Tag: author platform

Read, Eat, Drink–Link Roundup, a Mint Julep Video, and Not Derby Pie Bars

by Maria

Read:

How to find a literary agent

Guys, there are so many good things to read this week. I feel like I’m drowning in content, in a good way. As Jarrett would say “MOAR CONTENT!!” (And now he’s the happiest person in the world because an MGOblog joke finally made it on to here. Sigh.)

Here’s a roundup of everything worth reading on the interwebs this week:

  • How To Find a Literary Agent for Your Book (Jane Friedman): One of the most accurate and comprehensive guides to finding a Literary Agent that I’ve seen.
  • 6 Actionable Social Media Strategies from Successful Brands (Liz Dennison at Buffer): “Being great on social media isn’t always intuitive. Sometimes the best way to learn is to get inspired by what others are doing.”
  • What To Do When You Absolutely, Positively Must Know If Your Content Will Rock (Brian Clark at Copyblogger): “The audience decides what’s worthy across the board — in film, music, books, and any other form of content that’s produced by the imagination of a determined individual or group. It’s always been this way, but now the relationship is direct thanks to the Internet.”
  • How I Used Twitter to Find a Literary Agent, Grow My Business, and Fall in Love (Alexis Grant on The Book Designer): It’s true–Twitter is awesome, especially for fiction writers. But here’s why Twitter might not be right for all authors.
  • Build a Killer Conversation Strategy With Nothing But Time and Empathy (Brad Tiller at Unbounce): A good reminder that at the end of the day, building your platform is really about helping others.
  • The Story Grid Book is Here. (Shawn Coyne): I started reading this book last night and am deep obsessed already. An essential read for the writer who wants to figure out why their story isn’t working and how to fix it.
  • Sweet House Alabama premiering on HGTV on Sunday at 2 EST! (Shaunna West of Perfectly Imperfect): I was Shaunna’s editor for her book, The $50 Home Makeover, and so I’m thrilled to see that she now has her own show on HGTV! Watch the ridiculously adorable trailer here.

Drink & Eat:

Garden and Gun Mint Julep

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Why Twitter Might Not Be Right For You as an Author

by Maria

Twitter for authors

In the past few weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from aspiring authors about Twitter. Everyone seems to want to know if they should be on it, why I like it so much, and whether they should focus more of their own book marketing efforts on it.

Well, like everything else in this age of digital marketing, the answers to those questions are a bit complex. So I’ll just go ahead and tell you why I love Twitter, and why I think it’s not right for all authors.

Many of my readers are nonfiction writers/bloggers rather than fiction writers. And there’s an important distinction there: practical nonfiction is often highly illustrated (with four-color photos), while fiction is almost always straight narrative (with black-and-white text). Why does this matter when it comes to social media? Am I just being picky for fun? Are all literary agents out to befuddle writers and make social media even more confusing?

I hope you’re thinking no to those questions. Right? Right?

Right! So the format of your future book really does matter when it comes to social media. For practical nonfiction writers/bloggers, your aesthetic is your brand. The design of your online properties, the images you include in your posts, and the images you curate and share on social media are all part of your brand. Practical nonfiction is inherently image-driven, and therefore, it’s best suited for image-driven platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. (I’ll write more about the distinctions between these platforms next week.)

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Read, Eat, Drink: Author Websites, Pasta Roundup, and The Minimum Sage Cocktail

by Maria

Read:

Are you a writer? Do you have a website? If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, get thee over to WordPress.com and sign up for a website, STAT. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing insider who writes a great marketing blog, wrote a post this week that sent shudders of horror through me.

He pointed out that many authors don’t have websites, and even worse, that now some publishers are thinking about building and owning websites for their bestselling authors. This is so fraught with complications (which I won’t get into here, since Shatzkin covers them already), and it’s also shortsighted. The impact the Internet will have on publishing is coming into crisper focus every day, and it’s no longer possible to turn away from the fact that authors must have an online presence. Every single one of them. And that presence must be owned and managed by the author, or by an employee or consultant working on behalf of the author.

I feel a bit like a crazed doomsday prophet screeching about the interwebs sometimes, but take heed, authors, for the Internets shall not pass!  The online world isn’t going to go away, and it’s becoming an increasingly important part of our offline world. You need to exist in both places. And if you don’t have a website or some form of social media, you don’t exist to the all-powerful Google, and you don’t exist to the millions of potential readers who are looking for someone like you. So, I repeat, in my most annoyingly nagging tone possible: get a website!

Read the rest of Shatkin’s article here.

Eat:

Lately, I’ve been craving pasta. Just kidding. Every single day of my life since birth I’ve craved pasta. I predict that 50 years from now someone will isolate the addicted-to-pasta gene on a strand of DNA, and I will finally have answers about my condition. Until then, let’s all drool over these ridiculously good-looking bowls of pasta:

Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage

Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage and Pancetta. That reginetti is so cute I could just eat it right up.  (I guess that’s the point, huh?) Recipe here.

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The Most Important Paragraph of a Query Letter

by Maria

Desktop-and-flowers

Query letters are not fun for anyone. Writers hate writing them, and agents are so inundated with them that it can be hard to churn through the onslaught, day in and day out. But as with most painful things in life, they are necessary and unavoidable. A query letter is still the best way to concisely tell agents who you are and why your book is exciting.

Everyone has a different system for reviewing and processing queries—some agents automatically route them to a query inbox and review them en masse, while others only review projects that have made it past the first barrier of assistants.

My method is probably a little weird. I have all queries sent to my main inbox, and I try to review and file every last one of them by the end of the day. This works for me for two reasons: 1. I am a little OCD about keeping my inbox manageable and filing things correctly; and 2. It means I never have a fantastic project languishing in a rarely-checked inbox for months.

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