The Fabulist Flash

Issue 151

by Gregory A. Kompes

In This Issue:

1. This Week
2. Five a Day for Writers
3. Writers & Internet Commerce
4. Rebecka Vigus takes the 18Q
5. About The Fabulist Flash

1. This Week

Transitions, that's what this week has been about. Over the weekend, my cell phone encountered a horrible laundry accident. I've never been a fan of cell phones, yet now I find I'm lost without one. It's not that I use my cell often, but that little metal object has become a security blanket, especially when I travel.

What I discovered, while trying to replace my almost two-year old phone that I got for free when I registered my cell service, is that it's nearly impossible. Or, rather, it's expensive to "just" get the phone. Cell service is akin to airline ticket purchases. No one pays the same price for the same services.

After researching options on line and visiting four brick and mortar cell stores I still had no phone and I needed one because I was leaving town for a few days. I don't think I even own a long distance card any more.

That's when I came back across T-Mobile. I'd had there service a number of years ago, but had to change. Well, I'm back. In the transition process I had to make a choice, so I abandoned my old cell number, choosing to start my cell phone revolution again from scratch. TM won my business back because of their exceptional customer service. It's that simple.

This got me thinking. In our get it quick age, it was the company who showed care and understanding to me that won.

While all of this was going on, I also decided to give Vonage a spin for my office phone service. It will save me money and they offer more options than my current provider.

If you've tried to call me this week and couldn't get me, well, it's phone transition time. The bottom line, for me anyway, is that excellent customer service wins over any other option. Knowing this, I'll be working on my own customer service skills to better serve my own clients, students, and editors.

Hope you're writing up a storm!

Gregory

Upcoming Events

September 4, 2007: Writerpreneur(tm) Course: Internet Tech: Building Your ACE Internet Self-Platform Platform with Gregory A. Kompes -- learn how build, brand, and expand your writing career using Internet Technology during this 10 week, interactive, online course. ONLY A FEW SEATS LEFT!

September 15, 2007: Writerpreneur(tm) Workshop: Write Your Book in 20 Minutes with Eva Shaw. Las Vegas, NV.

October 20, 2007: Internet Tech: Building Your ACE Internet Self-Promotion Platform with Gregory A. Kompes -- learn how build, brand, and expand your writing career using Internet Technology during this three hour seminar sponsored by NSA-Las Vegas.

2. Five a Day for Writers

Five a Day for Writers
by Julie Gray

I have close friend who told me recently that on days when he feels frustrated about his writing, he asks himself – what did I do today that will move my writing career forward? And he's usually surprised to find that he did a whole lot of things. Like so much of life, forward movement is incremental. To paraphrase somebody – most of life is spent standing in line for something. But if it weren't for the small steps, the larger picture can never come into focus. Writers are in some ways pointillist painters. Here are five areas of your writing life that might just collectively bring a writing career into focus.

Write Promote Network Learn Live well

That's right: WPNLL – pronounced – wipnill©

So consider adding the following to your daily regimen:

WRITE every day. You might have more than one project you're working on; tend to at least one of them. And yes, generating ideas and spitballing is most productive and falls under this category, absolutely.

PROMOTE your material. Write and send query letters, enter screenwriting or prose competitions, follow up on calls, meetings and queries. Stay very on top of who has your material, when you'll hear back and what new opportunities have since cropped up.

NETWORK both with other writers and with professionals where possible. If you belong to a message board about writing or screenwriting, visit it daily seeking to build relationships. If you blog or read blogs, visit and comment. Keep building those relationships. Are you signed up for a class? How about a one hour Learning Annex course? Perhaps there is a community film festival or book faire happening? Sign up. Continually seek opportunities large and small to create, sustain and nurture relationships with other writers and filmmaking aspirants of any stripe. Networking is a powerful tool. It's hard to overstate.

LEARN more about the craft and the business constantly. Follow the trades. If the Hollywood Reporter or Variety are too much to absorb regularly, read Entertainment Weekly – a quasi-trade with pull-quotes, box office and celebrity news. Subscribe to Creative Screenwriting, Script Magazine or Written By. Sign up for classes, read books and see a lot of movies. Prose writers should subscript to Poets & Writers or Writer's Digest.

LIVE WELL by taking care of your essential core. We writers are sensitive souls. Pouring our hearts out onto the page is what we do. So be sure to exercise, get enough sleep, meditate or in some way return to your creative, essential self so that you can sustain and nurture the energy required to do steps one through four above. This one cannot be overstated or over-emphasized either. A burnt out writer doesn't produce good material and isn't fun to hang around with. Put your wellbeing before all else because everything you produce flows outward from that.

Know that life is good and writing is joyful. If this feels like work – well, it should, there's no candy-coating that – but it shouldn't feel like drudgery. Remember, nothing worth having comes easily. Any writer who makes a living at it is one who has worked long and hard for the privilege.

Real life moves much more slowly than the stories or screenplays we write. Try it. Tackle just one task that is productive today. Maybe it's that you just read this. Maybe you went hiking and had a great idea and stopped to write it down. Creation is the highest form of human expression. Tend it well.

Write, Promote, Network, Learn and Live well daily. Wipnill©.

Side effects may include: productivity, career opportunities, dizziness and wealth.

About the Author
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Julie Gray is a mom, screenwriter and script analyst currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. www.thescriptwhisperer.com.

3. Writers & Internet Commerce

Why Writers Need to Know More about Internet Commerce
by Jo Ann LeQuang

Assuming that you are a writer, I am further assuming that you seek to earn money from your profession. This used to mean that you would try to think up an idea for an article, do some preliminary research, and then try to find a magazine or newspaper interested in that article. Then you'd write up a few paragraphs, prepare a dazzling query, and try to get an editor willing to buy your article. It was nail-biting work, too, because if you couldn't get an editor to say yes, you didn't make any money. Even if an editor looked on your project favorably, the pay was never very much and one article did not necessarily lead to another.

Tough way to make a living.

If you were lucky, you sold it. If you were not exactly unlucky, the editor rejected your idea but paid you to go out and write something else. And the most common response was a great big bunch of nothing. No response. No answer. No sale.

You have probably heard that a writer can make money on the Internet, but you're probably thinking, "How on earth is that possible?" After all, just about every job offer that comes to writers for Internet type stuff pays less than even a skinflint magazine editor would have paid ten years ago for the same material. The big difference is that the Internet publishers seeking writing support want their content virtually overnight and the old-fashioned editors did not mind giving you a few weeks.

There are two ways to make money on the Internet and they mirror the ways people make money in the brick-and-mortar business world. First, you can sell something. Whether it's ceiling fans or candles or airline tickets, you can make money if you have a product that you can trade to people for cash.

The other way you can make money online is by selling advertising. The best models for this include TV programs, magazines, and newspapers. Take a TV program; it's content that is offered for free to people who want to see it. A newspaper isn't exactly free, but it contains a lot of high-value content from around the world and it's offered at a very nominal fee (less than it costs to print it, I bet) to just about anyone who wants it. They'll even bring it to your house every morning! Who else will deliver for a product that does not even cost a dollar-for no extra shipping and handling fee?

Then there are magazines. They cost more but they're still a great buy considering the content you get, the articles, the pictures, and the sheer volume of printed pages.

So how do these enterprises make money? They do it by offering content that people want and then selling advertisement. TV shows make money because they sell some of their viewing time to advertisers who offer commercials. Newspapers and magazines do take in some subscription money, but the thing that keeps them in business is ad revenue.

And how do advertisers manage to survive? Smart businesses know the best opportunities for their particular type of advertisements. There's a whole science to that. If a well-placed smart commercial on a certain TV show increases sales, then everybody wins. The company earns money because the ad draws customers; the TV show earns money because it sells time (and eyeballs) to the advertiser.

You can build a website that features lots of top-quality content and then sell advertising on that site.

Now you can't just throw up any old site (and the operative word here is "throw up") and figure that advertising will work. You need a quality product. You also have to offer something of value.

That's where the good news comes in: you're a writer.

You can create your own online magazine of sorts. The goal is to attract people interested in the same subject to look at your site. There's a whole science to that, too. But if you do it right, people on your site may be interested in ads on related subjects.

The Internet is all about niches. Let's say you want to write about dogs. Bad idea. It's too broad for the Internet. With the Internet you have to think narrow. You could write about dog training. Or adopting poodles from the pound. Or photographing dogs.

The idea is that your highly targeted information will resonate with a particular subset of readers. With billions of Internet search a year, you don't need to have broad appeal to get a big audience.

Then you sell advertising. In the traditional paper-and-ink world, you would have to start cold calling and then visit potential customers and finally sold an ad, which often had to be revised several times (for free) before the customer agreed to pay. Then you had to hound them for payment.

On the Internet, you can sign up with search providers to put ads on your site. These ads (offered by the big search engines) use electronic algorithms to automatically match ads by content to your site so that your dog training site won't offer ads for gastric bypass surgery. You don't sell a single ad: you merely clear some room for Google or Yahoo to put ads on your site. They match the ads to your content.

In the print world of our ancient ancestors, an advertiser paid if his ad ran, regardless of whether anyone responded. Internet ads work on a different model; they run for free and the advertiser pays only when somebody clicks on them. This is what is meant when they say advertisers pay for clicks.

The good news is that you can find qualified advertisers and start generating ad revenues from a website pretty quickly without ever having direct contact with your advertisers.

You can also get advertisers the old-fashioned way by selling space on your site to individual vendors. Those arrangements are worked out individually.

Savvy Internet entrepreneurs can make money either selling products (including electronic products like e-books or online courses and now even online audios) or selling advertising or a bit of both. There are strategies for what to use and how, but those are the basics.

What does this mean for writers? Writers need to start thinking about what they write not just in terms of how to tell the story, but how to best position the content in the marketplace.

If you can set up a wholesale arrangement with local or even international vendors, you can sell products using a "shopping cart" type website, lots of photos, and some cool product descriptions.

If you have the expertise (or can get it) and can write about how to beat a speeding ticket, land a job working on a cruise ship, or sell your home without a real estate agent, you can write electronic content (e-book, e-course, other materials that are delivered online including audios and videos) and sell that.

First, of course, you have to understand how these kinds of enterprises actually function. Even some off-the-wall business angles are good to study, because the same principles always apply. You target a specific niche market, develop content to attract visitors, and then sell either advertising, products, or both.

About the Author
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Jo Ann LeQuang writes for a living. If you do, too, or if you'd like to, check out more of what she has to say at www.workingonlinewriter.com and www.workingtexaswriter.com.

4. Rebecka Vigus takes the 18Q

Educator, Writer, and Sometime Duchess,Rebecka Vigus, takes the 18Q.

1. Did you choose the writing profession or did it choose you?
A little bit of both. I have wanted to write since I was a teen. I've finally been able to do just that.

2. What is your background? (education, work, etc.)
I have a BS degree with a major in English/language/literature and Education. I also have a Masters degree in Reading with an endorsement in Learning Disabilities and advanced course work in Educational Leadership

3. When did you 'know' you were a writer?
As a teen, I started with poetry.

4. How would you describe your style of writing?
Succinct...to the point. Clear and direct

5. What is your writing process?
I do many character studies and as I do them I begin to fit my characters into roles. The plot evolves from there.

6. What was your path to publication?
Difficult. I self-published my first book all 50 copies. I found Infinity Publishing while networking at a conference. They have published all three of my books.

7. What is your favorite self-marketing idea?
I love the idea of book marks. One for each book. I am working on them now. A snippet about the book and my website.

8. What are the biggest surprises you've encountered as a writer?
The adrenalin rush when the characters take over and the book starts to write itself. The fact that I can write a good book in 22 days.

9. How do you inspire yourself? What are your sources of creativity?
Life inspires me. I think there are mysteries in the ordinary. People and what they do are a source of creativity.

10. What is your proudest writer moment?
Finishing the NaNoWriMo 50,000 word novel

11. What's the best advice you were given about writing?
Just keep at it. Don't give up.

12. What is your most embarrassing writer moment?
Being asked to write a poem on the spot and having my mind go blank.

13. What business challenges have you faced as a writer?
Getting myself known. Finding the best way to market my books.

14. What is your writer life philosophy?
If you can imagine it or dream it, then believe that you can write it and you will achieve what you set out to do.

15. When you're not writing what do you do for fun?
Read, crochet, hike, swim, spend time with my grandkids

16. Who do you like to read?
James Patterson, Patricia Cornwall, Mary Higgins Clark…the list is endless

17. What's your advice for new writers?
Keep writing. Do it daily. Find a group and share ideas.

18. What are you currently working on?
My second novel, another mystery as yet untitled.

Take the 18Q Today!
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Selected a Writer's Digest "101 Best Website" for 2007, the 18Q is a collection of writers sharing their experiences.

If you're a published author, take the 18Q Today!

5. About The Fabulist Flash

ISSN: 1554-0804

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