Oh my friends … yes, the official advent of fall is still a couple weeks away, but the weather has a delicious chill in it that makes me a proud owner of a down comforter. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back at Starbucks. And my penchant for eating soup at any possible opportunity doesn’t seem so odd when a person needs something to warm their hands with.
Anyway – welcome to September. Good stuff is abounding on the Interwebs, shall we?
If you’re an aspiring writer and want to know some of the ins and outs of landing an agent and the publishing industry in general, Janet Reid’s blog is one that you should bookmark. Ms. Reid is an agent with New Leaf Literary & Media and frequently answers reader industry questions. This blog is a freaking goldmine. And this week, Reid had back-to-back posts that felt timely in my life.
First – how not to be a bonehead when promoting your book. For a humble Midwesterner such as myself, most of what Ms. Reid made sense to me. Unpersonalized email blasts are ineffective and somewhat rude. But the idea I really liked was the idea of building a spreadsheet of people who have cheered you on during your publication journey and sending out a PERSONALIZED email to them upon your book’s publication? As Reid writes: “… even if you spend 100 minutes doing 10 personalized emails you’ll reap more reward than if you spend 10 minutes doing a 100-person impersonal email blast.”
The second post regarding writers and business cards was even more timely coming off of my time at Killer Nashville. Do I have a business card? You bet your boot heels I do. And I distributed those babies around to EVERYONE I met. But Reid has a brilliant nugget in her post, citing the writer who made business cards containing her contact information on the front. And three lines describing the manuscript she was shopping around on the back.
Brilliant.
Reviews about the scariest clown to ever come out of someone’s imagination are abundant in the media right now, as “IT” comes to theaters. (And it features one of the Skargard brothers. Swoon.) Among all of that was a sweet blog post that one man wrote talking about the piece of writing advice that Stephen King gave him when the writer was a 10-year-old kid.
One final article I’ll leave you with today was this piece about Kyle MacLachlan in Esquire. I was 12 or 13 when Twin Peaks originally came out on ABC and that show seared my mind with possibility. I’m now 39 and watching “The Return” on Showtime reminded me a lot of the geek I once was and probably what a debt I owe to David Lynch for showing me that there are stories in the things happening under the surface of a small town. (And PS – Kyle MacLachlan has only aged like a fine wine.)
Alrighty, friends – that is all I have this week. I hope that this finds you well wherever you are.
michellekubitz 