blog a book

Round-Down: On Women Writers And the Fallout from ‘Confession’ in the Digital Age

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This post by Cathe Shubert originally appeared on Ploughshares on 9/22/15.

Social media is in the spotlight—or crosshairs, as it may be–in the literary landscape this week. Several articles and author interviews have touched upon both the benefits and the tremendous costs known to an author maintaining their online presence, none of them coming to a firm conclusion about whether it’s better to be Harper Lee or Hanya Yanagihara, Cheryl Strayed or Elena Ferrante when promoting a book. All of the attention being paid to how we market ourselves online has me asking: Does social media pose yet another disadvantage to women writers? Or is it a blessing that gives us easier access to mainstream audiences? Women are particularly vulnerable to the lure of public confession that the internet seems to demand—and they are most likely to be the ones to suffer fallout from it.

After Laura Bennett’s piece in Slate raised the question of whether publication of personal confessions is exploitative, The Guardian interviewed a variety of editors for outlets that often publish gone-viral first person essays. Curiously, all of these editors were themselves women and not all of them agreed on whether women were more likely to write confessionals than men.

 

Read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Should You Blog Your Novel?

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This post by Nina Amir originally appeared on How To Blog A Book on 7/1/14.

Many novelists feel intrigued by the idea of blogging a book. If they seek a traditional publishing deal, however, they usually have one major concern: If I blog my novel, will a publisher be interested in the manuscript? In fact, nonfiction writers have the same concern.

No matter what type of book you blog, this is a valid concern. For novelists, it’s a larger issue, though.

 

Previously Published Nonfiction Work and Traditional Publishers

Let me discuss nonfiction first. If you blog the first draft of your nonfiction book and then submit to a traditional publisher, that manuscript will be seen as previously published work. However, you will have 25 or 30 percent new content and an edited version to submit (if you follow the plan I propose here on the blog and in How to Blog a Book), so what you present is not identical to what can be found online. That makes the manuscript enticing to a publisher.

Plus, when you submit your work you offer statistics to prove the blog posts you published successfully test marketed your idea and created a platform for yourself, which means you now have a built-in readership for the book.

For these reasons—additional content, the difference in your manuscript, great stats, platform—the majority of publishers—not all—will not be put off by the fact that your manuscript technically is previously published. If your stats are good, they should be happy to publish your nonfiction book.

 

Click here to read the full post on How To Blog A Book.