Morrill's Monday Morning Mashup - 3/12/12

MASH-UP

A creative combination

or mixing of content

from different sources.

Saturday was the premier of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pen, five women authors traveling together on the long and winding road to overnight success, starring Linda Apple, Ruth Burkett Weeks, Pamela Foster, Patty Stith (aka Claire Croxton) and me, Jan Morrill.


Come by and visit our new blog at:

www.sisterhoodofthetravelingpen.wordpress.com.

Ruth, Pamela, Jan, Patty and Linda

We had a blast, sharing stories of our writerly journey complete with skipping and tripping through twists and turns on the way to the faraway land called Publication. The world has changed for writers, and I think we demonstrated it in an entertaining way. Much of the change we discussed involves the importance of a platform--even for fiction writers. And social media plays a huge role in building that platform.

Until you, too, can experience the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pen, I hope the links I share this week will help you maneuver your way through the challenges of this strange, new world.

Insatiable Booksluts has a great series called "Know Your Publisher," have provided information and links to a variety of small publishers, such as Red Lemonade and Coffee House Press.

http://insatiablebooksluts.wordpress.com/category/series-2/know-your-publisher-series/

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Once again, Kristen Lamb posts a relevant blog to help writers maneuver their way through the foggy, gloppy world of social media. In her post, "The Modern Author - A New Breed of Writer for the Digital Age of Publishing," she states "We need to be stronger, faster and smarter. We must be better trained than any writer in human history."

Don't forget, Kristen is our guest speaker at the Ozarks Writers League meeting on August 18!

http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/the-modern-author-a-new-breed-of-writer-for-the-digital-age-of-publishing/

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This week, through Twitter, I found a new blog, SEOmoz. Though it is an SEO (search engine optimization) software developer, they posted a helpful article titled "21 Tactics to increase Your Blog Traffic." Admittedly though some of these tactics are complicated and will require more study, (such as #5 and #7), most of the tactics are easy to implement.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic-2012

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes.

                                --- Marcel Proust

Morrill's Monday Morning Mashup - 12/19/11

MASH-UP

A creative combination

or mixing of content

from different sources.

I hope this week's mashup will take your mind off the fact that there are only five shopping days. Oh. Sorry for reminding you of that.

Grub Street Daily posted an excellent blog called "Reaching Readers via Social Media: Hot Tips for Authors." This post is contains a good mix of things to blog about, as well as resources to help you not be a social media wallflower.

http://grubdaily.org/?p=3141&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GrubStreetDaily+%28Grub+Street+Daily%29

Anne R. Allen's blog post, "How to Blog: Beginner's Guide for Authors" is also on social media. Though she gives a lot of good "how-to" advice, I thought the most eye-opening piece of information she gave came from Oak Tree Press acquisitions editor, Sunny Frazier:

“I don't read the query (sorry aspiring writers!) I look for two things:  genre and word count. I then Google the author. I'm looking for the number of times the writer's name appears on the Internet. I'm searching for a website or any attempt to build a platform.”

http://annerallen.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-to-blog-beginners-guide-for-authors.html

ProBlogger.net is a blog solely dedicated to helping you improve your blog. I especially liked "How to Run Two Blogs in the Midst of a Busy Life." Does that not apply to all of us? Once I started using Tip #1, "Keep a clean list of post ideas and update it frequently," I rarely run out of things to blog about.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2011/03/15/how-to-run-two-blogs-in-the-midst-of-a-busy-life/

And finally, I'm adding a new feature to my weekly mashup. Often, simply reading a quote will inspire me to write. Each week, I'll post a quote that inspired me, or at least made me reflect.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Do not wait until all the conditions are perfect for you to begin.

Beginning makes the conditions perfect."

-- Alan Cohen

Morrill's Monday Morning Mashup - 11/28/11

mash-up

A creative combination

or mixing of content

from different sources.

Since this is Cyber Monday, I'll start my mashup with a link for all you Christmas shopaholics. This site pulls together lots of bargain shopping so you don't have to go surfing for sales!

www.cybermonday.com

And now, on to my writerly mashup:

Do you have Klout? No, not clout, but Klout. Have you heard of it yet? Klout measures a user's influence across the social network. I'm not sure if I should admit my score any more than I should tell you my age, weight or bra size, especially since none are anything to brag about. But I will say that since tracking it in October, and reading Kristen Lamb's book, We Are Not Alone: The Writer's Guide to Social Media, it has gone up almost ten points! Here's a link to Social Media Today, which gives a good overview of Klout scores, and why many consider it important today:

The Klout Score: 3 Easy Ways To Become More Influential

However! My next mashup link is posted on Jane Friedman's website. Guest blogger, Christina Katz, cautions us not to spend so much time on branding that we lose the "expressive, evolving pleasure of our natural dynamic."

 Platform and Social Media Must Not Be Your Center 

So, the challenge is to balance our creative branding with our creative writing. As writers, we need to remember where our emphasis should be and write. In the last two weeks, my Klout score has gone up, but don't ask me how many new pages I've written.

Therefore, my last mashup for the week is full of prompts to get your creative juices flowing, posted on a blog by Marelisa Fabrega. It's a mashup within a mashup, with eighteen links to stimulate you to write:

A Plethora of Writing Prompts

I hope these links are helpful. Now all you need to do is decide whether to shop, brand yourself, or create a written masterpiece.

Morrill's Monday Morning Mashup - 11/21/11

Welcome to my Monday morning mashup, where I post links to information I found interesting or useful in the previous week. Below, I've listed a few appetizers to whet your writerly appetite for the coming Thanksgiving week:

KRISTEN LAMB'S BLOG

Kristen Lamb posts some of the most useful advice and information I've seen yet on social media. I recently purchased her book, We Are Not Alone - The Writer's Guide to Social Media. I am still in the process of reading it. (watch for a review!) but so far, it's full of practical, easy-to-follow information about how to establish an online presence.

The link below is on PLATFORM. According to Kristen, it's not just for non-fiction writers anymore.

http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/why-writers-need-a-platform/

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WRITEITSIDEWAYS.COM

This is a blog by author and teacher, Suzannah Windsor Freeman. I subscribe and I look forward to its emails that are always full of helpful information for writers. Here's a mashup within a mashup -- a list of 23 websites that will make your writing stronger:

http://writeitsideways.com/23-websites-that-make-your-writing-stronger/

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MYSTERY WRITING IS MURDER

This award-winning blog by Elizabeth Spann Craig regularly posts information that is useful to all writers - not only those who write in the mystery genre. I especially liked this post about what NOT to listen to in a critique. The guest blogger, Anne R. Allen, states:

"A critiquer should tell you what's right with a work as well as what's wrong."

This is something we as critiquers too often don't remember. Here's the link to the post:

http://mysterywritingismurder.blogspot.com/2011/11/9-pieces-of-bad-writing-advice-its-best.html

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Happy Thanksgiving! Unfortunately, browsing the Internet for interesting tidbits probably won't burn any calories, but I'll see you next week anyway, with a new mashup!