The Writing Life is full of musings, observations, and reflections of a 40-year veteran of the craft. Bobbi Linkemer loves to write, to teach writing, and, most of all, to help other writers write. This is a great way to make a living and a life!
You’re going along doing whatever it is that you do—in my case, writing—and suddenly your world blows up (or so it seems). You get hit in the head with a chunk of debris and end up on your rear end, wondering what happened. There you sit, trying to make sense of the senseless and becoming more immobilized by the minute.
It could be anything—an illness or accident, a family crisis, or a major loss—but whatever it is, it turns you into a zombie. If you are a writer, you simply stop writing. Words don’t come; what’s worse, you don’t ever care. That’s bad. No doubt about it.
In my own writing life, when this has happened, I have experienced a kind of miracle: I have somehow been able to convert the negative energy of the most stressful circumstances into the creative energy that fuels my writing process. I admit it has not worked 100 percent of the time, but in the past forty-plus years, it has happened. This never ceases to amaze me.
The next paragraph should be how to do it, but that’s the thing about miracles: they defy explanation. No matter how insane the situation in which I found myself, I usually wrote right through it. Sometimes, I cried or coughed or ran a fever or swore a blue streak while I was writing, but those things just seemed to intensify the process.
I have been teaching for many years and have yet to find a way to transmit this bit of alchemy. Perhaps in the beginning it was simply that I had a deadline, and it was unthinkable to miss it; so I sat down at my little Smith-Corona electric portable and just did what I had to do. Later, it was an ingrained habit. I had done it before; I could do it again. Maybe for each of us, there is a different trigger. I found mine by accident; I don’t know how you will find yours.
The important thing to know is that it can be done. You too can turn lead into gold. You just have to unravel the mystery in your own way. Please let me know if you do!
Whether you realize it or not, your life is a story, and it’s a story you should share, at least with those closest to you. If you decide to write a memoir, chances are it won’t be a best seller. You may or may not even choose to publish it. But I urge you to write it.
If you’ve never written before, you will be amazed at what an almost mystical experience it can be for you. If you have dabbled in writing, but kept your precious thoughts and words buried in a drawer or hidden on your hard drive, this is the best way I know to write, first, for yourself and, second, for your most appreciate audience, your family.
Merriam Webster defines a memoir as “a narrative composed from personal experience” or “an autobiography.”
Ten ways to structure a memoir
A theme or a thread
Chronological
Flashbacks
Function: how things work
Journey: circular changes, from beginning to end
Mosaic: pieces of a puzzle or little vignettes
Organic: from physical qualities or layout
Origins: how things came to be or are made
People or characters
The seasons
Ten ways to begin
You do not necessarily have to start at the beginning. Consider starting with:
An important moment that reveals character — yours or someone else’s
A memory or flashback
A photograph or memento
Beginnings, endings, first times, last times
A significant event — illness, birth, death, funeral, wedding, divorce
Sensory memories — sights, sounds, smells
Secrets, epiphanies, encounters, accusations
Successes or failures
Worst and best moments
Mentors, heroes, villains
What to do
Use impressionistic description through metaphorical language: metaphor – direct comparison; simile – metaphor, using like or as or as though. Paint a picture with details, active, descriptive verbs. Orient yourself with the landscape. The external landscape reflects the inner landscape of your life (turbulent, stormy).
Personalize your writing, using “I” words and a subjective approach to subject matter. Use present tense; it gives energy to the writing. Use dialogue; direct conversation is powerful.
Break your memoir into moments or scenes; include conversation. Capture interesting conversation that reveals something about the character; leave out what’s not important. Boil events down to the basics. What is important to convey? What about you is different because of this incident or time in your life?
Make your story complex, unpredictable, powerful. Loop together a series of scenes like moments of conflict; conflict makes writing interesting. Do your best to tell the truth, as you know it; but even when you’re writing about the truth, it’s OK to combine several people into a composite character.
What not to do
Don’t just write down facts; create images for the reader. Don’t tell; show. Show with visual description, metaphoric language, dialogue (either conversation you remember verbatim or close to what could have been said based on the situation). Don’t use clichés and expected language; use powerful verbs. Don’t weaken your writing with adverbs; get rid of all “ly” words. Don’t ramble; compress language.
Why it’s personal
A memoir is about you. It is creative nonfiction. The greatest strength about creative nonfiction is that you stick to the essence of the truth, but you can exercise some creative license by including factual information and physical details to make a scene come to life. Creative nonfiction teaches something, even if the lesson is subtle.
A memoir challenges you to do more than recall and record facts about you life. It asks you to engage in courageous writing — to reveal yourself, your humanity, and the range of human experience, both joy and pain.
There is something in your story that every reader can relate to even if you don’t know what that will be. So, even though it is your story, as you write it, seek universal themes so that it relates not just to you but also to humanity in general. Above all, remember that your life is a story. Write it!
For the second time since I have been teaching my class in "Writing, Publishing & Promoting Your Nonfiction Book," I have offered a follow-up class, euphemistically referred to as graduate school. The idea is that anyone who has ever taken the first class and is still somewhere in the process of writing a book can sign up for the second one. In the interest of full disclosure, I must add that these classes are offered by the St. Louis Community College as continuing education—in other words, they are noncredit.
That makes no difference to me; I teach both of them as if students were, indeed, receiving college credits toward a degree. Each class is two hours a week for six weeks. Despite the number of years I have been teaching, I write new lesson plans, bring in new outside speakers, and gear the course to the new people who take it. Therefore, it is a different course every semester.
To my knowledge, the community college has never offered anything like this before. It is not so much a class as a workshop or authors' support group. I try to get everyone on the same page on the first night by asking what I consider the four fundamental questions:
What is your book about?
What is your book's purpose?
Who is your ideal reader?
Where do you want to be by the last week of class?
I set a maximum of twelve students because I try to do a lot of individual coaching and editing. This time, eleven people signed up, eight from the last class and three from previous classes. On the first night, we had a great speaker who had taken both parts of the class while she was working on her book. She was informative, inspirational, and very funny.
After telling everyone what she did wrong and what she did right, she pulled out a letter she had received that day. It was from an literary agent to whom she had sent a dynamite query letter. The agent wrote that she "would be honored" to see the complete book proposal.
It is time to begin writing this book. I am so ready, I really can't put it off any longer. But first, I want to slip in a reminder and a thank you. The reminder is this: Every writer needs an editor. Every writer. No exceptions. The thank you is to my editor, who continues to remind me by the mistakes she finds and the great suggestions she makes that every writer needs an editor. Thank you, Judy!
Words have power. They can take an ordinary life and make it extraordinary in the time it takes to say them. In my case, words became a compass that pointed me toward my life’s work, though I could not possibly have known that at the time I heard them.
I was a 30-year-old housewife and mother. I wasn’t looking for my destiny; I was just looking for a night school class to take on Monday nights. Any class would do as long as it wasn’t yoga. My friend was taking yoga, and I thought that sounded ghastly. I read the catalog twice and finally signed up for something called “Writing for Fun and Money.” The teacher was a newspaper reporter who fit the stereotypical image of hard-boiled, straight talking, and tough. Writing for fun and money didn’t seem her style.
The first night she asked if anyone had ever made any money from their writing. I raised my hand; no one else did. I was embarrassed to admit it was only $25 for giving a book review to a women’s group. Still, that made me something of a star in our little class.
Looking back, I don’t think I learned anything useful about the subject. In fact, the only advice I remember was from a guest speaker who told us to “Write what you know.” While I was trying to think of something I knew, she described sitting in her children’s playpen and writing funny little pieces for parents’ magazines. I remember wondering where the children were while she was in their playpen. Other than that, I remember nothing … except, of course, the words that changed my life.
On the last night of class, we were all exchanging handshakes and hugs. As I approached the teacher to thank her, she grabbed my shoulders and gave them a good shake. “Listen to me,” she said. “I know talent when I see it, and I see it in you. You’d better keep writing!”
I had no idea what caused her to say that. We hadn’t shown her samples of our work or done any writing in class. But it really didn’t matter. She had said it and I believed her. Her words affected me so profoundly that for 40 years, “You’d better keep writing!” has remained a kind of sustaining mantra.
What comes after such a watershed moment? Well, certainly not instant success. On the other hand, I finally had some sense of direction, however vague. I announced to my husband that I was going to be a writer. He rolled his eyes, but to his credit, he helped me carry the picnic table from our minuscule patio to my new “office” in the basement under the stairs. And he did buy me an electric typewriter, which I used for 20 years until I got my first computer.
Okay, so I should keep writing; but I didn’t know what to write about, how to begin, or where to send what I managed to write. Write about what you know was the conventional wisdom. My life at that time consisted of cleaning, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cooking dinner, and taking care of little kids. This was 1967. Everyone I knew was leading exactly the same life. It didn’t seem worth putting on paper.
How to begin? When in doubt, read a book. Off I went to the library to arm myself with books on writing. The only books I found gave copious instructions on how to write fillers—little stories and clever observations on life—for women’s magazines. So, I bought every woman’s magazine I could find, read all the fillers, and struggled to write something scintillating. Unfortunately, the books didn’t provide much information on the mechanics of submission (paper, format, cover letters, etc.), and those things are not intuitive. I did everything wrong, but I think the biggest faux pas was using flimsy, erasable typewriter paper. Had I read even one article on the mechanics of submitting work to national magazines, I would have known better. Even worse, I made full use of the erasable feature, since I always was (and remain) a lousy typist.
Success eluded me, unless you count the colorful rejection slips that seemed to arrive almost daily. They came in all sizes, shapes, and shades of pastel. (They just don’t make them like that any more.) I considered each one a badge of honor and wallpapered one whole wall of my basement with them. They made a nice collage and at least proved I had been writing, even if my words never saw a printed page.
I didn’t seem to get the hint for quite a while that I was on the wrong track. If I had stayed on it, I probably could have wallpapered my whole house with multi-colored postcards. But at last, quite by accident, I did something right. I wrote a humorous article on what it was like to be handball widow. The title was “H.B.A.A. – Handball Above All.” It was very funny, if you like sports humor, and my husband urged me to send it to the editor of ACE magazine, the handball bible.
Sidebar
“Handball players are like no other sportsmen in the world. They are a breed apart, and they can locate or recognize a fellow fanatic a mile away. Put two handball players together, and they establish instant rapport, even if they have never seen each other before. A party where more than two of the guests are handball devotees is a certain disaster from the point of view of the unsuspecting hostess. They will gravitate together as if they were magnetically attracted. If this is allowed to happen (and just try to stop it), there is little chance of separating them before the evening ends.”
1968 • ACE: The Official Voice of Handball
ACE not only ran it, it did so in the issue that was distributed at the national handball championship matches that were held right here in St. Louis. I was an instant celebrity among the players, but more important, I was published! I immediately bought a portfolio.
That purchase may have been a bit optimistic since it remained empty for quite a while. This was my first foray into freelance writing, and with only one article to my credit, it was difficult to convince editors to take a chance on me. One at a time, however, I carefully scotch taped articles into my book. They were published in newsletters and free newspapers at first, but my first real break came when I was offered a job selling advertising space for a weekly newspaper called The St. Louis Jewish Light. “I really want to write.” I told the general manager, who didn’t need another writer. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “If you learn to sell space, I’ll find some things for you to write.” I took the job.
What he found for me were stories no one else on the editorial staff wanted to cover: meetings, programs at night, book reviews, short personality profiles, and little news items. If the subject was deemed boring or inconvenient, I wrote about it, slowly filling my portfolio with feature articles. Amazingly, ACE kept publishing my stories, first on notable local handball players and then on the emergence of racquetball as a serious sport. I interviewed many sweaty men in what looked like white underwear and became known as the “handball writer” around the courts. It was a heady experience.
I’d love to say that I made all my own breaks, and luck was not a factor; but that’s not true. Sometimes, just being in the right place when the right person shows up is like finding a four-leaf clover. I was still selling space, writing for the Jewish Light, and trying to interest editors of obscure publications to give me assignments or print my articles, when one of those right people came into my life. He was in charge of advertising for a company that owned, among other things, a small sports magazine for country clubbers. He liked my writing and introduced me to the editor, who paid my $50 for my H.B.A.A story. That was big money in 1970; in fact, it was the first money I had earned for anything I wrote. The editor hired an illustrator and published my “humor piece” in Replay. This was my second big break, and it turned out to be bigger than I could have imagined at the time.
Replay had a very short life. It was mailed free to a small, elite readership that had never asked for it to begin with. The publisher had a stroke of genius. He used Replay to give birth to a new city magazine called The St. Louisan. It simply appeared one month as an insert; the next month Replay ceased to be, and The St. Louisan was launched. I was launched right along with it.
Being able to write about subjects that were outside of the Jewish community was liberating. I wrote about a innovative day camp on a farm, a rehabilitation center for trouble teens, a relatively famous restaurateur, and my greatest challenge so far: kidney disease. I truly felt like I had died and gone to heaven, as I met more and more talented people. One of those people was one of the most talented photographers I have ever worked with. Portrait artist turned commercial photographer, Denny had a magic touch with people and pictures. From our first assignment together, we knew we had an unbeatable creative partnership. It was one that continued for a decade.
Sidebar
“Metropolitan St. Louis, with a population of approximately two-and-a-half-million people boasts two medical schools, numerous hospitals, and a reputation for being an outstanding medical center. Yet, only five short years ago, in the midst of all of this bustling medical activity and research, if a person was told he was suffering from kidney disease, he could be relatively certain that he would die. In 1966, there were two research units for kidney disease—one at Washington University and one at St. Louis University. The very small number of patients (two) at these centers was treated for education and research purposes only.”
1970 • The St. Louisan
In the meantime, I was still selling space, juggling a house, a family, and a large dog during the day, and writing almost every night. Ah, the energy of youth! That pace, as well as other circumstances, took their toll. I ticked off all the top items on the list of significant stressors—divorce, a major move, my boss’s untimely death, becoming a single mom, and a new job I was ill prepared to tackle.
Phase one of my writing life was coming to an abrupt end.
Another class in Writing, Publishing, & Promoting Your Nonfiction Book ended last night. It was a six-week, 12-hour, non-credit course sponsored by the St. Louis Community College and held in a high school classroom. The class almost didn’t come together because enrollment in continuing ed classes across the community college system was way down. As it turned out, more people showed up on the first night than were originally signed up; and, as is also sadly typical, a few people dropped out. I never know why that happens; and, though it probably has much more to do with the students’ time constraints than the caliber of my teaching, one can never be sure about why they leave.
Those who remained were enthusiastic and involved. They shared their ideas and suggestions with each other, asked many questions of the speakers, took copious notes, and began to write their books. At the last class, they brought food, and we had a great “graduation party.” They were gracious and grateful for what they had learned. As always, that last class was bittersweet. As I said my goodbyes and packed up my materials and books, I was already feeling the familiar sense of loss. While it was festive and lively, and people seemed quite relaxed, I dread these endings.
Some of these students will simply disappear from life. Many of their books may never be written. A few, of course, will stay in touch, perhaps ask for my help, and take the process to its desired conclusion — a completed, published book. But if I go back over my class rosters for all the years I’ve been teaching this class, I will find those success stories to be rare.
People take this class for many reasons. Depending on their previous experience with non-credit courses, they are often surprised that I expect them not only to learn a process but also to actually begin to write their books. For some, that is just what they hoped for; for others, it’s far too big a commitment. What always surprises me is when people take the class and then take it again, determined this time to produce a book.
So, another class ends. I pack away the notebook and re-shelve the books I brought as samples of each week’s topics. And for several Wednesday nights, I will feel vaguely out of sync. Something is missing, I will think. And then I will remember what it is and hope my class will be offered in the summer or next fall.
Teaching fulfills me as nothing else does. How fortunate I am to be able to do it, even if only six weeks at a time.
Time magazine had an article in its most recent edition about self-publishing, and I think every one of my clients has read it. While the article dealt mostly with fiction, there is no question that self-publishing is also a viable option for nonfiction authors. So, in response to all the questions arriving in my e-mail, here are some things you should know about self-publishing.
You do everything a publisher does, and you pay for all of it. On the other hand, if there is a profit after expenses, you keep it. you are in control, creatively and financially. The book is yours; you make all the decisions. Depending on the approach you take, you can make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of unnecessary money if you don’t know what you’re doing. Finally, no matter how you plan to publish, to attract buyers, your book must have a catchy title, eye-catching cover, solid content, and excellent writing. Here are four approaches:
Self-publishing: the "right" way There are many steps involved in this approach. As a self-publisher, you are responsible for printing, warehousing, marketing, and distributing your books. For help, check out Independent Publishers Association (PMA) or its local chapter in your city. The guru of self-publishing is Dan Poynter, whose book, The Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Book, has become the bible for self-publishers. He describes this process in great detail.
Technical steps
Begin by forming your own publishing company. Create a fictitious name to lend it some credibility.
Print on demand (POD/Subsidy Publishers/Author Services) POD is a digital technology that prints anywhere from one to 1,000 books at a time. The rest of the time, your book is stored as a digital file on a large server. This eliminates the need for large press runs and storage space. The appeal of POD companies — such as BookSurge (owned by Amazon), AuthorHouse, iUniverse (owned by Barnes & Noble), InfinityPublishing, LuLu, Xlibrus, and PublishAmerica — is that they offer a variety of packages to authors. The set-up fees and cost per book or per page vary from publisher to publisher, so it’s a good idea to shop around. Obviously, the quality of the books produced this way runs the gamut. It is up to you to ensure that your book meets the same high standards demanded by conventional publishers.
Here are few other things to keep in mind:
POD companies charge an up-front fee, which can be as high as $1,500.
Most POD companies have strict guidelines for format, size, and pricing.
There is an additional charge for editing and marketing; and, in some cases, purchase of the marketing package is mandatory.
If the company designs the covers, it owns the cover design.
Wholesalers and retailers may not buy POD books because they are non-returnable, higher in price, and often lower in quality.
The ISBN number is often in the company’s name, not the author’s, making the company the publisher of record.
After an initial number of complimentary books, you must purchase copies of your own books at about 40 percent of retail.
Start with a printer This is something you would do as a self-publisher, of course, but it’s a less complicated process. Some printers provide the ISBNs and bar codes at a slight additional cost. One is NoWaste Publishing in Fenton, Missouri, which printed the last two editions of How to Write a Nonfiction Book: From Concept to Completion in 6 Months. You can do as much or as little of the self-publishing process as you like with this option. I uploaded my book to amazon.com, featured it on my website, made it the centerpiece of my blog, wrote articles based on its content, and printed only what I could afford and store.
Use LightningSource LightningSource is a digital printer that prints books for publishers, as opposed to individual authors. You would have to create a publishing company to take advantage of their services. Ironically, the big POD houses farm out their printing to LightningSource, so they may be printing your book whether you realize it or not. LightningSource:
is owned by Ingram, the largest book wholesaler in the US
will automatically get your book into Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon
charges a single, upfront set up fee of $500, and then you only pay for what you print
sells internationally
prints in black and white and color, hardback or softback
It’s September — one of my favorite months. September is the start of so many things, including school. In recent years I’ve discovered how much I love teaching, which is somewhat ironic. Fifty years ago, when I walked into my first classroom, I was ready to run for my life. What had I been thinking, majoring in elementary education? I didn’t belong there, staring at 20 little eight-year-olds and trying to keep them from swinging from the chandeliers. That year was an endurance contest; I survived, but barely.
Traumatized, I didn’t walk into a classroom again for decades. When I finally did it was my love of the subject matter and the conviction that I could actually teach it that broke the barrier. I was teaching writing to adults, adults who were eager to learn, eager to write.
For the last five or six years I’ve been sharing what I know about how to write, publish, and promote a nonfiction book. I wrote a workbook, which keeps getting fatter with each edition, and used it as a text in several different continuing education programs in St. Louis. With each class I hope I become a better teacher. The classes are never the same. The students are different; their subject matter is unique; the dynamics of the group change every time,
I throw my heart into these little six-week sessions, and my money as well, trying to devise the perfect way to provide helpful handouts that don’t break the community college’s budget. I am often able to line up terrific speakers who are experts in their respective fields. At the last session we always have a party, and the students (by now, budding authors) often stay together to form writing groups. Of all the things I do, teaching has become my passion.
I am ready for my next class, which is supposed to start Monday. But something is amiss. Apparently, enrollment at the all three campuses of the community college is down — way down. No one knows precisely why. Perhaps it’s the price of gas or the upcoming election, though how an election that is two months away could influence whether people sign up for night school is beyond me. More likely it is the belt tightening brought on by a sagging economy. Whatever the reason, my class, which often has to be closed when registration hits the maximum, has barely made the minimum.
I received a call yesterday informing me that, though there are only six people in the class, the school is willing to go ahead with it. “It’s up to you,” the caller said. I struggled with what to do for about it for a minute before I reluctantly cancelled. Classes always shrink for a variety of reasons, starting out with 15 and usually ending up with 12 committed students. I taught a class with six people a few years ago and watched it dwindle in size from six to two. Miraculously, we persevered through the six weeks and beyond. The two writers came to class every week and actually wrote their books. One illustrated hers, and the other is waiting to hear from a publisher.
Still, it was not an ideal situation. One of the strengths of these classes is the rapport and support that develops among the students. To establish that rapport you need critical mass, strange as that seems,
I’m disappointed, and the few people I know who e-mailed me to tell me they were taking the class are probably disappointed, as well. Perhaps they will sign up for the next session in chilly February. In light of what is going on in the country and the world right now, a cancelled class is a small thing. But for most of us, it is the small things that compose our lives: habits, routines, aspirations, plans.
But as Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” My cancelled class is just one more example of the that piece of wisdom.
The summer is over … or practically over, anyway. A minute ago it was Memorial Day; suddenly, I’m staring Labor Day in the face (I still haven’t bought a barbeque grill!), and what do I have to show for it besides a tan and an improved flutter kick?
But I’m not being fair. Since my life is measured by statistics — my rankings on Google and Yahoo, marketing strategies that pay off, and number of words written, articles published, and books sold — I have accomplished quite a bit. This has been a summer of writing. In fact, I don’t seem to be able to stop.
It is hard to explain this obsession to people who think they can’t write, would rather die than write, or know they can write but hate doing it. As I tried to think of something profound to say, I decided to seek some help from noted writers past and present. Here are some observations that really resonated.
“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write.” Hugh Prather
"There is no perfect time to write. There's only now." Barbara Kingsolver
"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage." Sydney Smith
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock.” Ernest Hemingway
"Writing itself is an act of faith.” EB White
“It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” C. J. Cherryhr
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.” William Faulkner
“Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.” Sharon O'Brien
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” Isaac Asimov
"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes." Agatha Christie
"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke." Arthur Polotnik
The good news is that my little book, How to Write a Nonfiction Book: From Concept to Completion in 6 Months, is selling on Amazon and my website. The other day I counted my remaining copies and realized it is time to start thinking about the next edition. That’s about all it took; I haven’t thought about anything else since then. The seed was planted.
So, I packed up my new MacBook and went off to my latest dog-sitting gig, full of ideas for what I might add to the content. It seems the longer I teach, the more I realize how much I have to learn. The article sites I contribute to are goldmines of information, new perspectives, and advice on how to get from your first book-thought to your first book-signing. I read other people’s wisdom and find myself newly inspired. There is so much to share with aspiring authors who buy my book or sit in my classes.
Every time I revise what was once a pretty thin eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch workbook that focused primarily on how to write a book proposal, I add more to the other key aspects of writing, publishing, and promoting a nonfiction book. There are so many good books and so many experts, it’s a bit intimidating to publish what I want to say. Yes, it’s true; even veteran writers feel that way!
The first questions I ask myself are what do authors want to know? What are my students, clients, and book buyers asking me, and have I answered their questions in this book? I look for gaps in the text, and I find them. Why do I have to write a proposal? Do I need an agent? How do I find one? What should I send to a publisher? What is involved in writing a memoir? What’s the difference between POD publishing and self-publishing? And on and on.
Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a member of my writers’ group with her query letter to a publisher attached. “What do you think?” she wanted to know. “Let me get my thoughts together,” I wrote back and immediately set off on a research and writing journey that culminated in an article, as well as a new section for my book. This was undoubtedly much more than she ever wanted to know; but, when I tried to answer her question, I realized I didn’t really know enough about book query letters to do so.
The first edition of my little book was easy as pie to write; the second a little more difficult; and so on. It has taken me five editions to realize that the best way to learn about your subject is to write about it. I am dedicating this book — if I ever finish it — to my writers group, students, clients, and book buyers. Thank you all for continuing to ask questions I can’t answer without some serious thought.
I’ve heard it said that having a website no one knows exists is like having a billboard in the middle of the Sahara dessert. I believe it. I’ve had a website almost as long as I’ve been in business, and it was the world’s most expensive (and confusing) online brochure. Now, it generates viable leads every week. It didn’t happen overnight. It took time, advice from experts, lots of learning, and, most of all, doing.
1. It began at an SLPA meeting at which a marketing expert named Bobette Kyle knocked my socks off with her presentation. She offered the audience a free marketing workbook and 30 minutes of consulting time. I signed up. Her first suggestion was to redesign my website to reflect my new goals.
2. I’ll spare you the details of starting over from scratch. It was a series of false starts and frustrations. In the end, I bought DreamWeaver and did it myself. Of course, there were so many things I didn’t have a clue about, such as how to do, like making buttons for my navigation bar or settin up a template. Basic stiff.
3. I hired Pat Weaver, a computer wizard from the Webster school district. She became my fixer and teacher. If I wanted to learn DreamWeaver, she was the best.
4. Finally, I went back to Bobette for a brainstorming session on marketing planning — an essential step! I had to have a marketing plan, and it really wasn’t all that mysterious to write one when a marketing exert was asking all the right questions, and all I had to do was think through the answers.
5. My overall goal was to build my business as a ghostwriter, book-writing coach, and editor. One strategy was to expand my online presence. Tactic #1 was to write and submit articles in my area of expertise to online marketing sites. So, that’s what I did. I wrote them; Bobette submitted them to about 30 online sites, including EzineArticles.com, the gold standard. At the bottom of each was a little blurb explaining what I do and how to contact me. At this point, there are close to 60 articles, which are also on my website in two formats: web pages and PDFs.
6. In the meantime, I kept adding to and improving my site. I did the design and writing; Bobette did her magic behind the scenes. The key was obtaining quality inbound links from authority Websites, like relevant directories or topical Websites. This helps search engines find and list my site and potential clients find me. A novice could do that, I suppose, but it’s so worth it to pay a consultant who knows what she’s doing. I started showing up on search engines, and potential authors started contacting me. To me, that was a miracle.
7. Tactic #2 was to join social networking sites like Gather, LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Eons, among others. That took a lot of time; and, truthfully, it is my weakest link. Networking sites can become so addictive and time-consuming that I forget to work. Obviously, I still have a lot to learn about that aspect of Web 2.0.
8. There has to be a way to encourage people to e-mail and then capture their addresses when they do. And, even more important, then, I have to give them something free — information, reports, eBooks, anything that will benefit the reader and compel them to make contact. So, we set up a way to do that on my home page. The e-mail addresses go to EzineDirector, which automatically sends out the eBook I offer. It will also send out a regular newsletter and do all kinds of other things, automatically, if I set them up.
9. I struggled with the idea of doing a newsletter. I feel that a newsletter should be full of news and other helpful messages. Doing the requisite research is a big job, so I finally decided to send one only when I have something worthwhile to announce or share.
10. I don’t know what took me so long, but, eventually, I discovered blogging; and I love it. I set up my blog on BlogSpot, which is free, easy, and basic. I keep discovering new things I can do and adding them to my blog. My topic, of course, is writing; but, unlike articles, I find blogging gives me more flexibility. It is personal, so I can reflect on a whole range of writing-related topics that don’t fit in the article format.
Those are the basics. In between the numbers are all the things I have done wrong while learning to do them right, and, believe me, there have been many. There is so much to learn and so much to do, it could consume most of my day. But, when you are a writer who sells services as well as words, that is your full-time job. Marketing is how you get to do it.
Bobbi Linkemer is a ghostwriter, book coach, editor, and the author of 14 books. Her articles on all aspects of writing appear on more than 25 article sites on the Web, including top-ranked EzineArticles.com. Bobbi has been a professional writer for 40 years, a magazine editor and journalist, and a writing teacher. She has written about thousands of subjects over the years. With Musings, for the first time, Bobbi is sharing her thoughts on a wide array of topics, from serious to satirical and philosophical to factual.
Posts
