Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
Today we’re excited to be hosting freelance writer Nina Badzin. I’ve known Nina since she started blogging and it’s been fantastic to watch her career soar. Nina was a compelling blogger from the time she wrote her first post. It was obvious she had tons of talent and skill. And her “query addiction” post […]
by Anne R. Allen Most writers have been picturing it since we started scribbling ideas for our first novel. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel, the goal that keeps us slogging along, the Holy Grail of our writing journey— It’s your BIG BOOK LAUNCH PARTY!! We’ve watched the scene in so many […]
This Week Twitter rolled out its new “mute” function for mobile phones. Muting will soon be available on all devices including your PC. That means you’ll be able to mute anybody who tweets too often or annoys you with spam. So it will be more important than ever to avoid annoying your Tweeps. Here’s some […]
by Anne R. Allen I recently heard from a writer who said she felt disrespected by her writing group. They were all working on novels and memoir and didn’t take her short fiction work seriously.I saw another writer on Google Plus asking for help because his work kept coming in at around 40 pages—like that […]
by Anne R. Allen Publishing isn’t the only thing that’s being transformed by the digital age. Reading and writing themselves are evolving.We may not like it, but as writers, we need to be aware that our audience’s habits are changing. Last month I wrote about how to format your blog for easy skimming, and unfortunately, […]
Blog content is easy to write if you know a few tricks by Anne R. Allen You started a blog. Congratulations! But nobody’s reading it. Sigh. Don’t give in to despair. It takes a while to build a readership. Usually a long while. For the first six months I blogged, my followers consisted of my […]
by Anne R. Allen When I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the importance of commenting on blogs to raise your social media profile, I forgot to say one essential thing—probably because I figured it’s something your mom told you—but for those who’ve forgotten, here it is… If you don’t have anything nice to say, […]
Today’s guest post is from freelance writer Sarah Allen (no relation that we know of, but we do have a lot of things in common, including the agreement that Colin Firth is THE greatest Mr. Darcy, and a tendency to knee-weakness at the sight of Benedict Cumberbatch’s cheekbones). She is still in the query […]
by Anne R. Allen Writers know we need a “platform” these days. That means we need to be on Twitter and FaceBook and Google+ and LinkedIn and Pinterest and Tumblr and have a blog with a ton of followers and get 100s of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and drive ourselves batty keeping up […]
This week I’m totally jazzed to host my agent, Pam Van Hylckama Vlieg (aka Pam Howell) . She’s one of the new breed of agents at the cutting-edge literary agency, Foreword Literary, founded by “Agent Savant” Laurie McLean. Pam represents the book I wrote with Catherine Ryan Hyde, How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: […]
by Anne R. Allen Platform. It’s a scary word to a lot of authors. Some of us obsess too much about it and waste time on pointless overkill. (More about how to skip the time-wasting stuff in my post, 7 Ways Authors Waste Time Building Platform.) But others ignore it entirely, but that’s not smart. The […]
by Anne R. Allen We live in a speed-obsessed culture. Whatever it is we crave—cars, trains, electronics, food, dates—we want them ever-faster-and-furiouser. In fact, much of the developed world seems to be engaged some turbo-charged drag race of the soul, hurtling our frenzied selves from cradle to grave, terrified of slowing for even a […]
by Anne R. Allen Guest blogging is a great way for writers to improve visibility. Most host bloggers will allow you to link to your website and to your book “buy” pages, so the post can both improve your name recognition and sell books. It’s free advertising and boosts your search engine rank. Some authors […]
