Link Love for Writers

As a writer, I’m also an avid reader. The following links caught my attention via social media, fresh from the week. Yes, it’s another round of Link Love.

Publishing & Promotion Ideas

• 3 secrets to ebook cover design success – I just loved the information provided by Joel Friedlander from The Book Designer as soon as I found him (twitter). Monthly, he runs ebook cover art contests and provides his own comments on some of they submitted designs. Some of the biggest elements for ebook designs have now been drilled down to 3 Secrets to Ebook Cover Design Success in this post. His latest post, as of yesterday, also includes a piece on image resolution for print and ebook design. From 300dpi to 72dpi.
• Finding photographs just got easier – Joel must be on a roll with me this week. He also republished an article on finding usable stock images for cover art – introducing me to two more websites offering affordable help. Republished from The Book Designer, you will find Finding Photographs for a Book or Blog Gets Better at Publetariat.
• James Patterson sees Explosive Ebook Sales in 2011 – In this e-reader article James Patterson appears to have some evidence towards the movement in the industry towards increasing ebook sales. Ebook sales for the author brand now exceed 5 million, with 2 million in 2011.
• Author Bios – via a WoMEN’s Lit Cafe @WoMensLitCafe tweet, some Author Bio Tips shared by @CarrieGreenBook: mrkt.ms/xRh4G
• KDP Select Program – The question on many author’s mouths lately is “How valuable has Amazon’s KDP Select Program been?” This program allows authors a select offering through Amazon Prime’s Kindle Lending Library, plus some marketing opportunities such as being able to offer the books for free for a limited time. Many authors who took this opportunity over the Christmas Sales period have now started blogging about their own sales results. Here is a small list of some results posts I’ve read of late:-

• Michelle Hughes provides her results on the Bookbuzzer Blog. This post mentions some other author results also.
• Rose Andrade searched for results late December and provides some of her own.
• Catherine Ryan Howard has some, with more promised later.
• JA Konrath states he made $50,000 Initially in December in this post, but in a subsequent one, his Amazon results for that month have doubled. (may include first week of Jan)
• In this post at Technolog, it is reported that Amazon had 295K Kindle e-books borrowed in December.

Writing Craft – Starts and Endings

• The Question to Ask Before you ask “what if?” – Larry Brooks tells us that most of our ideas just aren’t worth it. 
• Where to Start – Janice Hardy gives guidance on working out where to start a novel in The Line Forms Where? Knowing where to start your novel.
• Tension on Every Page – part one: The first of a 3-part series of guest posts at The Writer’s Forensics Blog finds Jodie Renner building bridging conflict from the very first page.
• Is there a correct way to end a novel? – Paul Dorset blogs about resolving off, and mid-series endings.
• Revising and Polishing Your Novel – this one’s an oldie but goody. As I’m selecting from Jodie Renner I thought it important to point out her excellent list on revising a novel, on her own blog. Published in September last year, I’ve seen this list linked to on blogs again only this week.
• Hooks, LogLines and Pitches – Anne R Allen explains what these terms mean in Hooks, Loglines, and Pitches: What Every Writer Need to Know
• Email prompts for kids – The Daily Good discusses a daily writing prompt email that members can sign up for at the Figment. From 2nd Jan to end of March a writing prompt will be sent out, and anything written to the prompt can be shared on the Figment site. Figment targets young fiction writers.

Social Writing

• #WIP on Twitter – Via Advice for Writers, Natania Barron shares how she uses the #wip hash tag on twitter with other writers. Last week I mentioned several good twitter hash tags for writers. #wip allows the sharing of your WIP work and feedback from fellow authors. Also check out #WIP500, #writer and #ROW80
• Authors Commenting on Reviews – Elizabeth S Craig @elizabethscraig gives some decisive reasons behind why it may best for authors not to comment back publically on reviews of their books in Commenting on Reviews: A Different Kind of Author Intrusion
• Why fiction authors make frustrated bloggers – I noticed this article, the beginning of a series, at iWise, just after I’d expressed some similar frustrations myself on this blog. What interests me more is the comments to the iWise post – which move from one previous niche blogger (similar to my own history) who was suffering from slow growth in comparison after starting a writing blog, to those who simply think many writers just don’t bother to read blogs or communicate, to a couple who enjoy their blogs. Albeit, that in these times, we all need an author platform, this series provides some answers.
•  The New York Times – Why Authors Tweet – a great post for writers (Via another Joel Friedlander @JFBookman post)

Interesting Motivation

• How Tolkien Was Dismissed for the Nobel Prize – The Huffington Post told us how JRR Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings was dismissed for the Nobel Prize.
• The Zen of Steve Jobs – although Walter Issacson‘s biography on Steve Jobs was a best seller in 2011, it misses out telling us what Steve did during the mid-80’s when he was fired from Apple. In fact, he turned to Buddhism, and the graphic novella The Zen of Steve Jobs, although speculative, shows us how this may have been. Via Brainpickings.
• Poking an Enduring Issue with a Stick: Gender in Publishing – Sophie Littlefield on Murder She Writes discusses some startlingly poor statistics from some of the biggest book reviewers on how many books by women writers are reviewed.
• Striking a Pose – Jim C Hines tries (painfully) to emulate the character poses on the book covers of his Princess books. Funniest post of the week award.

Tech & Productivity

• Scrivener coming to IOS – for those who are fans of the Scrivener writing software (available now for Mac and Windows), many will be happy to hear that an iPad / iPhone version is just beginning development. With plans for android in the future also. I caved in, and got Scrivener for Windows myself this week, in preparation.
• Keeping up with technology – Guest post by Jen Talty on Bob Mayer‘s blog discusses some of the latest upcoming technology for ebook production coming out of Amazon.

Idea of the Week – Writer vs Author

I first encountered this idea via twitter and the #writetips hash tag. Dean Wesley Smith wrote a thought provoking post entitled The New World of Publishing: Writer Vs Author

On the same day as reading DW Smith’s take on the terms, I also read a slightly earlier blog post by Amber West. In the post, Why I Don’t Call Myself an Author, she makes a similar first thought – that the term author belongs to those who have published books.

In an attempt to answer this question myself, I posted my own post with my thoughts – Writer Vs Author : Where I’m at with this. This is a long post, but deals with several issues and provides a look into my future. It’s a question that I’m sure most writers have considered at one point or another, and probably intermittantly over the course of their writing lives, as public and writer understandings change.