Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
Email marketing: the Holy Grail of book sales or Spamalot? by Anne R. Allen Email marketing is the only way to sell stuff online these days, we’re told. Get yourself an email address list and customers will beat a path to your buy page door, desperate to buy your deathless prose. Authors are abandoning blogging […]
Social Media Scams Part 1 is here. by Anne R. Allen Social media is big business these days. And wherever there’s money, you’ll find crooks, trolls, and scammers. Social media scams are lucrative cottage industries in some developing countries, where whole villages may be employed by click farms, con artists, and identity theft scams. So […]
Social Media Scams Part 1 by Anne R. Allen Everybody tells writers we must be on social media, but almost nobody mentions all the dangers we’re going to run into. There’s big money in social media these days. And wherever there’s money, you’ll find crooks, trolls, fraudsters, and scammers. Social media scams are big […]
by Anne R. Allen Piracy has become big business in the age of e-publishing. If your intellectual property is available on the Web—in ebooks, blog posts or other web content—chances are pretty good you’re going to be pirated at some point. If you have a Google Alert on your name and book titles […]
Meet the faculty, tour the campus and calculate the tuition of the University of Hard Knocks by Ruth Harris Scammers and con artists have been around publishing since writers were using chisels to carve words into stone tablets. They loot, cheat and steal. They’re the faculty of Hard Knocks U. and they are out […]
by Anne R. Allen Last week I talked about some of the writing scams that Ruth and I have heard about recently in my post 5 Scams that Target New Writers. Sometimes we’re contacted by the scammers themselves and sometimes we get questions from readers who aren’t sure if they should accept an offer […]
by Anne R. Allen Welcome to our new blog!! I hope you’ll find our new WordPress site is easier for comments and searches. Because we have a high-profile blog, a lot of people contact us because they want us to promote their services to our readers, usually through contests or deals. Sometimes these services are […]
by Anne R. Allen Should I pay to copyright my manuscript? Will a publisher or agent steal my plot from a query? How can I protect my ideas? We get asked these questions a lot. Until recently, our standard answer was: “Stop worrying about it. Your work is automatically copyrighted as soon as you type […]
by Anne R. Allen Internet spam! Everybody hates it, right? Not only is it annoying, but vigilante groups can be cruel in enforcing anti-spam rules. But here’s the thing: not everybody defines “spam” the same way. I thought I knew what was acceptable on social media. I know that it is social and shouldn’t be be used for direct […]
by Anne R. Allen The blogosphere has been full of debate about “traditional” vs. “indie” publishing since the dawn of the E-Age.We’ve also seen lively discussions about the definition of the terms.”Indie” once meant small independent publishers, but since the introduction of the ebook (and Kindle Direct Publishing) it has evolved to mean self-publishing […]
by Anne R. Allen We writers tend to be a delusional lot. Most of us know the average writer doesn’t make a bunch of money, but we secretly believe our own efforts will bring us fabulous fame and fortune. Or at least pay the rent. When we start out, we’re certain our books will […]
by Anne R. Allen Everybody tells authors we must use social media to have successful careers in the E-age, but nobody talks much about the dangers that lurk here. Here’s the thing: the Internet is still the wild frontier. And it’s so huge nobody’s quite sure how to police it. Big, loosely regulated social […]
by Anne R. Allen The Oxford dictionary says the word “anthology” comes from a Greek phrase meaning a collection of flowers. I love that image. An anthology is a place to display literary or musical works that have been chosen to work together—like a floral bouquet. I’ve had the privilege of contributing to […]
