3 secrets for copywriters and marketers

If you’re balking at getting into social media…just do it! There’s literally millions of people out there blogging and twittering away, and sharing great info, insights and experiences.

It’s become an excellent filtering system, with your ‘community’ leading you to the really good stuff.

For example, yesterday I took half an hour out of my day to browse through some of my favourite bloggers. Something always catches my eye and gives me the nudge I need!

Like this great article from Gary Bencivenga (one of his fabulous Bencivenga Bullets): 3 Secrets for Multiplying Your Productivity, Success, Income, and Personal Happiness as a Copywriter or Marketer.

Those three ’secrets’ are great stuff. I especially like the 80/20 rule, which I’ve heard a lot about but never really looked into it. 

But wait…there’s (so much) more! So dive in and enjoy!

elle

I’m chirping about… bird by bird

I’m reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at the moment. I can’t chirp on about this book enough. I feel like Anne’s been inside my head – and no, I don’t mean she’s found out my head’s full of feathers.

It was first published in the 1990s, but for me it’s like finding the mother-lode. I’ve had this book recommended to me so many times, but never got around to buying it.

But once I started reading it, it was pretty hard to put down. Especially because she tells it like it is, and she tells it funny. And I can never resist funny. So what’s the ‘bird by bird’ thing about? In her words:

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day…. he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

I can’t recommend it highly enough. Especially when it’s filled with encouraging things like this: “…it is fantasy to think that successful writers do not have these bored, defeated hours, these hours of deep insecurity when one feels as small and jumpy as a water bug”.

Because don’t we unpublished writers always think that getting published is the pinnacle – when apparently the second book is even harder? At least with the first one, you can take your time, learn your craft, enjoy the process. There are no expectations, no deadlines.

Then again, I work better to deadline. And those kind of expectations I can live with

Elle

A tough week…

I’ve been back for a week from my scriptwriting course in Melbourne, and it feels like the whole world’s gone mad!

The recession is really hitting close to home, with many of my friends losing their jobs this week…so I’m more concerned about how they’ll get by emotionally and financially, than debriefing about my course!

I guess it brings up all those ‘what if…?’ questions in us  - about getting through the tough times, paying the bills that keep the roof over our heads, putting food in our bellies.

I remember back in the early eighties, trying to find a job. I’d get out of bed at six, race down to the newsagent and buy a paper, sit there scanning and circling jobs, then hit the payphone on the corner and start dialling.

Yes, this was before mobile phones and email – and in a sharehouse, who could afford a landline? (And no, I wasn’t around when dinosaurs walked the Earth!!).

It was like calling a radio station competition when the prize was a million $$. If you actually got through to the number, it was likely they’d already filled their interview quota.

I got ‘lucky’ after a week, got an interview, and got the job. It was harder getting the job than doing it!

Our kids don’t realise how lucky they’ve been over the last fifteen years, so maybe a little hardship will do them good too. They’ll certainly learn that leaving a job (by choice) in this economic climate isn’t a good idea.

Which raises a whole lot of questions about following your dreams. Maybe that’s why so many of our parents, many of whom lived through The Depression, never really had the job-satisfaction-or-die mindset. It was more about food on the table, clothes on your back, enough to scrape by on.

And maybe this recession will help us all get back some balance. Maybe we’ll work out the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’.  Clive Hamilton talks about this in his book Affluenza - one of my favourite non-fic reads in recent times.

I reckon we’ll be okay. Even if sometimes, a week can seem like a lifetime and you get to Friday feeling like crap…

Elle x

Writing resolutions

It’s the first day of the new year and I will definitely be counting my blog contribution as part of the day’s word count. Why? Well really, it’s a difficult day, filled with so much hope, so many resolutions and not a few expectations. And what a disaster if we fail at fulfilling our resolutions on the very first day? Tragic.

That said, I have pulled out my trusty, dog-eared copy of Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a writer. First published in 1934, the book is one of those gems you come to rely on as a writer… just to remind yourself that it’s about the writing and not some magical process the novel writing fairies forgot to tell you about. Brande recommends writing every day and training yourself to write when required, instead of waiting for the muse. Perhaps this is where blogging can actually be a writer’s tool, rather than the inanity Doris Lessing suggests it can become. If a blog can get us writing every day, can make us think more about the writing than the potential audience (because for all the people passing their days reading blogs there are still an awful lot unread), can help us develop a habit that could improve our skills or just make us think a bit more, then isn’t it worth doing?

Well I’ll give it a go and see what happens.

Hopefully this month you’ll get to read a review of Simon Higgins Tomadachi. It’s published by Pulp Fiction Press and I was lucky enough to be given a copy last time I visited the fantastic Pulp Fiction bookstore. I also picked up the Uglies series while I was there, so perhaps I might write something on that for the few people left who haven’t heard of this great series by Scott Westerfeld.

Enough for today. I don’t want to peak too early. And I suppose I must write a bit of the novel if word count resolutions are to be met.

Good luck with all your resolutions, especially those involving word counts.

Sash.