Sandra Gulland's Blog, page 44

Net Marketing for Ludites: Part 4 (Friends & Followers)

..You've got your sites set up and you're sending out pithy thoughts. You're cooking! But who is reading them? Your "followers" (on Tumblr), your "friends" on Facebook and MySpace. With luck, maybe some of your followers and friends reblog your posts, in which case they go out to all their followers, etc. etc. etc.


But basically, you need to have some friends and followers of your own ... and there's nothing more humiliating or infantile than having to send out "Will you be my friend?...

Net Marketing for Luddites: Part 3 (Blog? Website? Both?)

..Does an author really have to have a website and/or a blog? Websites can be expensive to set up, and even more expensive to maintain. I suggest setting up a simple blog that serves as a website. I use Blogger, but WordPress is another good one (possibly better). Both are free.


If you don't want to set it up yourself, I know that there are people trained to quickly set up WordPress websites, and no doubt on Blogger as well. Once set up, you can easily maintain it on your own.


The advantage...

Net Marketing for Luddites: Part 5 (The Book Trailer)

..Writers these days make (or have made) "trailers" for their books. These are put up on YouTube and on web sites. Here are a few examples:

Claude & Camile; A Novel of Monet by Stephanie Cowell


The Crispin Guest Medieval Noir Series


Mary Sharratt's, Daughters of the Witching Hill

 Some authors get a lot of Net attention by creating a funny video. This one continues to get quite a lot of "buzz":

This emotional author video got over 1.5 million viewers and created a bestseller for author...

Net Marketing for Luddites: Part 2 (Cracking the Social Net)

..Today, it's essential for an author to have a presence on the Web. The key is to do it efficiently and effectively so that one can continue writing and not go crazy.

I suggest that George (my Luddite student victim) should have:

a Facebook Fan Page
a Twitter page
a MySpace page (because George's subject would appeal to musicians)
a Tumbr page (because that's where the hip and groovy hang out)

Overwhelming, right?

It's free to set up these sites, and not too hard to do: it just takes time and pat...

Net Marketing for Luddites: Part 1

.. I always knew my good friend George Whiteman was talented: his paintings are amazing; his CV includes album cover designs for the (now) classically famous. But now he has published a memoir (the first in a trilogy) — The Perrenial Freshman — and it turns out he's also an amazing writer.
But now that he has a book out, he needs to know how to promote it. He's never seen a Facebook page, thinks Twitter is what birds do, and doesn't know what a blog is. Where to begin?
First, I would say: the...

A writer at work: Agatha Christie's messy notebooks

.. "The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks" in Slate Magazine is a wonderful article on Agatha Christie's notebooks: so messy! (So creative.) It gives us all hope!

I'm not so keen on the family notes, however:

Even Christie's second husband, the archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, used her notebooks. He jotted down calculations. Christie's daughter Rosalind practiced penmanship, and the whole family kept track of their bridge scores alongside notes like, "Possibilities of poison … cyanide in...

A writer at work: Agatha Christie's notebooks

.. "The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks" in Slate Magazine is a wonderful article on Agatha Christie's notebooks: so messy! (So creative.) It gives us all hope!

I'm not so keen on the family notes, however:

Even Christie's second husband, the archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, used her notebooks. He jotted down calculations. Christie's daughter Rosalind practiced penmanship, and the whole family kept track of their bridge scores alongside notes like, "Possibilities of poison … cyanide in...

Notes from the Cheering Section

.
A number of books are coming out right now by writers I know and admire. Two of these I gave a glowing blurb, so I'm especially thrilled to see them getting such great reviews. 
Here's a charming one for Mary Sharratt's Daughters of the Witching Hill , from Passages to the Past:

"Don't you love it when you start a book and immediately get sucked in just from the first few sentences? Well, that's what happened when I began to read Daughters of the Witching Hill. This book seriously had me...

Donald Maass on The Elements of Awe

..Agent Donald Maass is always worth reading. These two essays on Writer Unboxed are thought-provoking:

The Elements of Awe ...

"What is the strongest emotion you want your reader to feel? Search and delete that word everywhere it occurs in your manuscript. Now, how will you provoke that emotion through action alone? Got it? Good. Next write down three ways to heighten that action." 

And The Elements of Awe, Part II:

"High story impact does not come from length alone. It occurs when e...

"Literary" is not a four-letter word

..Whenever the word "literary" pops up in a discussion of historical fiction, someone is bound to get ruffled. It's almost not PC, as if there's something exclusive about it, something condescending.

I beg to differ. "Literary historical fiction" is simply a genre. It's a descriptive term for a certain type of writing, and I think it's time to raise the flag and not be apologetic about using the term.

It's the genre I read, and the genre I aspire to write (although I don't feel worthy).

But defi...