Pretty quiet on the boards today. Is it the heat?
Anyone read Get A Freelance Life?
“I am trying to place an 800 word humor piece about Baby Shiloh. No, it hasn’t been done–yet. It satirizes a very common aspect of modern parenting in a lightly snarky way. Any thoughts?”
Does Dragonfire pay?
What are the chances that a past employer would bad-mouth someone after 6 years of absolutely no contact?
How do you know what you’re qualified to do?
Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion's Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook's Morin Oluwole, and bitly's Tim Devane. Register now.
For you science writers, get your submission in the mail today or tomorrow! You could win $3,000. You could use $3,000, couldn’t you?
This is your last chance to submit your entry for the
2006 AAAS Science Journalism Awards.
Submissions must be postmarked by or on TUESDAY,
1 August.
The contest year is 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2006. There is
no entry fee.
Each category winner will receive $3,000, to be presented
at the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Annual Meeting in February 2007 in San Francisco, Calif.
To download a brochure and entry form, or to read the
most frequently asked questions, please go here
Kathy Gannon reveals what it was like to report from Kabul and other parts of war-torn Afghanistan during her 18-year tenure as the AP’s correspondent there:
It was Oct. 23, 2001. The U.S.-led coalition had launched Operation Enduring Freedom just two weeks earlier. The bombs were pounding the Taliban’s Afghanistan and every Western journalist covering the story was either in Pakistan or in enclaves in northern Afghanistan controlled by the coalition’s Afghan partners, known as the Northern Alliance. As for me, I was on my way to Kabul, the only Western journalist allowed by the Taliban to return to their territory.
I have been in the region 18 years. I covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the communist regime and the four-year rule of the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, led by the Northern Alliance. Those four years were particularly brutal, marked by bloody internecine fighting that left 50,000 Afghan civilians dead in Kabul alone. I was there when the Taliban swarmed into Kabul in September 1996 having sent the Northern Alliance leaders fleeing north. Because I had persisted in my coverage throughout the Taliban rule, meeting them on the front lines, and in their heartland in the south, the Taliban let me back into Kabul while denying all other western reporters access. Some Taliban even knew me from the 1980s Soviet invasion.
More here. Or read an excerpt from Gannon’s book here.
Last week, reader Dan Cooper tipped me off to the fact that Scrivener, a program I was saying sounded good for screenwriters, is actually B.S. We emailed a few times and just in the course of conversation he sent me the following mini-tutorial on personal branding. I thought it’s good advice for any writer and asked him to share it. By the way, if you are wondering just who the hell Dan Cooper is and why we should be listening to him, according to the bio I’m lifting from his site, Dan Cooper was a key member of the original 5-man launch team of the Fox News Channel and that Dan originated the “team coverage” concept in news broadcasting, and played an instrumental role in the early success of ABC’s “20/20″.
As a writer, you must view yourself as a brand, your work a product, and you’ve got to use marketing strategy to build your brand and achieve success.
This in no way conflicts with your truth. All successful artists are brands.
What is a brand? It is a set of differentiating characteristics. To understand this, let’s look at automobile brands. Each brand is followed by its primary differentiating characteristic:
BMW is the driving brand — BMW is the ultimate driving experience.
Mercedes owns engineering. They are always at the forefront, and they use the word engineering in their advertising, as BMW does driving.
Audi owns design. Porsche owns sports car.
Toyota and Honda both own reliability, which is a problem for both of them, but both do well because reliability is a key factor running through all car buying decisions. These are the safe choice cars.
Let’s get back to writing.
Claire, you have a wonderful writing voice. Now is the time to develop your brand and market it. Marketing yourself now means working toward finding your unique differentiating factor as a writer. We know that best-selling authors as well as “literary” writers are well-branded (David Sedaris is the funny gay writer. Steven King is the best horror writer. Ken Auletta is the top media writer. Ian McEwan is the best English writer, while Martin Amis is the “bad boy” English writer. Ann Coulter is the conservative monster). This kind of differentiating is not like being a science writer or celebrity writer. it’s built on what differentiates you from everybody else on the shelf.
I very strongly recommend reading Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout, an old friend of mine, and the world’s most important marketing guru site
For decades I have created TV shows and production elements based on Jack’s theories. When I worked for Fox News, for example, Roger Ailes highly differentiated his product with the “fair and balanced” slogan. In marketing terms, Fox has repositioned the rest of the press as liberal. Perception is always what sells, not reality.
Finally, when you examine your level of comfort with publicity, you must determine that you will indeed always be quoted, always maneuver for publicity. When someone asks who you are, don’t say “a writer”. You’ve got to give them your differentiating position. Developing your differentiating characteristic is hard, and you have to deliver on it, but it’s the way to reach the largest audience and establish financial security in a difficult field.
EAST COAST
Monday:
Writing and Selling First-Person Pieces: A panel discussion moderated by Susan Shapiro
Tuesday:
How to Build Buzz in Public Relations: Train yourself to think like a publicist
Wednesday:
Starving Artist No More: Breaking Into Food Writing
Thursday:
Breaking Into TV Comedy Writing: From late night network programming to comedy on cable, you’ll learn how to hone your writing style to make your mark as a television comedy writer.
WEST COAST
Monday:
A Journalist’s Introduction to Online Journalism: This three-hour seminar is aimed at giving you, the published print journalist with a working knowledge of (but maybe a sneaking suspicion about) the Web, the basic tools of the online journalist.
How to Write a Flawless Nonfiction Book Proposal: You have to summarize your story in a succinct attention-grabbing proposal that will convince overwhelmed agents and publishers that your idea is worthy of their time. This seminar will show you how
Getting Freelance Copyediting Gigs: Take better tests and nail that interview
Tuesday:
Copywriting and Grantwriting for Nonprofit Organizations: Copywriting for the web, brochures, and newsletters, plus grantwriting!
The 4-Week TV Writer: Finish your spec or pilot in one month
Grammar A-Z in San Francisco: Tips, tricks, and differences of grammar and style
Thursday:
How to Write in Solitary Confinement: You can survive the work-at-home experience—and be productive, too.
Writing Your Memoir: This class will teach you how to keep your personal story personal while also making it universally engaging and relevant.
Saturday:
Weekend Warrior: 2-Day Film School: mb has teamed up with HFI to put you through film school in one weekend
Sunday:
Writing the TV Pilot: This seminar will show you how to develop and write a pilot, detail what to include in a proposal, and discuss the elements of the perfect pitch.
Create and Develop Your Freelancing Career: Develop the network that will keep assignments coming
As a creative director at Young & Rubicam advertising in New York, today’s interviewee developed brand advertising and award-winning commercials for some of the world’s leading companies, an experience that led to his new novel, The Futurist. The first chapter of said book appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review and was named a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction.
Has your outing as a ‘soulless ad guy’ turned off some of the literati? I used to think that that was outdated–that journalists and novelists think you’re useless if you’re in advertising or pr–but maybe that’s not the case.I’m sure it has turned off some people. Or maybe it’s led some to believe I woke up one day and decided, Instead of writing about yogurt today, I’m going to write a novel. Yeah, a novel! It’s probably my just being overly sensitive to the whole thing. I mean, even though I got an MFA in writing from NYU and have been writing (but not necessarily publishing) fiction for more than 20 years, I did work in advertising for a long time. Having a soul-challenged protagonist who works on the perifery of advertising and touting my former job in my book jacket bio may be contributing factors as well. And the truth is, the ex ad-guy angle probably got me a lot more press, because the middle-aged white guy writes a book angle isn’t the most differentiating way to position a supposedly literary novel. Then again, I guess the best way to deflect attention from my advertising past would be to do what Don DeLillo did: write a bunch of brilliant novels.
Listible is a new way to get relevant resources quickly. I can’t even go into all the things it offers but check it out, especially if you consider yourself pretty web-savvy.
And if you’re not, learn at Poynter what Digg is and what it can do for your traffic. This is good for me because just the other day I had the sneaking suspicion that I should know what Digg is and figure out how it works but I don’t. So I will, shortly.
For you songwriters: tips on writing a song when you’re cooperating with someone more talented than yourself.
Via Lifehacker: clean your laptop with a post-it note.
Free writing classes at Barnes & Noble.com!
One that I can use: how to write a how-to blog post that gets you lots of attention.
If you’re one of those on-the-go type bloggers, you might be interested in this new service recommended to me by Alissa over at Unbeige. She forwarded the following info to me from her friend Ophir. Unrelated, he was sending this from “34,000 ft. above Brussels – First time using WiFi on a plane (El-Al)!” Scary.
I’ve been working on a new experiment/venture called Mojungle with partners Ari Mir and Andrew Arrow. Mojungle is a free service that enables you to send media (text, images, video) directly from your cell-phone to a personal media player online. This player can be placed on any web site (usual suspects include social networks like MySpace and blogs) and media sent from your mobile device is shared with the world in real-time. We launched the service very recently and have been getting positive writeups and good growth.
First writeup on Mojungle here.
More reviews/mentions here:
The service is insanely simple to set up and use and works with nearly all US and international providers. We are developing several features that add to the social nature of the service as well and these will be deployed in stages over the next few weeks. I’d love to hear your feedback. Check out www.mojungle.com. Share your life.
Another great podcast for writers: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s “Writers on Writing,” which airs on KUCI-FM.
Thanks, benevolent anonymous tipster! Keep them coming!
For those of you sickos out there who really and truly love looking for errors in people’s writing, Melissa Holbrook Pierson at Salon has written an ode to her most anal obsession.
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