Inspiring writers to write and get published

Twitter list are dangerous

Twitter recently added the ability for users to group their followers into lists. A similar feature has long been part of twitter clients such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck but has now been formulised.

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Using Twitter lists

Building a Twitter following is a vital part of any Proactive Writer’s long term plan for building an online presence.
However, keeping track of followers past the magic 150 mark is impossible. This is where twitter lists can be very handy.
If you use Twitter clients such as hootsuite, tweet deck or Seesmic to control your [...]

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How to choose a book title

Let me begin by saying that this is not a post about choosing the perfect book title for your latest novel. Instead, the ideas here are all about making sure you don’t pick a really crappy title…
Most writers, correctly, spend weeks or even months wrestling with a list of titles, trying to find the one [...]

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Almost 5′4″ by Isobella Jade

Isobella Jade is no ordinary model. She’s barely 5’2”, almost 5’4” when she’s wearing heels. Because of her height, modelling was perhaps not the most obvious or easiest of career choices and Isobella soon finds herself having to take any job to make ends meet. From nude photo shoots, to changing her name and her focus, to paid nude photo shoots, to ‘arty’ crotch shots; from sex toys to lingerie shows. This is a brutally honest memoir, one that shows the good, the bad and the ugly sides of modelling in the heart of New York City.

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Is your book invisible?

In a previous post I set out to explain the way in which big publishers operated and why this gave literary agents so much power. In essence, big publishers work on a model that predicts just a handful of titles making excessive profits in any given year. Publishers accept that most titles will make little, if any, profit and it is the handful of ’successful’ titles which support the business. Since it is next to impossible to predict which titles will sell, publishers need to release a range of books, taking a scatter gun approach to finding the hits.

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3 Ways to Market your Book for Free

he publishing world has changed and the days of a writer being able to sit back and let a publisher market their books are long gone. Today a successful writer needs to be a marketing machine in their own right. Below are three classic ways to market your book for free. You have probably seen or used some (or all) of these method in the past. However, what I hope to do is to breath fresh life into these tried and test techniques.

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Why is it so hard to get published?

Getting published is tough – really tough! For new writers it often seems as though the publishing industry has set up a succession of doors and hurdles to make it as difficult as possible to get published.

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6 things every writer with a blog needs to know about attracting more traffic

We all want visitors to our sites and the best source for new visitors is search engines. Here are a few tips to make your blog more visible to search engines such as Google

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Writers and Stumble Upon

I would like to point writers in the direction of Stumble Upon. I have used this for a number of years and the service regularly brings traffic to this blog. The basic premise is that people using the service install a tool bar, highlight the topics they like (e.g. writing) and hit the stumble button. They are then taken to pages that have been identified as potentially interesting. Readers rate these pages meaning only the best material floats.

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Writers and Adwords

You know those text ads that you see in search results on Google. Well those are text ads that advertisers write and Google displays in relation to relevant keywords. The advertiser then pays each time someone clicks on the ad

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