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Make Your Online Writing Pay | Jane Friedman | Oct 10

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Learn how to become a better online writer and monetize your work

Starting Monday (Oct. 10), Jane Friedman is teaching a new online course—“Make Your Online (and social media) Pay” through MWW Ongoing—that helps you learn how to market and promote yourself through online writing—as well as what it takes to monetize your online work. It’s a 4-week course ($200) that’s suitable for all types of authors, especially those who want to develop a long-term strategy for their online platform and creative work.

REGISTER HERE!

This course is for both unpublished and published book authors who wonder what they could or should be doing to market and promote themselves through online writing—whether that’s blogging, guest blogging, micro-publishing through social media, or contributing to sites such as Medium, The Huffington Post and other large clearinghouses of content.

The challenge for most book writers is that they haven’t had any professional experience or training in writing short pieces (or even social media posts!) that are ultimately skimmed quickly in online environments—particularly mobile environments. Writers have heard that blogging, or producing content for social media sites, can be an effective way to build a readership, but don’t understand how that happens especially when they have no audience and are unpublished.

This course helps authors make themselves and their work more visible through strategically written online pieces that get distributed and marketed to the right audiences in order to develop their author platform and build a readership over the long-term of their careers.

This course is about making your online writing efforts, especially those with a marketing intent, have a measurable and meaningful payoff—whether for your website/blog, social media, or someone else’s site. We’ll look at content strategies, measurement tools, marketing and promotion tactics, and specific ways to make your online content put money in your pocket.

Week 1: Best Practices of Online Writing and Blogging

  • Welcome from Jane
  • A Big-Picture Preface Before We Begin
  • Basic Principles of Online Writing
  • Blogging Basics (is it for you?)
  • 7 Principles of Good (Professional) Blogging
  • Don’t Forget the Important Role of Your Website

Week 2: Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Week 3: Marketing and Promoting Your Blog or Online Writing

Week 4: Monetizing Your Blog or Website

Interview with blogger Erik Deckers

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Deckers, ErikErik Deckers is a professional blogger, whose column appears in several Indiana newspapers. He also is a travel writer, a ghost writer, public speaker, social media marketing pro, and a very funny man. (For a taste of Erik’s humor, visit his blog, laughing-stalk.blogspot.com.) In addition, he is president of the Indianapolis-based Professional Blog Service and co-author of Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself, No Bullshit Social Media, and The Owned Media Doctrine. Erik has been blogging since 1997 and encourages any writer interested in building a following to consider building an online presence through Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, but especially via a blog. According to Erik, an author’s blog is the hub of the personal brand — a home base where the authors’ readers can find them, get to know them, buy their books, and keep up with their new releases.

MWW committee member Janis Thornton was in touch with Erik and asked him to reveal a bit more about himself, his workshop, and what his blog workshop participants can expect.

MWW: Who should attend your class, and what sort of prerequisite web and social media experience will they need?

ED: The course is designed for anyone who wants to promote their writing and to build up their readership, whether you already have a blog or not. It helps if you at least know how to use a web browser, have one working finger (or one of those cool computer systems that tracks your eye movement), and understand the principles of social media.

I do recommend that you have a Twitter account, and if you want to get started early, set up a free blog at Blogger.com, WordPress.com, or Tumblr.com. Learn the basic mechanics of how to publish a blog post and embed a photo. Those things aren’t necessary to taking the class, but I won’t be discussing how to do it. They’re very easy to figure out though.

MWW: What do you say to writers who are hesitant to start their blog for fear they won’t maintain it?

ED:  DO IT NOW! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

Sorry, got carried away. That’s not what I say to writers.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting a blog and letting it fail. How many stories are unfinished on your laptop somewhere? You’re allowed to have those and, in fact, it’s almost encouraged because it means you’re working and trying to create. But how many stories are still in your brain because you’ve never started them because you’re afraid you won’t finish them? Don’t you regret having those untold, unrealized stories? I’d much rather start a story and not finish it, than never try it at all.

It’s the same with blogging: it’s perfectly okay to start a blog and then not update it very frequently. It’s perfectly okay to start a blog and let it die. It’s not okay to refuse to start because you’re afraid of failing. Remember, we’re writers. The whole point of writing — which is also our biggest fear — is taking a risk and sharing our ideas.

Your blog lets you do that. You’re not writing for posterity or to give the scholars something to study in 100 years (that’s what our notebooks are for). This is to share fun ideas, quirky thoughts, works in progress, notify people when your next book signing is, and so on. You can build your readership and fan base, and find out what your readers want from you.

MWW: What are some of your favorite author blogs and why?

ED:  I’m a very eclectic reader when it comes to author blogs. Ryan Brock and Metonymy Media (www.metonymymedia.com) is a good one. Ryan is a friend and competitor, and I love reading his outlook on how storytelling is the most important part of effective business writing. Doug Karr is another friend who writes a marketing technology blog (www.marketingtechblog.com); since my job is social media and content marketing, his is a big one for me. And I read Cathy Day’s Literary Citizenship blog regularly.

MWW: When did you first realize you could write well enough to make it your career?

ED:  I never actually realized I could write until I was 29. But I was that annoying guy in college who got A’s on papers he wrote in four hours. I just thought everyone could do that. Writing had always been a part of my work as a marketer, and I always wanted a job where writing was one of my responsibilities. But it wasn’t until I was 42 that I finally had my own business where writing was the sole activity of my career.

MWW: Besides writing books about blogging and social media marketing, you are a syndicated humor writer. Have you always been funny or is being funny a trait that even the humor-challenged writer can cultivate?

ED:  Ooh, nice segue into Friday! (I’m teaching a class on humor writing that day.)

I’ve always been funny, although throughout my life, not everyone realized it. But I learned I’m funniest when I write. So I’ve spent years and years, not just studying humor, but studying the psychology of humor. And thanks to the work of other humor thinkers and researchers — Dick Wolfsie, Victor Raskin, and even my dad, a psychology professor and humor researcher (no, really!) — I’ve managed to steal all the best information, and will be teaching it during Part II on Friday at the workshop.

Basically, humor has a formula, and if you can master this formula, you can write humor. Humor is not about jokes — the “two giraffes walk into a bar” kind of thing — but it’s about surprising your audience, getting them to recognize the elements of your joke, and even lying to them. And I will be sharing five of them on Friday.

MWW: What sorts of fun can your blogging workshop attendees look forward to?

ED:  I may or may not do any of the following:

* Tell jokes

* Have candy

* Tell the one big secret to successful blogging

* Tell dirty jokes (okay, I won’t do that)

* Tell a funny thing I know about Kelsey Timmerman

* Tell the story of how my knowledge of blogging got me fired from a job

* Give away a copy of my book.

MWW: Is there anything you would like to add?

ED:  My Friday session is called “Five Secrets to Writing Humor,” but I’m going to actually do six or seven, BECAUSE NO SCHEDULE CAN TELL ME HOW TO LIVE!

Sorry, I keep doing that shouting thing.  But still, six or seven secrets. (I’m just sayin’ …)

MWW: Thanks, Erik!

Erik is conducting an all-day intensive workshop called,Build Your Author Blog during Part I. The workshop is billed as part tech, part marketing, part writing; and judging from the sense of humor Erik reveals in his answers, it’s also bound to be 100 percent fun.

Erik will also deliver the Thursday evening opening keynote address.

Interview with author Patti Digh

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INTRODUCING PATTI DIGHDigh
“I can’t wait to meet Patti, whose most recent book, Creative is a Verb, is full of the author’s fascinating personal stories. Patti inspires readers to get in touch with their uniqueness,” commented MWW committee member Cathy Shouse. “It also offers hundreds of thought-provoking quotes from everyone from Malcolm Gladwell to C.S. Lewis.  I appreciate its refreshing reminder that along with instruction on craft we must learn to effectively tap into the creativity each one of us was born with.”Q: Your Thursday Intensive Session “From Blog to Book” is the first time MWW has offered such a topic. Give us a brief overview and timeline of how your blog turned into a book.

I started writing my blog, 37days.com, in January of 2005, as a response to my stepfather dying just 37 days after being diagnosed with lung cancer. I was asking myself one question: “What would I be doing if I only had 37 days to live?” and writing my stories down for my two daughters was one important answer to that question. Several years after I started writing it, a publisher approached me and asked if I was interested to make a book from 37days. That book, Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful and Live Intentionally, was published by Globe Pequot Press in 2008, and is illustrated exclusively by readers of my blog from around the world.

Q: Tell us a little about your background.

I got my undergraduate degree in English, with a focus on contemporary American literature, and my graduate degree in English and Art History, with a focus on the figure of the artist in fiction.

My graduate thesis was on William Gaddis’ masterpiece, The Recognitions, which I consider one of the great American novels (along with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove [yes, really], and Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing).

I imagined I would be an English professor somewhere, but I found myself in Washington, D.C., for 20 years after graduate school, in the business world.  The first book I co-authored was called a “business book of the year 2000” by Fortune magazine. A few years later, I wrote another well-regarded business book.

And then the death of my stepfather sent me on a much more personal path, and I haven’t looked back at that other business voice since. I am fully inhabiting my own voice now, and telling my own stories.

Q: When you started blogging, was your objective to get a book contract and if so, are there specific steps to make that happen?

Absolutely not, and I believe we fall prey to focusing on outcome and not on process far too often. My intention was singular: I wanted to write my stories down for my two daughters so they would know me as a person, and not just as a mom. I wanted to leave behind a record of my being-all of it, not just the tidy professional me, but the messy, confused, fearful parts too.

I had no audience in mind but them, and I believe this singularity of intention ultimately drew readers in great numbers to the blog, ironically. A friend teaches young actors and one of the first things he teaches them is that you can’t play two intentions on stage at the same time. For example, you can either warn Hamlet (if that is the part you are playing), or you can try to get the audience to love you, but you can’t do both and do them honestly. Writing for a book contract is a split intention. Write what it is you long to say instead. Focus on process-using your voice, saying what you long to say-and not on product. Focus on content, and not on form.

Q: Will your MWW Intensive Session be more technology oriented or writing oriented; in other words, what should people expect?

Writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. In general, writers spend more time talking about how to write or what to write or what keeps us from writing than we do actuDigh creative bookally writing. This intensive will take us into process. I’ll also share insider tips on product–what happens in that liminal space between blog and book? We’re going to look at intention, voice, and much more–by writing, by digging into both content and form.

Q: Anything quirky or unusual about yourself inquiring minds would want to know?

My childhood hero was Johnny Unitas (quarterback for the Baltimore Colts), I played Johnny Appleseed in my fourth grade play, one of my favorite recording artists is Johnny Cash, I have a slight obsession with Johnny Depp, and I’m married to a man named Johnny. There is a pattern here. I also love the smell of lavender, and I write a thank you note every morning. And mail it. And I love to laugh.