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How to Manage Your Online Afterlife

The week before Christmas, I looked at my birthday notifications on Facebook and saw that it was my friend Chris’s birthday. Facebook has this new feature that allows you to wish your friends happy birthday without even visiting their walls. But because I know some people post fake birthdays to protect their privacy, if I […]

Writerly New Year’s Resolutions

What are your New Year’s resolutions? Mine are:

1. Run the Oakland Half Marathon on March 25, no matter how slowly. I ran this marathon in 2010, and then in 2011 I wimped out after a 10-mile run two weeks before because I hadn’t trained enough. My ego didn’t want to run it slower than […]

2011 Books in Review

Happy New Year! Can you believe it’s almost 2012? I feel like I’m living in the future.

Sierra Godfrey’s post last week reminded me that I used to wrap up the year with a list of the books I’d read that year. My goal is always to read two books a month, and with two […]

Interview with Red Room founder and CEO Ivory Madison

Some of you may be familiar with Red Room, a social network and marketing platform for authors that boasts superstar members like Margaret Atwood, Naomi Wolf, Jonathan Lethem, Erica Jong, Salman Rushdie, Dave Eggers, and Amy Tan. What you may not know is that on October 24, Red Room launched the “the world’s only authors’ […]

How to Combat Writer Envy

Check it out! New blog design to match the rest of my website. This is a work-in-progress, so if you find any glitches, please let me know, and I will remedy them as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, feel free to click around to check out my new digs right after you read this post:

A […]

25 Ways to Build Your Author Platform Before Your Book is Published

If you’re a writer, you’ve had the importance of building your “author platform” drilled into your head like the multiplication tables were in fourth grade. Most people associate building an author platform with Facebook and a blog, but there are many ways to create a following. Here are 25:

1. Blog Not every writer needs […]

Are you blogging to the wrong audience?

It’s been my intention for some time now to expand this blog to write about other topics, and to post more frequently. I haven’t done that because, frankly, I don’t have the time. Blogging once a week has been perfect for me. It’s manageable, and with two- and three-year-old children, I need something manageable in […]

Are You Plagued by Perfectionism?

I arrived at the tail end of an interesting lunchtime conversation at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto last week—just in time to hear author Julia Scheeres utter, “Well, that was depressing.” From there the conversation continued on about how women tend to submit less often to journals, magazines, and newspapers (and by extension, agents and […]

Dear Klout: It’s Not Me, It’s You

I was a Klout junkie. The first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was reach for my iPad and check my Klout score to see if it had gone up a point since the previous night (scores apparently change in the middle of the night). I’m a casual gamer (Settlers of […]

Author Advances: Survey Results

Thank you so much to the 105 authors who took the author advance survey! Here are the results (now with author comments added below):

Average and Median of All Advances

Five people reported multi-book deals (four two-book deals and one four-book deal), which skewed the results a bit. Below are results counting the multi-book deals […]