Writing Web Pages

If you wanted a face-to-face explanation of how technology can help market your work, come to Write On The Sound in Edmunds, WA, (Seattle-land) October 5-7th. I’ve just signed a contract with the hosts of the the writers’ conference and am pleased to report I’ll be doing a seminar on…technology for writers.

More details to follow.

If you have never been to a writers’ conference before, it is a very good experience and one I would recommend. There are always a few good things to learn at these conferences.

Write On The Sound inspired the theme for this blog — technology for writers where one can learn how technology can help market your work. My presentation will be the oddball one in the group, no doubt. Amongst the publishing, fiction oriented, non-fiction writing skills, I’ll sneak in there and talk about blogs, web sites, white papers, virtual book tours and all things technology that can help you in your work — in a way that a writer will understand.

And, I’m planning a really great leave-behind as well with lots of resources and links.

“There are a million blogs about technology out there. Very few are written from the viewpoint of a writer trying to develop a voice and market their work.”

You’ll get that point of view in the Technology for Writers session at Write on the Sound.

I hope to see you there!

Scot

There are, of course, some tried and true ways to get an agents attention for your work. And variations in the tried and true ways, almost always ending up with a rules based criteria for selection that have no rules.

A good list comes from the Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk. Using a list of seven things to get an agent’s attention from her own agent.

It’s a pretty good list.

My favorite was to “show outside validation:”

The key to self-praise is to have others say it for you. So, for instance, if someone else has called you a gifted writer and that someone is not your wife or your mother, do tell us. Outside recognition could be that your blog gets a gazillion hits a day or was just cited in Time Magazine. This is what we want to hear. There’s an art to bragging and it involves finding someone else who will do it for you.

The one thing that technology can give you is some fact-based numbers to support your case about you being an expert at what you write about. Whether it is X number of subscribers to your blog, the traffic to your blog, your traffic ranking on Alexa, your “authority” ranking on Technorati (where my “authority” ranking is higher than my traffic ranking…), or number of downloads of your e-book, technology can support your case for why you can validate that which you write.

Outside of pulling out previous publications and interviews with Writer’s Digest next to those of Newsweek magazine (which happens to all of us, right?), technology numbers can be one of the few things that can support your work before you are published.

Once published, you can add the publishing to the list of outside validations.

But to get to the first brass ring, technology can help.

Scot

One of the things that I’ve wanted to do on Ten Keyboards was to review existing blogs that writers use. The purpose is not to be critical, but to bring good writer blogs here so that writers who are in the process of deciding what type of blog they want to start can see some good ones out there.

For those who have existing blogs, it is a way to pick up ideas from other blog formats and designs that they could then use on their blogs.

The problem is how to evaluate a blog and then apply the same evaluation to all other blogs that are reviewed over the course of time. It’s been a conundrum for a while as I don’t want to just evaluate a blog on the basis of my biases (even when I don’t have any….).

Today, while walking around during a break, the light bulb went off in my head. I’ve written some posts on what blogs should have and in my business life I’ve built evaluation scorecards. But, I haven’t done those things for blogs.

Consequently, I’m working on an evaluation scorecard for writer blogs that will end up looking like a checklist that can be used to evaluate all blogs. Same thing with writer web sites. It’s actually harder to do than one might think as some writers are published and others not, some write non-fiction and others fiction, some are famous and some just write for the joy of writing. Each blog appeals to a particular audience and the purpose of each blog for the writer can be different.

Some criteria is in order. I’m starting to work on that. What do you think a successful blog or web site should have for a writer?

Scot

One of the themes here on Ten Keyboards is that a writer should use either a web page or blog (or both) to enable marketing of your work. I’ve offered up Five Requirements for a Writer’s Blog.

One of the areas that could be expanded upon in these requirements is the Contact Information. I’ve stated the need as follows:

Contact Information. It is very important that potential publishers, media types, and readers are able to contact you through your blog. Most blogs, including this one, have a dedicated page for contact information. Mine is called Contact Scot.

In doing some additional research into this area, I came across a really good post by Kristen King over at Inkthinker in her article on a Professional Website. She notes some really good ideas on additional items that could be included in the Contact and About information on your site:

Even if you don’t have clips right now, you will eventually, and there’s a lot you can say about yourself even without a ton of writing creds on your resume. For instance…

• What’s your education?
• What kind of jobs have you worked in previously?
• What kind of work do you want to do as a freelancer?
• How have your education and professional experience equipped you to solve my writing problem, whatever it may be?
• How could I hire you if I wanted to do so?
• What’s the best way to contact you?
• Where are you located?

The purpose of a writer’s website is to allow potential editors and clients to find out more about you, and eventually to showcase your work. If you don’t have work to showcase right now, that’s okay. There are still a lot of ways to show your skills and highlight your strengths.

See? Technology can help market your work and, in my opinion, start to build an audience for your work.

Scot