documents, and stuff you’d normally find on print. It’s the place where YOU become the publisher: Upload a document, it’s fast, easy, and totally FREE. Find and comment on thousands of great publications. Join a living library, where anyone finds publications about anything and share them with friends.
http://www.22books.com/
22books is dedicated to the creating, sharing, and viewing of book lists. Start out by browsing some of the featured lists to the left and then open a free account and start creating lists of your own.
http://www.booktagger.com/
Tired of cruising bookstores trying to judge a book by its cover? Now you can ask those who’ve read it before. Booktagger is an online bookshelf application to list the books you’ve read and to share them with others.
http://www.mixbook.com/
Mixbook was started with the idea that friends should be able to create books together. Though Mixbook software makes book creation easy and fun, it also allows groups of people to build books together. Now friends finally have a way to share their memories online!
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Until next time …
No day without a line!
Are You Overlooking this Simple Readability Tool?
Do you want to improve your chances of receiving an acceptance letter instead of a form rejection in response to your query letters? Of course you do …
How? Simply mirror the readability of the magazines that you’re submitting queries to.
Developed by Robert Gunning, an American businessman, the Gunning-Fog Index is one of the methods used to measure the readability of a passage of English text. The resulting number is an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person needs to easily understand the text on the first reading. For instance, if a passage of text has a Gunning-Fog Index of 12, it has the reading level of a U.S. high school senior, an 8 would indicate that a U.S. 8th grader could easily understand the passage.
Writers and editors who want their articles, stories or essays to be easily understood by a large segment of the population commonly use the Gunning-Fog Index. Texts that are designed for a wide audience generally require a Gunning-Fog Index below 12.
Typical Gunning-Fog Indices of some popular magazines:
12 — Atlantic Monthly
11 — TIME
10 — Newsweek
9 — Reader’s Digest
8 — Ladies’ Home Journal
7 — True Confessions
6 — Comic books
Calculating the Gunning-Fog Index
The Gunning-Fog Index is calculated in the following way:
- Take any passage of text that is around 100 words.
- Find the average sentence length by taking the number of words in the passage and divide by the number of sentences.
- Count the number of complex words, words with three or more syllables, within the passage. Do not include proper nouns (for example, Ravikant), compound words or common suffixes such as -es, -ed, or -ing as a syllable, or familiar jargon.
- Divide the number of complex words by the number of words in the passage and multiply by 100. This will give you the percentage of complex words. For example, 8.3%, not .083.
- Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words.
- Multiply the result by 0.4. This result is your Gunning-Fog Index, your readability.
While the index is a good indication of reading difficulty, it still has limitations. Not all multi-syllabic words are difficult. For example, the word “engineer ” is generally not considered to be a difficult word, even though it has three syllables.
While I can’t guarantee that by simply matching your article’s Gunning-Fog Index to that of the magazine you’re querying will result in an acceptance letter. I do feel confident saying that if you thoroughly analyze your magazine market, including its Gunning-Fog Index, you’ll begin to receive more acceptances than rejections.
Here’s an example. This passage of text is from an article that ran in INC. MAGAZINE, March 2008:
LIKE so MANY technology entrepreneurs, Williams, whose friends call him Ev, is a software engineer. But unlike many of the most successful, he’s no genius when it comes to programming. His specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. “He’s like a master craftsman,” says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. “There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn’t one before.” If Williams’s art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d’oeuvre.
- The passage contains 103 words and is 7 sentences long. 103 divided by 7 gives us an average sentence length of 14.7 words.
- It contains 16 complex words (in italics). 16 divided by 103 equals 0.155. Multiply that by 100 gives us 15.5% complex words
- Adding 14.7 (the average sentence length) to 15.5 (the percent of complex words) gives us 30.2.
- Multiply 30.2 time 0.4(constant) gives us 12.08, or a 12 grade reading level.
Simple, once you’ve calculated a few.
So, the next time that you’re sending out a query, match the text of your letter with your magazine market and let me know when you get your acceptance letter. I’ll be cheering for you!
Until next time …
No day without a line.
Find Your Writing Voice
My daughter Chelsea loves to sing. She’s been singing even before she could speak in complete sentences - she’s a teenager now - I’m still not sure about her ability to speak in complete sentences sometimes. Anyway, about a month ago I downloaded and installed Audacity on my computer and she’s been playing around with it. She sings along to her favorite songs, recording herself and then playing it back. She has a beautiful voice. Except when she tries to make herself sound like someone else. Then her voice sounds strained and stressed. It’s actually painful to listen to for any length of time. But, when she sings in her own voice, it’s beautiful … music to my ears to use a cliché. The same happens when you write.
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That’s not true in music - unless you’re Michael Buble - and it’s not true in writing. You need to write in your own voice. Ask any editor what she is looking for in a new writer and, 9 times out of 10, she’ll answer “a fresh voice.”
What is your writing voice?
Basically, your writing voice is how your words “sound” on the page. It the way you write. It’s your tone: are you friendly, formal, chatty, or distant. It’s the words you use: are they simple, everyday words or scholarly, technical words? It’s the pattern of your sentences: are they short and choppy or long and drawn out or a combination of both? It’s the way you put these elements together.
So, how do you find your writing voice?
It was the great American sports journalist Red Smith that said to write, “you just open a vein and write.” Don’t fear, finding your voice doesn’t have to be difficult or even painful. Here are 5 steps you can take that will have you writing in your own authentic voice in no time.
- Write as much as possible. The more you write, the better you’ll write.
- Keep a journal. Journaling is an excellent way to develop and strengthen your own voice.
- Turn off the computer when writing and write with pen and paper. As author and teacher, Heather Sellers points out, “Writing by hand is the difference between store bought cookies and from scratch. Everyone can tell.” Give it a try.
- Quiet your internal critic. This is easier then you may think. Simply write fast. Writing as fast as your hand can move quiets your inner critic and your own writing voice will emerge.
- Try writing in different forms and genres. If you write romances, try westerns. If you normally write mysteries, give science fiction a try. Experiment here
Follow these exercises and before long you will find your own voice and dramatically improve your chances of getting noticed by publishers.
Until next time …
No day without a line.
The Need to Write
This past Thursday evening I attended a talk on The Yoga of Eating, given by author and speaker, Charles Eisenstein. At one point during his nearly two-and-a-half-hour talk, Mr. Eisenstein mentioned that many people use food as a substitute for one of their needs that aren’t being met. He went on to list the needs that every one of us has.
- The need to love and be loved
- The need to know and be known
- The need to laugh
- The need explore and have adventure
- The need to create, especially something of beauty
- And, the need to give
“Interesting,” I thought to myself, “Can I relate these needs to writing?” As writers, I think that we all write for some, if not all of these reasons … these needs. Examine the list again and see which ones apply to you.
Do you want your writing to be loved? Do you want to be loved as a writer? I think that everyone who writes wants their writing to be accepted and, maybe even respected, by others. I know I do. So, yes, we want our writing to be loved.
Do you want to be known? I recently read The Rise of the Author, by Mark Joyner. In it he tells the story of the first time that he was recognized in public as an author. His “heart nearly exploded from [his] chest with confidence and joy,” he said. Do you want to be known as a writer? I think to some degree we all do, even if it’s only to our friends and family.
Do you need to laugh? This one might be a little more difficult than the others, but if you change “laugh” to “enjoy what you do,” I think that it makes sense. Do you enjoy writing? If not, find another line of work. Life’s too short to be doing something you don’t enjoy.
Do you have a need to explore and have adventure? If the writing life isn’t exploration and adventure, what is it? Yes, again.
Do you have the need to create? That’s all us writers do is create, even when it looks like we’re just watching the snow melt or the grass grow, we’re creating.
Finally, the need to give. When we finish a poem, a play, a short story, an article or a book, we’re giving. What do we give? We give hope. We give comfort. We give knowledge and wisdom. We give a smile.
So, the next time that you feel like giving up as a writer, think about your own needs for a minute. I think that you’ll find that by continuing to write you will meet at least some of your needs. And remember, the world needs your words too.
Until next time …
No day without a line.
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