web stuff 4 writers

What is a blog carnival?

A blog carnival is a type of blogging event. One blogger (the carnival organiser) will name a topic, and call for others to write blog entries on that topic and send in their links.

Once submissions close, the organiser publishes an entry with a description of the carnival and a list of links. You can see this in action at a post called ‘Writers from across the blogosphere’ over at The Writer’s Block blog.

Why should I submit entries to a blog carnival?

First a disclaimer: blog carnivals are another topic that’s new to me. However, after researching them for this entry, I’ve decided to take part in a few over the next month and will write a follow up post once I’ve seen the results.

For now, I can say that blog carnivals look like a good way to publicise your blog and drive traffic to your site – both from other carnival participants and from other readers who chance upon the list of links.

It also seems to be a good way to discover other writers who have similar interests to you.

In his post about how he became an A-list blogger, Scott Allen writes that he ‘can’t say enough about the value of blog carnivals.’ He suggests that in any given week, a blogger should be able to find at least five carnivals to which they can submit a recent post.

Where can I find open blog carnivals to join?

The Blog Carnival website provides a list of carnivals, which can be sorted by category (eg. writers) or searched by keyword.

Your thoughts

Have you participated in a blog carnival? Did you find that you had more visitors to your site as a result?

Tags: What is? by Natasha
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What is Bookcrossing.com?

Bookcrossing.com is a book sharing website.  Members register their books on the site, then leave them in the wild (on park benches, in coffee shops, in trees and so on) for others to find, or pass them on to another read through organised bookrings.  Each new reader writes a journal entry about the book, so that previous readers can track its journey.

How writers can use Bookcrossing.com

I’ve been a member of the site for about four years now, and – through finding books in the wild and through bookrings – I’ve been introduced to authors and works that I might have otherwise missed.  Though the Bookcrossing.com monthly meetups, I’ve also met a number of fellow readers, in Melbourne when I lived there, then in Wellington, and recently in London. 

There may be people out there who’ll argue with me, but I believe that reading and talking about what you’re reading is of great benefit to a writer.  And by following the journal entries of the books I’ve read, I’ve been able to see what does and doesn’t appeal to certain readers.

Earlier this year, I also set up two bookrings for my novel Lessons to Learn: one for Bookcrossing members in Europe and North America, the other for members in Australia and New Zealand.  On the day after the launch, I mailed the copies to the first participants.  The feedback has been mixed: some have enthused, some have been indifferent – but it’s feedback either way and it has been interesting to see what each reader has picked up on. 

Does Bookcrossing.com hurt book sales?  No more, I’d argue, than libraries do.  Perhaps less.  After all, I have been know to buy extra copies of my favourite books so I can share them with others through Bookcrossing.com  On the Bookcrossing.com forums, this topic is discussed further in a thread called Authors and Bookcrossing.

Your thoughts

What are your thoughts on book-swapping websites such as Bookcrossing?  Are you a member of any?

Tags: What is? by Natasha
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In Saturday’s entry, while writing about about blog tours, I mentioned touring writer, Trish Milburn and added a link to her website. This morning, I received a notification that Trish had commented on that entry. There are millions of blogs out there. There are millions of entries posted each day. How did she find out about mine?

She received a Google alert.

What are Google alerts?

Google alerts are email notifications that you receive when a certain term (which you have specified) is mentioned in a blog post, news story, web page, or Google group.

You can choose to receive these emails, once a day, once a week, or as soon as the term is discovered by Google.

How can writers use Google alerts?

Writers may wish to enter their own name, or the names of their books or websites, as a search term so they will receive an email whenever these are mentioned on the web. It’s worth noting though, that if you or your works have a common name, some of the results you receive may not be relevant.

If you blog or write articles about a niche topic, signing up for Google alerts related to your keywords, will also keep you up-to-date with what’s newsworthy in that area.

You can create your alerts by entering your email address and search terms at the Google alerts website.

Your thoughts

Do you use the Google alerts service? What ‘search terms’ have you specified? How relevant is the information that the service delivers?

Tags: What is? by Natasha
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What is facebook?

facebook is another social networking website, which allows its members to keep in touch with their friends and associates. Membership was originally restricted to university and college students, but in late 2006, use of the site was opened up to pretty much anyone with an email address.

To give you some idea of the site’s popularity and reach, I’d suggest you check out the BBC news article, 15 reasons why facebook may be worth $15bn.

How writers can use facebook

It’s probably fair to say that facebook is a more ‘closed’ website than some of its social networking competitors (such as Bebo or MySpace). To see most of the information, you need to be a logged-in member. To see someone’s profile – depending on the privacy settings on their account – you may need to be listed as their friend. Unfortunately this means I can’t provide links to content.

Instead, I’m going to provide a list of ways that writers could use facebook, by taking advantage of the basic tools and applications that are available to you as soon as you become a member.

• Add relevant links to your user profile. Under contact details in the profile editor, you can add a link to your writing website or blog. You can also use the posted items application to let your friends know when you’ve written an entry or found a website that you want to share.
• Join one of the writing related groups. Search for ‘writing’ using the groups application gave me 500+ results.
• Start your own group. As an alternative to an email list, you might want to start a facebook group about your writing. Then you can send messages to all the members of the group, share related videos or photos, and join in any discussion on the group’s message board.
• Advertise your event. Whether you want to promote a performance of one of your plays or the launch of a new book, you can make it an ‘event’ for it on facebook. You may wish to allow your friends to invite their friends, which will get the word out to a much wider audience.

There are also a number of ‘add-on’ applications which may be of use to writers. I’ll cover these in a later entry, but in the mean time, if you’ve got any other suggestions about how writers can use facebook or any opinions about the service in general, please leave a comment below.

Tags: What is? by Natasha
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What is RSS?

RSS stands for
Really Simple Syndication.

Syndication, according to dictionary.com, means ‘to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places’.

So, RSS is basically a way for a website to supply content which allows it be read from a number of different places. It’s kind of like podcasting for text.

A bit about feed readers

To read this post today, you might have typed www.webstuff4writers.com into your browser address bar. You might have clicked on a link from another website, or found it on a search engine.

Or you may not be visiting web stuff for writers at all. Instead, you may be reading my RSS feed remotely through a web service known as a feed reader.

If you’re reading this post through a feed reader, you won’t see the links on my side bar and you won’t see the comments that people have left – but you will see the text and images that make up the post.

Examples of popular online feed readers include Google Reader, Bloglines and Rojo.

Why subscribe to RSS feeds?

Feed readers save time because they bring the content to you. You can subscribe to a number of different feeds, from a number of different blogs, and read them all in your feed reader. You don’t need to go to the individual sites and check if there have been updates. If a new article has been posted on a blog you subscribe to, then your feed reader will let you know.

You can skim over articles that don’t interest you and – in many of the feed reader programs – highlight ones you want to follow up on.

How to subscribe to feeds

It’s not only blogs that offer feeds. Some of my favourite book-related periodicals, such as the Books section of the Guardian newpaper, also offer syndication of their news online. The Problogger jobs board offers a RSS feed of the latest blogging jobs.

As RSS becomes more widespread, more and more websites are offering an RSS service. You might notice that they mention the word ‘subscribe’ or display an icon like the one shown here. Clicking on the link will either give you the raw feed (this may look disturbingly code-y but all you need to do is to copy the link into the appropriate place in your feed reader) or take you through to a page which asks you which feed reader you’d like to use to subscribe to the feed.

If you’re interested, here’s the link for the webstuff 4 writers feed.

Your thoughts

Do you subscribe to any blogs/news services through a feed reader? If so, how has it affected your web reading habits?

Tags: What is? by Natasha
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A couple of weeks ago, Faye (yesterday’s interviewee) sent me an email about Bebo. I’d heard about Bebo. I figured it was just another social networking website, kind of like facebook or MySpace. Which it is. But what I didn’t realise until I received Faye’s email is that Bebo has a section dedicated to writers. This afternoon, I decided to check it out.

Authors on Bebo

If you click on the ‘Authors’ tab on Bebo, it’ll take you to a section of the site where you can browse published and un-published writings, via genres or Bebo’s book charts.

Visiting a book’s profile may allow you to read an extract, or – if you’re signed into your Bebo account – you can leave comments, write a review, or add yourself as the book’s ‘fan’.

Setting up a profile for your book or short story on Bebo

To set up a profile on Bebo for a book or short story you’ve written, click on the ‘Authors – Register You Book’ link in the authors section of the site. If you don’t have a personal Bebo profile, you’ll need to register for one of those as well (but, if you wish, you can change the privacy settings so that your personal profile can be only seen by those you’ve added as friends).

Once your personal profile has been configured, you can register your book or short story on the site, entering in its name, tag line, assigning it a category and entering a 1000 word description. For published books, you can also add a publisher and a ISBN number.

You’re then presented with a generic profile, which you can customise with the cover of your book ( click on ‘upload profile photo’). You can also add an extract (‘add a chapter’ under the ‘Read’ tab), set up a blog or a poll, and pick a more appropriate design for your profile (‘change skins’).

For an example of a Bebo book profile, check out Faye’s page for Cover the Mirrors.

Why use Bebo?

Bebo, like any social networking site, works best when you know a lot of other people who are using the service. I’ve set up a profile for Lessons to Learn but as I don’t currently have any Bebo friends, I’m not sure how anyone would find it (if they didn’t follow a link like the one I just provided).

Bebo’s one way to promote your book but, in my opinion, it doesn’t replace having your own blog or website. I couldn’t find a way to create a clickable link back to natashajudd.com from the front page of my Bebo profile, nor to any non-Bebo reviews, nor to an online store where Lessons is on sale – which kind of limits the routes your profile visitors can take to find out more about the book.

Still, I’m going to leave Lessons to Learn up there for a while at least, and see what happens.

If you’re interested in learning more about promoting your work and finding new readers on Bebo, you might want to check out this article from the Bebo author blog on how to be a great Bebo author.

Your thoughts

Do you have a Bebo account? If so, how useful has it been for you? Do/would you ever use a site like Bebo to discover new authors and writing?

Tags: Promotion, What is? by Natasha
6 Comments »

Last Friday night my friend and fellow writer, Caitlin, asked me which writing podcasts I listen to.  My answer: none.  I do have an iPod and I do listen to it while I’m working on websites, but at the moment, I tend to have music playing rather than podcasts.  This is a situation that should probably be remedied as, in the past, I’ve found podcasts to be a great source of online advice, information and entertainment.

What are podcasts?

Podcasts are basically digital audio files which you can download and listen to on a portable audio player (such as an iPod) or on your computer.  Like bloggers, podcasters often create a series of podcasts on a particular topic.  Subscribing to a podcast allows you to automatically download the latest podcast in the series.

While I’ve only ever used iTunes, there are a number of other software solutions out there which allow you to subscribe and listen to podcasts from your computer. 

The BBC Radio website also has a good overview of podcasting for beginners.

Where can I find lists of podcasts?

There are a number of podcast directory sites dispersed through the world wide web, including Podcast.net and Podcast Alley.  On these sites you can search for podcasts by genre or keyword.  Once you’ve found a podcast that you’d like to subscribe to, you copy its feed URL into your podcast software.  Then all you have to do is find time in your schedule to listen.

Your thoughts

Do you have any favourite writing-related podcasts?  Do you recommend an alternative podcasting client to iTunes?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Tags: What is? by Natasha
3 Comments »

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us is what’s known as a social bookmarking service. It’s a way to store links to selected websites and share them with others.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for about six months now, and I still want to pronounce it ‘del-dot-icio-dot-us’, but I’ve been told that the dots are silent and it should be pronounced as just ‘delicious’.

Why use del.icio.us?

There are other ways to bookmark a website. You can simply add it to your ‘Favourites’ if you use the Internet Explorer browser; ‘Bookmarks’ if you use Firefox.

So why bother using something like del.icio.us?

Firstly, having a del.icio.us account means that you can store these links online. And this means that you can access them from any computer (or at lease, any computer with an internet connection).

Unlike the bookmarks listings on browsers, del.icio.us also allows you to add ‘tags’ to your bookmarks. ‘Tags’ are keywords associated with a piece of information. For example, for my bookmark on the Guardian’s poetry workshop, I assigned the tags: workshop, writing, poetry, competitions, Guardian, UK.

Writers and del.icio.us

There are a number of ways that an online bookmarking service could be useful for writers. For me, these are the three main ones:

1. As a resource list: del.icio.us allows you to save and tag sites as you surf the web, so when you see a writing competition which you’d like to enter or a magazine you’d like to submit an article to, you can add it to your bookmarks and perhaps add the month of the deadline as a tag. Then later you can sort your list of saved opportunities by closing dates, etc.
2. As a research assistant: In the past, I’ve often found a website which has some useful information for a story or article I was writing, but haven’t bookmarked it. And then a week later, I haven’t been able to find it again. With del.icio.us, you could tag a website with ‘chapter 1’ or a character’s name and then be able to search your list of bookmarks for that information at a later date.
3. As an online portfolio: If you write for a lot of different websites, del.icio.us could allow you to build a list of links to your work. For some, this might be an efficient alternative to having a personal website or blog.

How do I get started with del.icio.us?

Basically you’ll need to register for an account, and then decide whether you’d rather add links to your list by visiting a website or installing a button on your browser. There’s more information on the del.icio.us website.

Your thoughts

If you’ve used del.icio.us or any other online bookmarking tool in the past, have you found it to be useful? Are there any other ways that you can see del.icio.us benefiting writers?

Tags: Research, What is? by Natasha
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What is BlogRush?

This is BlogRush.  You can currently find another, more clickable, version of it on my sidebar.  It’s a widget.  In the web world, a ‘widget’ is something that sits on your sidebar (or on other parts of your website) and does something.  There are widgets that create calendars and countdowns, widgets that keep track of who leaves the most comments on your blog, widgets that display random videos or Bible verses, and so on.

BlogRush is a widget that has been designed to increase your blog traffic.  The title-links that you see on my BlogRush widget here have been taken from the RSS feeds* of other blogs which are on similar topics to this one. 

* The BBC website has a simple explanation of RSS feeds.

From reading the FAQs on the BlogRush website, it seems that BlogRushers earn credits based on the traffic their own website gets.  The more credits you earn, the more frequently the titles of your blog posts appear as links on the BlogRush widget of others.  Extra credits can be earned by referring other bloggers to the service, as their site traffic is also counted on your account.

Advantages for writers

I only installed this widget yesterday, so I’m still experimenting with its features and potential.  However, I was pleased to find when I signed up that there was a ‘Writing & Literature’ category that I could choose for my blog.  This means:

1. My blog titles will appear on other blogs which have also been BlogRush-categorised as being about writing and literature.  Arguably visitors to those blogs will be more interested in reading another blog on a similar topic.
2. I’ve already whiled away a couple of hours by clicking on the links on my own BlogRush widget.  It seems that it’ll be a great way to find interesting writing and book related commentary and resources on the web, and to ‘meet’ other writers.

Interested?

You can sign up for BlogRush here.  Once you’re registered you will be given a piece of code which you need to cut and paste into to the appropriate place on your blog.  If you’ve got any questions about how to do this, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do to help.

Already have BlogRush installed?

What are your initial thoughts?  Have you seen an increase in visits to your website?  Can you see any other benefits for writers?

Tags: Blogging, What is? by Natasha
2 Comments »

In Wednesday’s post, I mentioned that one way people could sponsor Bianca’s novel writing was to donate via PayPal.  Today I’m following up with a post on what PayPal actually is and how it can be used by writers.

What is PayPal?

PayPal (www.paypal.com) is a website which allows money transfers to take place over the internet.  Having a PayPal account is kind of like having an online bank account.  You can ‘deposit’ funds and then use them to by goods and services.  Other users can also transfer money into your account.

It is free to set up and pay for purchases with a PayPal account, however there are transaction charges to withdraw funds and accept credit or debit card payments.

Paying for products and services with PayPal

It’s probably fair to say that most of the websites I buy things from regularly don’t accept payment by PayPal.  However, when I can use this service, it means that I don’t have to worry about submitting my credit card details directly to a supplier or about having the right currency for the transaction. 

It seems that online products and services, such as Skype and eBayare more likely to accept this type of payment.  So if you’re setting up a website to promote your writing for example, you may be able to pay for your domain name and hosting via PayPal.

Receiving money with PayPal

Perhaps more useful for writers is the ability to receive money through PayPal.  If you’re selling something via your website – such as an e-book (or a printed book), or even seeking sponsorship for your novel – you may wish to allow your site visitors to pay you via PayPal. 

If you are writing articles or other content for publications or websites based overseas, you may also be able to ask for payment into your PayPal account.  You can then transfer the money from PayPal into your local bank account, in your local currency, without the need to worry about receiving foreign cheques.  There is a list of supported currencies on their website.

Your thoughts

Have you used PayPal to send or receive money online?  Were you happy with the experience?

Tags: Funding, What is? by Natasha
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