While I consider myself a fairly good salesperson, I am eighty years old and wonder if self-marketing is for me. I wonder if I have the physical energy to get involved in self-publishing.
At the same time I have come to trust WritersWeekly in a number of areas. But I still wonder, Can an old man market a book?
A few weeks ago I noticed an article in WritersWeekly by Jimmy Moore in which he talked about how blogging was helping him build a market for his book. The piece rang a bell for me because it closely parallels my experience with podcasting. The American Oxford Dictionary declared “podcast” to be its word of the year for 2005. In a little over a year, the technology went from non-existent to hosting thousands of shows (National Public Radio alone puts out 234 podcasts).
At the new sonogram, she was MUCH bigger and they couldn’t get her entire body on the screen at one time. She was moving her mouth (chewing) for a few minutes, and later was sucking on her finger. Max thought that was just the neatest thing in the world. (He thought the blue goo they put on my belly was pretty neat, too.) Needless to say, we were all absolutely shocked into hysterics, when the technician panned over Izzy again and a very prominent, very large…
This Week:
One of the biggest problems with seeking an agent is that you may actually find one. Not unlike the ever popular quest for a boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s easy to overlook some rather annoying qualities when you just want an agent so badly.
I was wondering if there is a way to access markets older than last week? I recently saw a listing for a trade magazine looking for articles about good employee management practices but now I can’t find it!
In anticipation of the new baby’s arrival, we’ve all been learning sign language. Babies can sign long before they have the ability to speak. Surprisingly, Max (age 4) has tackled signing with gusto. He can easily learn and remember 5-10 new signs each day. He’s been watching a baby signing video and he’s now teaching all of us new signs. He was signing to me at a lunch last week with some women I’d never met and I had to tell them that, yes, he can speak. He just prefers signing right now. It’s really neat to watch him get so excited about learning something new!
This Week:
Is writing short articles, 100 – 800 words, worth the effort? Because the money involved is small, one has to question the value of accepting these short assignments. There can be sacrifices involved. Shorts can fragment one’s time, allowing less time for larger projects that bring fatter paychecks. This time fragmentation also can make it harder to meet deadlines.
However, with effective strategy and good time management, short pieces can be additional income producers while paving the way to longer, more lucrative assignments from some editors, while not interfering with your current larger projects.
In 2001, I signed a contract through my agent, and began working with an editor at the publishing house that accepted my proposal. After I delivered the manuscript and received half of my advance, the editor told me that she proposed my manuscript to the company as a hardcover rather than the gifty small book I’d proposed. Great, I thought. The bad news was that it would have to wait another season. Then it was pushed back again because she claimed that she hadn’t figured out what the art should be yet. At that point, we were talking two years. But I didn’t think that meant never.
