|
|
E-Writer Issue #2 23 April 2004 http://www.nickdaws.co.uk E-mail: ewriter-at-nickdaws.co.uk "Hints, tips and tricks for wired-up writers" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >>> In This Issue <<< 1. Editorial - Thank You! 2. Opportunities: Google AdWords 3. Market Info: Anthologies 4. Article: Short Story Advice From Iain Pattison 1. Editorial - Thank You! First of all, a big thank you to everyone who has registered to receive E-Writer so far. Although you are still a small but select group, already there are subscribers from as far apart as Australia and Denmark, Lanzarote and the USA (not to mention Britain, of course!). So welcome, once again, to all of you! Thanks also to everyone who wrote with kind comments about the first issue (if you missed this, by the way, you can still view it by clicking here). I'm glad to hear that generally you liked what you saw. As I noted last time, I'd be delighted to receive feedback on E-Writer, and any requests for topics you would like covered or queries you'd like me to answer. Equally, if there is anything you'd like to see LESS of, I'd be grateful if you could let me know this as well! Please use the e-mail address at the top of this newsletter or on my website. One other point is that, if you would like to change the e-mail address to which your copy of E-Writer is sent, please first unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of any issue, then subscribe again using your new e-mail address at http://www.nickdaws.co.uk. Unfortunately my current mailing list service provider, YMLP, does not allow me to perform this task myself. I believe this is an anti-spam measure. 2. Opportunities: Google AdWords This is an example of the kind of opportunity for writers I hope to bring you regularly in E-Writer. Actually, I had planned to leave this one for another issue or two until the subscriber base had grown a bit more, but as you'll see there is a good reason for acting sooner rather than later. So what are Google AdWords? Well, if you use the Google search engine (http://www.google.com), you will probably have noticed that to the right of the main list of search results there is usually a list of short items under the heading 'Sponsored Links'. These are actually mini-advertisements. The advertisers bid a certain amount (say 20p or 30c) for one or more keywords or phrases. Every time someone performs a search which includes these words, the ad in question is displayed and the advertiser is charged the amount of their bid by Google. In general, the more you bid, the higher your advertisement will appear on the searcher's results page. So how is this relevant to writers? Well, these ads have to be very small: generally no more than a dozen words and a heading. No pictures or graphics are allowed, and neither is there any design input or programming. On the other hand, there ARE various rules about punctuation, repetition, capitalization, correct spelling and so on (which are clearly explained on the AdWords homepage). So this really is a writers medium! You can, of course, offer your services to advertisers wanting help with their AdWords campaigns - and this is indeed something that I do. However, what is really exciting is that you can make a so-called affiliate deal with a merchant and sell goods on their behalf using AdWords. Every time you make a sale through one of your AdWords ads, this will be tracked automatically and you will be paid a commission, e.g. 5 per cent of the value of the goods. As long as you make more in commission than you spend on AdWords, you will be earning a steady profit for no more than writing a few ads and doing a bit of simple administration! I first started trying this method last year in the run-up to Christmas. I applied for an affiliate deal with a well-known online merchant selling a wide range of consumer goods. Once I was approved (and almost everyone is) I simply looked at their 'best sellers' list and wrote ads for some of their top-selling items. I bid just enough to get my ads listed in 8th place or better (which ensures your ad appears in the first page of any search results). In the month leading up to Christmas I spent around 200 UKP ($300) in AdWords advertising and made over 600 UKP ($900) in commission - effectively tripling my investment. That's not a fortune, of course, but considering it was my first time and I approached the project with great caution, I was well pleased with the results I obtained. One thing which quite surprised me was that I found I was selling all sorts of stuff apart from the goods I was actually advertising. Having followed my link to (say) a camera or an electric toothbrush, some folk then went on to buy other things from the store as well - and I got paid commission on those sales too! This is obviously more likely to happen at Christmas, but that's not to say you can't make a profit at other times of the year as well. Getting started in this field isn't rocket science - if you read the Google AdWords guide at https://adwords.google.com/select/ it will tell you most of what you need to know. However, if you want to use this method to make money via affiliate schemes, it's useful to have something to guide you. An e-book which I read, and which I thoroughly recommend to others, is Google Cash by Chris Carpenter. Assuming no previous knowledge, Chris takes you step by step through signing up for an AdWords account, finding suitable merchants to promote, and writing and publishing your adverts. You can read all about Google Cash by visiting http://tinyurl.com/2xtga. And here's the other reason why I was so keen to bring this opportunity to your attention now. Google currently have a number of special offers of free advertising for new clients. Unfortunately I only have links to offers for UK clients, so if anyone knows of similar offers for people living elsewhere, I'd be very grateful if you could let me know (and I'll pass the info on in a future issue). Anyway, the links to sites offering fifty pound AdWords vouchers are as follows: http://www.google.co.uk/adwordsintro (expires 15 May) http://www.google.co.uk/adwordsfifty (expires 30 May) You can buy a lot of Google AdWords for fifty pounds ;-) Even if you don't want to use the affiliate marketing method to make money, you could use AdWords as a way of marketing your writing services. Again, I tried this for a few weeks last year. I was pleased to find that there is little competition for most of the relevant search terms (freelance writer, script writer, short story writer, and so on). I got a number of approaches from potential clients, and though none of them was quite right for me, I have no doubt that if I had persisted I would have got work this way. As it is, I suspended the campaign, as I was really too busy to take on anything else anyway. But if I go through a slack period in future, I would certainly try it again. 3. Market Info - Anthologies Here are details of a few anthologies seeking contributions which have crossed my desk recently, starting with one for any poets among you... Contributions are invited for 'Our School', a poetry anthology for children aged 7 to 11 to be published by Macmillan UK. The poems will explore every aspect of school life. The deadline for submissions is the end of July, and previously unpublished material is preferred. Fees will be competitive, for non- exclusive world rights. Contact the editor, Tony Bradman, on tbradman-at-dillythedinosaur.co.uk. (Replace the -at- with the usual @ sign). Mitzi Szereto is seeking erotic short stories of up to 7,000 words for a new, international anthology to be titled, 'La Petite Mort: Tales of Sex and Death'. Stories must be well written; explicitness is fine, crudeness is not. Mitzi says: 'Think poignant, poetic, humorous, bizarre, noir, gothic, visceral, transgressive, philosophical, surreal, and always always sexy.' The deadline is 1 October 2004. For more information, contact WordDabbler-at-yahoo.com. Fantastical Visions IV is both an anthology and a short story competition. The winning entries receive a cash prize (up to $150) and publication in the anthology, for which royalties are payable. Stories must fit broadly into the fantasy genre. The organisers say, '...basically keep the nature of the stories magical and not technological. A successful entry could be high fantasy with elves and powerful wizards, a supernatural thriller set in the modern day, a tale of magic in ancient Egypt, or any other form of fantasy.' Stories may be up to 10,000 words. The closing date is October 15 2004. There is no fee for single entries, though multiple entries do incur a small charge. For more information, including how to submit your story, see the website http://fantasistent.com/CONTESTS/StoryConRules.html. 4. Article: Short Story Advice From Iain Pattison Recently at the Lichfield & District Writers Group I was glad to have the opportunity to listen to an excellent talk by top short story writer Iain Pattison. So I thought I'd take the chance to pass on a few of his words of wisdom while they are still fresh in my mind. If you'll forgive a brief digression, I've known Iain for many years, going back to the pre-industrial era when we were both tutors for The Writers Bureau (http://www.writersbureau.com). Iain is a highly talented short story writer, though he told me after his talk that these days he actually makes more money from judging short story competitions than from writing! Anyway, as an experienced short story writer and competition judge, Iain is well worth listening to if you have any ambitions in this direction. Here are some of the main points he made... From reading many hundreds of stories submitted for competitions, Iain felt that many people had no joy in their writing. Many stories failed because they were too predictable, using the same old settings and scenarios. As a judge, he is looking for something different - a story with originality, pace, authenticity, and a sense of daring. These were a few of Iain's pet hates when he comes to read a short story submitted for a competition. - First person ('I') short stories - Competition entries are judged anonymously, so the judge won't know if a first person narrator is male or female. If you must do this, find a way of making their gender clear asap. - Ghost stories - It's almost impossible nowadays to come up with an original ghost story. Nobody will be surprised any more if one of the key characters turns out to be a ghost... - Children's stories - unless the competition is explicitly for this type of story. - Stories with no emotion - if your characters don't seem to care what is happening to them, the reader certainly won't. - 'Fairy godmother' endings - stories where everything is resolved by a bolt from the blue (a lottery win, a sudden and totally implausible change of mind by one of the characters, even the arrival of aliens in a flying saucer!). Characters should generally find a way to resolve their own problems. - Stories with talking babies, cars, toasters, etc. - Stories written from an animal's point of view. - Stories featuring weddings (Iain says if he reads a story based around a wedding, his first thought is that it must be a rejected magazine story!). Iain commented that many people fail to realise the fundamental difference between magazine and competition short stories. Magazine short stories (and by this I mean stories in popular, mainly women's magazines) are often somewhat formulaic, and the shorter ones generally rely heavily on a 'surprise' twist- ending. But this type of story is highly unlikely to win a short story competition, where originality and quality of writing are much more important. Incidentally, short stories are a particular interest of mine also, and I'll be talking more about them more in future issues of E-Writer. But this time I thought I'd let someone else offer the advice! Finally, if all this talk of short story competitions has whetted your appetite, you might like to check out the new BBC 'End of Story' competition. The 'twist' to this is that eight well-known authors have written the start of a short story and you have to go on and finish one of them in 1200 words or less. The competition closes on May 31. More info is available from the competition website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/endofstory/. Sorry, it's UK authors only for this one. That's it for this time. E-Writer will be with you again before too long (though not necessarily in a fortnight!). Happy writing, Nick ---------------------------------------------------------------- Advertisement Nick Daws' course 'Write Any Book In Under 28 Days' takes you through every stage of writing a book, from getting the original idea through to editing the completed manuscript, all in the shortest possible time. Read a lengthy extract from the course at http://www.nickdaws.co.uk/writeany.htm, then click through to the publisher's website to read some of the many testimonials! Return to E-Writer Archive Page |