Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Two weeks ago, I posted a helpful piece from children’s author Sarah Allen about using Substack. A Substack newsletter is the trendiest way for authors to communicate with readers right now. But here I am, still blogging, with no newsletter, much less a fancy Substack one. In fact, this is my […]
by Anne R. Allen Happy New Year everybody! Yes, I’m back. Sort of. I won’t be posting every Sunday morning like clockwork the way I did for the fifteen years before I paused the blog last July. That rigid schedule was becoming a burden, and I’ve decided to unload some of my burdens this […]
by Anne R. Allen Yes, Ruth and I are taking a break. I’ve kept this blog going for fifteen years, posting every Sunday morning for most of that time, except the 5 months in 2020 when I was hospitalized. During that tough time, Ruth took the reins and kept the blog going with great […]
by Anne R. Allen For the past few years, authors have been urged to give up blogging for newsletters, especially using the trendy Substack. Substack encourages users to put their good content behind a paywall, so only elite readers have the privilege of reading the entire newsletter. I was going to write a whole post […]
by Anne R. Allen So you won NaNoWriMo! You had to skip Thanksgiving dinner with your brother-in-law’s fabulous spatchcocked turkey, and watching the game with your favorite cousins. Plus your houseplants died, your cat evaporated, and you still have your Halloween decorations up. Tip: Make some Santa hats for all your bats, witches and […]
by Anne R. Allen A lot of people hope to write a book when they retire. And that’s a great plan. Late blooming writers can do very well for themselves if they learn to write well and have something unique to say. Some writers who became successful authors in their later years were Laura Ingalls […]
Fragmenting Social Media Creates a Problem for Book Marketing By Anne R. Allen I know how it is: your readers started fading from Facebook all through 2022, disgusted by invasive advertising and slimy tactics that spy on your every move. They are also fed up by those bizarre, arbitrary algorithms that send you to Facebook […]
by Anne R. Allen So you have an author blog on your website, but you haven’t posted there for over a year, when your last book came out. Or maybe you started a blog a while ago, but nobody visited, so it’s just floating out there in cyberspace, collecting spam. It can seem pointless to […]
by Anne R. Allen Bad marketing is worse than none. And I’ve seen some breathtakingly bad marketing strategies recently. I assume authors are hiring cut-rate online marketers who have more experience selling real estate in Mumbai and knock-off designer sunglasses than books. Do I need to say this is a bad idea? Being annoying may […]
Blogging is a great way to build platform by Anne R. Allen I started this blog on March 13th, 2009. It was Friday the 13th. Obviously I have a need to tempt fate. I knew pretty much nothing about blogging. I simply wanted a place to put the unpublished columns I had written for Inkwell […]
by Anne R. Allen When a writer complains that everybody in traditional publishing is crooked, or that the whole industry is rigged against new writers, you can usually be sure the author’s manuscript needs work. But it could also be that he doesn’t know how to write a query. I know some excellent writers who […]
An author blog gets Google’s attention by Anne R. Allen Should all authors blog? Of course not. We’re all different and we write for different audiences. There are lots of ways to establish an online presence. Anne Rice does a good deal of publicity from her Facebook page, and Stephen King is big on Twitter. […]
When those “dreams come true” are publishing scams… by Anne R. Allen Because I have a lot of articles out there on publishing scams, I get frequent messages from writers who fear they’ve been ensnared by a scammer. I hear even more often from their friends. These friends or relatives see something iffy going on, […]
