Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Ooops. I seem to have missed my 10-year blogiversary! I posted my first attempt at blogging on Friday, March 13, 2009. Yes, Friday the 13th. Apparently I have a need to tempt fate. But I immediately lost the blog for about three months, and didn’t write my second post until June […]
The dying Google Plus. Will its demise affect you? by Anne R. Allen If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you probably know I’ve had something of a love-hate relationship with Google Plus. It was clunky and annoying, but I recommended it as a way to get blogposts noticed by the Google search […]
Good Web content attracts those search engine spiders. by Anne R. Allen These days, pretty much all writers need to learn to write Web content. Yes, even if you’re a Victorian romance author whose readers care more about reticules and spatterdashers than retweets and SEO. Even if you don’t have your own blog. Any website […]
Guest Blogging: learn to target the right blogs and write a good query by Anne R. Allen Most author marketing gurus will tell you that guest blogging is one of the best ways to promote your book. Beth Hayden wrote on Jane Friedman’s blog about the many ways guest blogging builds platform and sells books. […]
By Anne R. Allen. This week, Jane Friedman reports some bad news for new novelists who want to go the traditional publishing route. She says fiction markets are increasingly “more competitive and risk-averse due to continued dwindling sales.” And she tells us that agents and publishers are now combing queries looking for “authors who demonstrate they […]
I’m tired of book bloggers getting no respect. by Anne R. Allen The contempt some business people have for bloggers never ceases to amaze me. Every day I get emails demanding I do free work for companies that are obviously solvent enough to hire employees—so why do they imagine it’s okay to demand that bloggers […]
Aggression, greed, and paranoia do not enhance your author brand. by Anne R. Allen Recently there’s been a bizarre drama going on in the book world. It’s been given the name #cockygate, because it involves a cocky author who managed to trademark the word “cocky” in a deluded attempt to eliminate the “competition” and “protect” […]
It turns out authors make lots of website mistakes. by Gill Andrews You didn’t sign up for this. Writing and sharing your ideas with others – sure. But this website thing? You just wanted more people to read your stories. But now you spend hours agonizing over blog post topics, looking for free images, and […]
An Author Blog is still one of the best ways to build platform By Anne R. Allen If you tell your non-writing friends you’re thinking of starting an author blog, you’ll probably hear some noise about how blogging is “totally over.” People have been pronouncing the demise of blogging for a decade. Google “blogging is […]
The Author Blog: Easy Blogging for Busy Authors is here! by Anne R. Allen I’ve made some spectacular blunders in my blogging career. But since we learn from our mistakes, I’ve got a boatload of information now. As Ruth and I say: “We made the mistakes so you don’t have to.” The worst decision I […]
Popups proliferate like Tribbles, but they’re not as cute. by Anne R. Allen Studies tell us the popup is the most hated form of marketing on the Web. A popup is the contemporary version of those phone calls that used to interrupt your life just as you were sitting down to a family dinner. The […]
An author blog is the best way to build your writer’s platform by Anne R. Allen Some people have been saying blogging is dead for a while now. But for authors, it’s anything but. On a recent list of the most overrated marketing strategies, blogging was close to the bottom. Only 6% of marketers thought it […]
Blogging can open up many career paths for writers by Anne R. Allen Most people who choose a career in writing first imagine ourselves as novelists or memoirists, not nonfiction writers. But these days, writers, even novelists, can’t just write books. We need to start “A Multi-Media Author Business.” And that involves writing a lot of […]
