Monday 22 October 2012

The beautiful part of writing is that...

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." Robert Cormier

That is what is such an amazing thing about writing. Its always a learning curve. The beauty of it these days is that people share their mistakes and learning with the rest of the world - after all it makes us more human - thank you social media.

Anyway I logged on to www.selfpublishingreview.com last week and I was reading an interesting article on reaching your target market when I thought I would take a look at the resources page (I can never just do one thing at a time) - I thought I would open the page in a  new window whilst reading how to reach my target audience and  minutes later I had at least ten further pages open. This kind of slap shod research is no good to anyone because I cant really say who said what or provide valuable links for all you writers out there. But I will try and share the information I have gleaned.

Well for starters I stumbled upon two web tools to help authors. The first is www.paperrater.com Which is a free on line grammar check. I am not sure how many authors use this and surely it is just the same the the spell check and grammar checker on word? I don't know. It detects plagiarism and provides a little guidance on style. I am not convinced that a computer can do the latter and given that I have no clue about punctuation in the first place I think a site like that (for me) is best avoided.

Secondly I came across www.polldaddy.com - This looks pretty good. Collect data from your facebook, linked in and twitter followers - This could help in market research and if I wasn't so busy opening multiple pages I probably would have signed up. It is definitely something I need to look at. Is it similar to survey monkey? probably but if it creates some stats for you based on your social media hits and what not - well then it is probably.

Of course there is also www.twitterfeed.com  which I said to myself 'Oh that looks interesting' and then realised that i already have an account. It also provides stats on who has clicked through from your twitter account. Needless to say I need to do a bit of work on that.

I also came across some pretty useful writing website and blogs such as http://writinghapiness.com and http://thedigitalwriter.net and one I definitely will be going back to www.writingforward.com

All these sites provide a plethora of information for all writers out there. And best of all it's all free!
One of the sites even had an article on 20 careers as a writer : Could I see myself as a greeting card writer? - no Although I was tempted after watching 500 days of summer. A writing coach - well I could see myself doing that. After all I nearly trained as a life coach it would be like missing the two together and I can be pretty motivational when I put my mind to it.

The final nugget of information that I found was in an article by @jimhbs where he asked why authors were so cagey about giving out their email addresses. he said he could find twitter details, facebook details and feedback forms but no contact email address. http://hbspublications.blogspot.co.uk - I guess a lot of us don't want spam but when we are so desperate to get out there why dont we put an email address out there?