Worderella Writes

Networking for Writers: Crit Partner Match

Hi all, I know I’m disrupting my posting schedule, but this is too cool to pass up. Zoe Winters, our guest blogger today, has clued me in on a new networking opportunity that is both fun and useful, too. It’s called Crit Partner Match, and the premise is that it’s like eHarmony.com or Match.com, but for writers looking for a critique partner. I’ve already set up a profile and am about to write my introduction in the Historical Fiction group.

So join us at http://critpartnermatch.ning.com/. I hope to see you there, no matter your genre!

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Share and Share Alike

Writers are sharing a lot with each other this week. There are great things happening and I want you to be a part of it. In this post I’ll talk about J.A. Konrath’s free e-book that guides newbie authors on publishing, remind you about a great forum to reference when looking for agents and publishers, and advertise Lynn Viehl’s workshop where fellow authors and writers offer their knowledge in a week-long online convention.

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Villain Month

Since I cheated my usual schedule and made my real post yesterday about finishing First Draft B, I’m dedicating this post to a fellow writer-blogger, Eliza W, who’s dedicating her blog to a month of developing villains in fiction.

Jump over, take a look, join in!

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Self-Published Authors and Taxes

It turns out that if you’re self-published, you’re considered self-employed. If you’re self-employed, you need to report your income if you accept more than $400 a year for your services (as seen on the form, here).

So for you writers that are either self-published or vanity-published, here are some tax forms you might want to take a look at.

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Books on Display

I understand that other people don’t have the luxury or know-how to create a library in their closets. So, keeping in mind that I haven’t tried some of these products, nor am I receiving any sort of kickbacks for talking about them, here are a couple of really cool book display ideas that I found while searching online.

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“Gender Genie” saves the day

So about a week ago I read about an author who was having trouble with her hero’s voice… that is, she couldn’t seem to make him actually sound like a man. And then she remembered a great online tool created from an actual study in which some academics discovered men and women do, in fact, speak differently: The Gender Genie. They even came up with an algorithm that predicts whether the person speaking was a man or a woman.

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Good-bye to Miss Snark

I bring sad news! Miss Snark { http://misssnark.blogspot.com/ } is leaving us, though not without a prize: the archive of her blog, thus allowing us to search it at will so we can learn from the snarkiest of snarks. Miss Snark, if you don’t know, is an agent with a penchant for telling the truth, as brutally as possible. A form of tough love, if you will. I suggest you look at her snarkives (a.k.a. archives two years in the making) for guidelines on how to write a proper query (any of the submisions Crap-O-Meters will give you an excellent idea of what not to write to an agent).

So good-bye, Miss Snark. Do send my regards to Killer Yapp.

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Good-bye to POD-dy Mouth

I just wanted to mention the going of POD-dy Mouth. She had a wonderful experiment of finding self-published print-on-demad authors, reviewing them, and even coming up with a top list of books with the reward being that the winner of her Needle Competition would have a reading with a literary agency. She’s done a lot of good work these last two years trying to change the way the publishing industry looks at POD and self-publishing.

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Happy New Year, Get Studying

Happy New Year everyone! May your muse shine brightly this year.

Now to some business: for those of you who are interested in taking graduate-level courses, check out the following programs. Some of them are only a week long, but cram enough information to cover a year-long publishing internship/entry-level job. I suggest looking these over, especially if you’re thinking of self-publishing and doing it properly and well. Also, it looks great on your resume, and, I think, looks even better than saying you have a graduate degree in Creative Writing. The thing is, a creative writing degree is hard to sell unless you came from a prestigious school or had a well-known writer as your lecturer. Even so, having the degree only means you know the tricks–it says nothing about whether you can apply them or not. With a publishing degree, it shows you take the process of writing a book seriously. Your publishing house/agent/whomever knows that you understand the process and therefore know that even though they’re publishing the book, your marketing skills are absolutely key.

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Linking Squee

So, after updating the website with little things here and there, updating links, adding a nifty (and random) blockquote to the main page, among other things, I decided to do the exact thing most writers shouldn’t do: I googled myself. Well guess what? It turns out that one of the blogs that I read somehow found me! Word Nerd edited one of her journals to include other bloggers in a chain-blog with the subject “What five things would I like to do one day?” Because she went back to add people to the list, I never saw that I was added. But how exciting! Though, now I feel a little self-conscious.

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