The appeal of the Internet, for me, has always been that I had unrivaled access to people and information all over the world. Want to know what's going on halfway around the world? Go there - virtually. Want to send a quick note to your brother, cousin, uncle or childhood friend, but don't have any stamps? Want to take college classes, get a recipe, or find other writing mothers?
You get the idea. So in all of my 11 glorious years on the Internet, I never thought about meeting online the people I might bump into at the grocery store.
Until recently, when a local entertainment columnist wrote about Tweet-Ups. "Hey," I thought to myself. "I'm on Twitter. She's on Twitter... Who else might be on Twitter?"
And this matters because I've been thinking of focusing my writing efforts more locally. My local clients are GREAT to work with, so I reason that having more like them would be a good thing. But walking up to someone and introducing myself in real life is a bit more problematic than it is online. Meeting another local person on the World Wide Web is like meeting another American in a foreign country. Instant comaraderie.
And truth be told, I probably wouldn't meet these folks around town. We don't run in the same circles. (My circle is the one that goes from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen.) The vast majority of people I have found who share my city as well as the Internet are in either journalism or tech. They're also a mite younger, I suspect. Yesterday I read a Tweet from someone local that said "What do senior citizens have to do online? Geneology?"
LOL and ROFL.
I have yet to see whether friending local folks will yield any real results in terms of local business, but it has led me to discover some great local content, and make a few connections I wouldn't have otherwise made.
What about you? Do you frequent your local WWW sites? Have you made any new connections with people in your own city? Am I the only one who hasn't thought of this yet? :)
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Why didn't I think of this sooner? Going local.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Notes from an Accidental Humorist by Judy Gruen
Happy Sunday Mamas! Today we have a great essay by Judy Gruen about how to market yourself in a niche ... in her case, the humor (or as Kai and I would say, humour) market. This is a favorite (or as Kai and I... oh nevermind..) topic of mine since I've written a LOT in my niche market. And I tell every new writer I can get my hands on to specialize and corner a niche market... So, without further blabber from moi... heeeere's Judy!
When an editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner called to tell me she was buying my essay, “Fear of Fat: Don’t Let It Make You Skinny,” I didn’t try to act cool – I shouted "Yippee!" right into the phone. I was only 22 years old, and this was my first freelance sale. Not only had I earned fifty whole bucks (in the mid-1980s, this was only paltry, but not laughable), I had broken into the newspaper business, or so I thought.
What was really happening was quite different, though I wouldn’t realize it for years. This first sale, and the several that followed, were paving a foundation for my career as a humor writer. The Herald-Examiner, at the time the scrappy underdog daily paper in L.A., bought a few more of my pieces, and then I sold a few to the Chicago Tribune when I lived in that city during grad school in journalism. Inspiration struck quickly, as native Chicagoans kept asking me in disbelief, “Are you sure you’re from LA? You’re so . . . normal!” Apparently, they expected native Angelenos to have purple and blue hair that looked like it had been cut by a 4-year-old who’d been mainlining sugar all morning. I was no different than any other essayist: I recycled as many of my life's experiences as possible into humor fodder: When a boyfriend jilted me, for example, I skewered his metrosexual habits, such as sending his jeans to the dry cleaner and stuffing shoe trees into his sneakers, in the Chicago Tribune. (That was fun.)
Though I kept selling humor pieces, the very idea of trying to become a professional humorist seemed absurd. After all, how many Erma Bombecks could one country support? No, I was a practical gal, and my day job for years was writing and editing for health care publications, both at a major research university and later, at a health care corporation. I loved my job. It was interesting. It was relevant. It paid.
But several years later, after I had left my job and worked at home as mom to four children, there was simply too much hilarious material to ignore, so I wrote my first book, “Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy.” Then, when I hunkered down to do the hard, gritty work of marketing the book, I realized I had to market myself as a humorist. That’s when I realized my career focused had changed, perhaps for good.
It’s hard to market yourself in a limited niche, and the key thing I’ve learned after working at this for seven years is that you have to keep searching for your audience, the people who will relate to your voice. For years, I avoided marketing my work to Jewish publications, even though I’m Jewish, since I didn’t want to limit my audience, nor did I want to be pegged as solely a “Jewish writer.” But over time, editors of Jewish publications and web sites started coming to me – they had heard my voice and recognized it in the pieces I had sold to them. In the past two years, I’ve become a regular humor columnist for two Jewish print magazines, the “Jewlarious” section of the web site aish.com, and started podcasting my program, "Just Off My Noodle," on the web site of a national Jewish organization. I no longer shy away from writing about this aspect of my life, as it actually widens my audience, and I can almost always adapt my work written for these outlets into more generic humor, such as for my blog on MommaSaid.net, for my email newsletter subscribers, and other media outlets.
If you are writing for a limited market, you’ve got to love what you do and love your topic. If you aren’t getting pleasure from your work, rethink your writing emphasis. Finally, persevere and carry a thick skin. If you’ve been at this for more than 15 minutes you know editors will ignore you more often than they'll pay attention, but if you keep polishing your work and continue hunting for new, like-minded audiences, you can and will break through!
Judy Gruen’s latest book, The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement, has earned numerous publishing industry awards, including a Gold ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Silver “IPPY” from Independent Publisher, and a Bronze Benjamin Franklin award from the Independent Book Publishers Association. Her work has also appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, and many other media outlets. Read more of her work on www.judygruen.com.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Should books have content warnings?
The Internet is buzzing with the latest study showing that Americans aren’t reading books. Are we really that surprised? With the amount of written information thrown at us daily at via junk mail, E-mail, text messages, billboards and the Internet, who has the time to read books?
As writers, instead of asking why people aren’t reading our books, we should be asking ourselves this question: How we can encourage more people to read? As my writing instructor recently pointed out, our goal as writers shouldn’t be to simply put books on the shelves. We need to move those books into the hands of our readers. How do we do that? What is holding back our prospective readers?
I’ll go first. I got out of the habit of reading books in college. (So much for higher education!) Everything that I read was either assigned by my professors or touted as the latest and greatest self-help tome. I no longer read for pleasure; everything in my twenties was about self-improvement. If I wasn’t improving my mind, I was working on my soul. But I lost something along the way … the ability to escape into a novel, the ability to dream.
I’m not sure when I shook off my intense sense of drama and realized that it was okay to relax. Sometime in my thirties I set aside my self-help books and decided to read for fun. But it was hard. I discovered that the last time I actually read for fun, I had my school-assigned Scholastic book order form to help me out. I had no idea where to start. I didn’t even know in which section of the library to begin. And I suspect that I’m not the only one.
I propose that there should be a rating system for books, similar to the ones currently in use for movies, television, and music. This would save time for the harried prospective reader. If your new murder mystery was rated PG for violence, you wouldn’t have to worry about blood splatters and excessive gore keeping you up at night. You’d have the chance to brace yourself for a stream of expletives (and hide the book from your youngest child) when you bought the latest novel, R-rated for language, by that hilarious but highly irreverent humor columnist.
I realize that a book rating system could lead to an over-zealous societal backlash of book-banning or that certain books (and patrons) could be ostracized by placing them in a special “adult” section. But, handled properly, a book rating system might be worth it.
What do you think?
(Thanks for giving me a guest slot, Heather!)Friday, August 24, 2007
Hie Thee to the Internets
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