Monthly Archives: May 2006

To blog or not to blog . . .

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If you’re a writer-o’-books, the answer to this question is “depends on who you ask.”

Miss Snark has recommended that novelists be cautious about blogging — because when you’re blogging, you’re not working on your novel. But she also wrote, once, that a “well-clicked” blog can be a plus when you’re querying agents.

Late last month, John at Romantic Ramblings recounted the advice he got from his last agent, who told him a blog was practically indispensable.

But John also found a warning on Agent Query that a blog may be a liability rather than an asset for writers looking for representation. (What they are really trying to say, I think, is that a poorly written or presented blog can be a liability. Which is true, I’m sure.)

So now, to add another twist to the conversation, comes this: Joe Garofoli, in the San Francisco Chronicle, reports on how political blogger Glenn Greenwald was able to coordinate online publicity for his non-fic book among his like-minded blogging buddies. The resulting burst of orders pushed his book to number 1 on Amazon.

Granted, Amazon is only one reseller, so if your book is ranked high there, but isn’t selling anywhere else, it doesn’t really mean much.

Except that you get to say your book is a number 1 Amazon best-seller. Certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

So what’s the verdict? I’d say it’s something like this. Don’t blog if you tend to use it as an excuse to avoid doing the real work of writing. Don’t put up a sloppy blog, or a cheesy blog. Don’t present a virtual persona that comes across as loony or raises red flags about your people skills. (Of course, if you have people-skills problems you probably don’t know your blog comes across that way but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.)

And last but not least, remember that blogging is really a type of networking. If it’s going to help you sell books, it’s because of the relationships you’ve built, not because you’ve mentioned your title and now it shows up on Google.

Where I am?

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Writing. Had a breakthrough on the plot in my novel-in-progress so I’ve been doing that in my spare time lately instead of blogging.

I promise this will wear off soon tho! Although hopefully not until the entire first draft is in the can.

:-)

My contest picks

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Okay, as promised here are my picks for Evil Editor’s “match the synopsis to the title” contest.

This was hard! I’ll be very surprised if anyone gets even half of them right. At first I was picking the ones that seemed kind of straight, but that can’t be a good strategy, considering how goofy people get when they try to invent what they think will be a saleable novel premise. So I switched my choices on a couple, looking for synopses that have a particularly naive “out there” feel to them.

But of course, the Evil Minions submitting fake synopses were presumably trying to create examples that had that feel . . . so who knows?

Like I said — this was hard!

(And John, I promise I’ll publish which five I contributed as soon as the contest is over! I can’t do it now, tho! lol)

Q1. Spitting Image
13. After a night of drunken stupor, Hal finds himself married to a girl who is identical to a ghostly figure from his childhood dreams.

Q2. Bad Ice
8. Stan Milburn, heist-man extraordinaire, gets more than he bargains for after he steals the cursed black diamonds of Calcutta.

Q3. The Heart of the Tengeri
6. Clarissa trusted rugged jungle guide Will to lead her through the Tengeri rainforest. Will her trust in the gentle stranger lead to danger? Or romance?

Q4. Little Girl Blue
2. When rookie cop Sarah Baxter is sent on her first undercover mission, she must catch the killer quickly… or miss her thirteenth birthday party.

Q5. The Whog Manual.
6. Space Pirate Verna’s newly-stolen starship is a special prototype about to plunge the reluctant thief into an adventure he never expected.

Q6. Commandment
3. Doctor Death, the self-proclaimed lord of crime, finally meets his nemesis: The Deity. Will Death bow to The Deity’s commandment — “Thou shalt not kill!”?

Q7. Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo
10. Pam moved to California envisioning the high life and true love. Dreams don’t  always come true, Pam learns, as she struggles to pay for bread.

Q8. Raise the Buried Dead
3. Nobody ever said voodoo was easy. But when Vance raises a trio of zombies, he finds that undead underlings are more trouble than they’re worth.

Q9. When Sid was Sid
1. Chapters alternate between past and present, as Margaret Divan describes life before and after she discovered her husband Sid, is a transsexual.

Q10. Dressed to Kill
10. A nightclub owner’s plan to have themed costume parties to attract business seems to be working — until she realizes the vampire “costumes” aren’t actually disguises.

Q11. Second Growth
12. A forest fire takes Mary’s family, and her sight. The power of nature can restore the woodlands, but can it give her back her happiness?

Q12. The Midnight Diaries
3. Two kids venture out every midnight to solve crime and help their mom get elected mayor, aided by GPS technology.

Q13. The Innocence of Evil
12. Only Macy Sanders knows that inmate Trey Mitchell doesn’t deserve lethal injection. He’s innocent. But Macy’s fiance knows nothing of Trey. Or of Macy’s past.

Q14. Heart of Desire
3. Vascular surgeon NICK loves JESSICA, but her ailing ticker may “do the newlyweds part.” Nick’s first wife once promised him her heart; is she Jessica’s genetic match?

Q15 Lack of Control
3. An alpha male CIA agent must battle his inner demons and protect a vital microchip from a beautiful and mysterious spy, or millions will die.

Q16. The Island and the Bell
6. Following a plane crash at sea, lone survivor Bob has only a silent bell, found in the wreckage of the plane, to keep him company.

Q17. Bad to the Bone
6. Custom motorcycle builder Danny Irons must prove he didn’t kill the man whose oil-soaked skeleton turns up buried behind his shop.

Q18. Portal to Murder
4. A detective and his attractive partner discover a string of murders caused by a mysterious portal that transports your soul to hell. Even if you’ve been good.

Q19. The Monster Within
7. Anna’s lycanthropy is under control–until she meets Jerome, who inspires all her best instincts and excites all her worst.

Q20. Soulscape
3. Danni knows she’s special. But now she’s involved with a treacherous voodoo priest, and must prove it–on the Soulscape, the realm of the dead.

UPDATE: I didn’t win :D

The Internet’s Cliff Clavin Conundrum

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Somebody once said that the World Wide Web is like the biggest library in the world — too bad all the books are on the floor.

That quote is from a long time ago in Internet years; improvements in search engine technology have made that library a lot easier to negotiate.

But apparently our techno overlords think we still have info needs they haven’t met. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) by Kevin Delaney reports on a new trend in in web search engine services: for a nominal fee, you can pose questions directly to other human beings.

The idea is that this will work better than typing in a bunch of keywords and hoping your question will be answered by some web page that sproings onto your screen.

After giving an overview of a couple of these services, Delaney looks at some questions and answers from Yahoo’s Answers.

The first example question he looks at is “What part of the body contains the most bones?”

Then he looks at the answers users had given to the question.

They are . . . wrong.

lol

Fortunately, the service uses a wikipedia-like self-correction mechanism — users can also vote on the answer selections, and assuming some votes are cast by people who know what they’re talking about, the most accurate answers will rise to the top.

Still, it touches on what is, for me, an intriguing question about the Internet as an information resource. How do you decide what to trust, when you don’t have a personal relationship with the person offering the information? When you meet someone face-to-face, you’re able to pick up all kinds of clues about his intelligence and character and whether he’s telling the truth.

Granted, con artists and their ilk can manipulate these clues to some degree. And even intelligent people with impeccable characters can give terrible advice.

But on the ‘net, we not only have con artists and intelligent bunglers. We also have zillions of other advice-givers, about whom we know absolutely nothing.

So how do we know, when we type a question, that we’re not about to get Cliff Clavin’ed?

Chunka chunka great big asteroid

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Scientists didn’t think it was possible to find pieces of large asteroids that have struck the Earth’s surface.

When a large impactor strikes the Earth, a colossal amount of heat is produced; and the asteroid material is believed to vaporise or fuse with the surrounding rocks. A 10-km-diameter impactor is thought to generate temperatures of between 1,700-14,000C.

But as reported by the BBC, chunks of asteroid have been discovered in a 145 million-year-old, 100 mile-wide crater in Africa.

I read po-tah-to . . .

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A couple of British researchers surveyed men and women about their reading habits and oh no! We read different things!

lol

The LA Times has bulleted some of the results (registration required). Here’s a couple:

* No male authors made the women’s top five, and no female authors made the men’s top five.

* Only four books made both top 20 lists.

You know what’s funny? Back (waaaay back) when I was an undergraduate and indulged in the conceit that being a writer meant being a literary writer, I assumed my audience would be male as well as female.

Now, I could care less about writing for men. No offense, men, I think you’re adorable but it’s complicated to communicate with you.

My dog training book probably appeals well to women, and my novels-in-progress are romances, so they skew to gal readers. Fortunately that means my writing is targeted at the largest market segment, in both cases.

But I’m thinking, it may be a bit trickier to do a commercially viable books if you’re a man . . . hmmmm. Unless of course you channel a Navaho & send your MS to Esquire. lol