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How many times have you visited a website only to discover it had not been updated in six months or even a year? How is a reader supposed to know you’re still writing if you don’t refresh your pages now and again? The mere existence of a website doesn’t cut the mustard with an eager or inquisitive reader. Any reader who visits your website wants recent information. They also want to return a week later and see more news has been added. Why? Because you wouldn’t go to a grocery store week after week if you thought for one instant their stock had not been upgraded or they ran the same sales week in and week out. It’s all about creativity. Constantly changing your content will bring visitors back to your site. The article, 10 Website Essentials to Increase Your Sales, which you can read here, provides a list of excellent pointers, one of which is providing your visitors with fresh content on a continual basis. Here are some other helpful ideas to keep your website fresh: Add polls.  Ask your readers what they think about something that’s important to you, or just ask them to vote for their favorite cover More

The number of classes, appearances, books, and podcasts for writers boggles the mind. It almost feels like teaching writers makes more money than actually doing it. Out of curiosity, I briefly study most of those opportunities that come across my desktop, and, believe me, I’m on a lot of mailing lists. If they appear interesting, the first thing I do is look up the presenter. You would be amazed at how many teachers haven’t done much more than teach writing. A lot of them wrote one book, maybe two, and then deemed themselves experts. Some published six articles then considered themselves established. But it’s because so many writers, especially fresh writers, are so eager to find success that they gorge on how-to, seeking the magic carpet that will get them there. Most do not have the hundreds or thousands of dollars it takes for the higher level professional services, so they opt for the less expensive. Recently someone asked me how to land a grant. Their goal was to publish their book they’d been working on for years, then teach writing. They defined their years of working on a project, even though it hadn’t proven successful yet, as the experience More

We all know the benefits to donating our time and money: warm fuzzies, tax write-offs,  the gratifying sense of purpose and general knowledge that we’re helping others and making the world a better place. But in donating, when do we as writers sell ourselves short and where do we draw the line? When is charity a detriment to our endeavors as self-employed artisans? Stop to consider what your time is worth when offering or accepting an opportunity to “promote” yourself. I recently received an email (again) asking me to present a talk regarding a book about cold cases, my current work-in-progress. This presentation is through a local college branch of a nationwide organization that offers non-credit courses for adults over 50. When they first approached me a couple years ago, I felt honored (tip #1—tell your ego to sit down and be quiet) and accepted this offer. The presentation could be 60 to 90 minutes long, my preference. I offered to “teach” the 90-minute course, and in reply, received an application. Wait, what? I have to apply to do a presentation I was asked to do? Oh, well. Fine. I slogged through the lengthy paperwork only to discover at the More

(Read Parts 1 and 2 of this three-part series online.) 3: Production and publication With the book hitting its crowdfunding target, it was time to look at production and publication. We had a fantastic copyeditor, Hayley, who carried out what Unbound called a developmental edit. She spotted lots of errors, some quite structural, and did a superb job. We had a new editor, and Unbound decided to change the title. They felt Kitten on a Fatberg would be hard to market, and so it became Work in Progress. This was a bit of a wrench, as we were so used to the title (named after one of the character’s eccentric poems). Many supporters were fond of it too. But Unbound was confident in its decision, and we embraced it. With COVID, the publication date was pushed back several months, which worried us as it meant our supporters would have had to wait almost two years for their copies. (They stayed loyal and patient, but apparently people do sometimes ask for their money back.) When the books arrived at last, I received a couple of hundred copies which we had pre-ordered with our article payments. This turned out to be a More

You may not realize it, but I wrote the chapter “How Much Should I Charge?” in the 2022 Writer’s Market this year. It was a humongous assignment, and until I did the research, I didn’t realize how much had changed in the last five years as well as mid- and post-COVID. Freelancers are very much alive and well. Employers have learned to embrace freelancers with a passion. Freelancers tackled social media as marketing tools and learned new methods of landing clients, establishing a brand, and networking. But how much you should charge depends on so many factions: 1) your experience 2) your niche (and sub-niche) 3) your diversity in skills (i.e., more than writing an article) You can get down into the reeds and try to break it down into small sub-factions, but these three major ones pretty much steer your ship and dictate your income. A beginner is usually anyone with 0-3 years of experience, however, you will find the exceptions who leaped in and made six figures within two years. Many others will brag about how much they made in spurts, like four months, but the proof of success manifests itself in how well you can perform over an entire More

(Read Parts 1 , 2 , and 3 of this 3-Part piece at FundsforWriters.com.) 2: Getting the orders in! After getting the book deal signed with Unbound, we now had to raise a five-figure sum in pre-orders to get our manuscript turned into a real book. One of the fun things Unbound does is teach you to offer different levels of pre-orders (pledges). These go all the way from basic ebook and paperback versions up to pricier bespoke levels. We offered book critiques, and various fun items “created” by some of the book’s dotty characters. Some actor friends recorded an audio version of the first few chapters, which we offered exclusively as another pledge. See a list of all our pledges here. The first few weeks of crowdfunding proved easy. Friends and family chipped in generously, and the target ticked over nicely. (Unbound provides dashboards you can obsessively consult.) But then the pace starts to slow, and you start to reach out to former colleagues, school friends, neighbors, ex-neighbours, friends of friends… anyone you think might pre-order a book and not be offended by you asking. This is the hardest part, and, honestly, I’m not sure we performed as well as More

1: Getting started In this series of three articles, I’m going to look at how I crowdfunded my novel, Work in Progress, through Unbound’s unique crowdfunding model. I wrote my book with two pals, Martin and Alex. It was originally called Kitten on a Fatberg, and it tells the story of a group of eccentrics, aspiring writers who form a critique group to offer feedback on each other’s work. We wrote the story in a spontaneous, open-ended way, and somehow it turned into something quite farcical. All the characters are larger than life in a comic sort of way, and there are lots of feuds, misunderstandings, romances, and petty rivalries. We hoped it might be as much fun to read as it was to write. Unbound is an international publisher based in the UK with a different model. It accepts authors from the UK, US and around the world. It’s been covered quite widely in the media in the UK, and I’ve always liked the sound of it. Soon I was on the Unbound site, and looking at how to submit our manuscript. Unbound bills itself as “publishing for the 21st century.” As far as I know, it’s the world’s only book More

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  ~Annie Dillard This quote, from the FundsforWriters newsletter on November 26, 2021, reached me toward the end of a one-month writing residency. Dillard’s words helped me understand why I had found my weeks at the residency so worthwhile: because this brief period of time proved to be the exception to her otherwise true insight. Many of us, including myself, work hard to fit writing around the daily grind. My grind includes a day job, a family, pets, household maintenance, garden maintenance,  friendship maintenance, and self-maintenance. I am not complaining. I love my grind. As a deadline-driven woman, I often find it helpful. If I have a meeting at nine o’clock, for instance, I will get my word count in before that Zoom alert blooms on my screen. Meeting postponed for an hour? Reaching my word count will stretch out until ten a.m. But doing some types of writing requires in-depth, sustained attention rather than the rapid-fire rhythm of deadlines. I have been working on such a project, which I call Asking After Alice. It is the story of someone in my family who spent her whole life institutionalized because she More

Steven Pressfield (the author of The War of Art) speaks about the difficulty of pushing through and reaching THE END of whatever you are writing. It could be a poetry chapbook. It could be a memoir. It could be fiction of any genre or any word count. It could be a how-to on cabinetmaking or a children’s picture book. A lot of writers struggle with perfecting an effort and reaching THE END. Why? Because that is the point where you let others read it . . . and get feedback. That is when you submit for publication . . . and get feedback. The feedback is the thrill and the agony of writing, and sometimes we feel safer just saying we’re still writing it, because that is the world in which we feel safest. What are we afraid of? -Being told it’s just okay. Or worse, that it’s bad, but frankly, once we hear it’s okay the meaning is the same. -Prematurely releasing your darling in the world. But who’s to say when it’s premature? -Learning after all that time invested that we really do not know what we are doing. It’s called being a phony. Look across social media. When an author More

As writers, we tend to carve out a niche for ourselves and stick to writing what we know best. We get comfortable writing in our genre. It fits us much like a pair of old pajamas. Even if the money isn’t coming in like we’d hoped, we don’t want to take those flannel pants off, because then we’d have to find something else to wear that might not be as soft or warm. But if the royalties are sputtering, full-time writers can’t just throw their hands up in the air helplessly. The better angle is deciding it’s time to get proactive and take some of those old eggs out of the basket. As writers, we have skills and talents that can be put to use beyond the pages of a book. Most of those ways are lucrative. Maybe not Jay Z-lucrative, but they’ll keep the wolf away from the door. Let’s study some of the ways to boost your income before you return to the grind of a 9-5 job. Articles. Articles. Articles I can’t emphasize this one enough. Writing nonfiction is different, but your talent can be shaped into bites of 600-1,000 words that will pay considerably well. The More