Adding more fuel to the fiery debate of traditional publishing vs eBooks, Barnes and Noble announced on October 4, 2010 the launching of a uniquely individual publishing service called Pubit!, and this new publishing platform aimed at individual publishers and first time authors promises to bring smiles to the faces of anyone who wants to give publishing a try.

It is simple as heck to use, 3 steps, and features quick listings in the Barnes & Noble ebook library (the world’s largest with 1 over 1 million titles listed); 24 to 72 hours after title acceptance. There are no hidden fees as the bookseller has a clearly stated compensation schedule that is very competitive; for instance, all books published to sell between $.99 and $9.99 will reap a 70% return for the publisher of the content. Throw in the fact that the published result will be in ePub format, making your book readable on more devices than anything published at that other place.

Both Amazon (that other place) and Barnes and Noble (Pubit!) now have free publishing services and are showing no signs of letting up in the debate of traditional publishing vs eBooks.

Why should they?

Overall book sales have dropped in the previous two years, while one of the only gainers in the book publishing industry has been eBooks with a massive increase of 176% in 2009 alone.

The announcement of Pubit! Only accentuates the mega bookseller’s commitment to providing the whole book experience to the public. Theresa Horner, director, digital products, Barnes & Noble:

We’re delighted at the enthusiastic response we’ve received from thousands of independent writers and publishers who are eager to introduce their exciting works to a broader audience of readers,” said “The launch of our PubIt! platform further reinforces our long-standing commitment to authors and writers, and offers a significant opportunity to provide an even greater selection of reading material to our millions of customers.

The writing is on the wall. Print books are being forgotten about as the heavyweights of the publishing industry are moving the debate from traditional publishing vs. eBooks to Amazon eBooks vs  Barnes and Noble eBooks.

Maybe this will help traditional print hide and survive quite a bit longer…

© 2010, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

Halloween is here and we at Extreme Writing Now are going ghost hunting. Suit up and throw the switch on to the containment unit; we have ectoplasmic creatures to snare. That’s right; our next contest begins right about…NOW!

Deadlines

Jennifer is also a copywriter  for other writers, individuals, and businesses.  Her experience includes writing articles, website content, blog posts, newsletter content, press releases, sales letters, print flyers, and e-books.

Between now and midnight EST (-5 GMT) October 24^th, 2010, every member is invited to write a ghost story and post it here at EWN. Judging will be held between October 25^th and October 30^th with the winner announced on the EWNN radio show, October 31^st, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. EST (-5 GMT).

Entries

This will be a Flash Fiction contest with entries to be no more than 750 words and all ghost story themes (with the exception of explicit porn) will be accepted. Word count will be verified by the WordPress editor.

Select the category Writing Contests and sub-category Ghost Stories when you draft your post. For the duration of the contest, Contests will replace Authors Corner on the front page of the site.

All members are welcome to participate.

Winner

The winner will be determined a little different than other contests we have had in the past. For this contest, our own Jennifer Akers has graciously accepted an invite to judge all entries.

Up for grabs is a copy of Mickey Mills’ paranormal thriller, Haunting Injustice. Mickey will be the guest on our radio show on October 24^th, 2010.

If you are a member, join in on the fun. If you are not, what the heck are you waiting for? We’re free, we’re fun, and we’re delicious!

© 2010, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

Is happiness as compelling as fear? That’s what I wondered after last week’s exercise on remembering fear.

Like fear, happiness for me is best remembered in moments. It’s often fleeting, but oh so delicious. Contentment tends to be longer lasting, but happiness? That is when you experience a joy so profound that you suddenly realize that this moment is perfect. The heart swells, the stomach flutters, the eyes crinkle and you think, this is what life is for, these moments.

I had one of those moments recently. All three of my kids are home together for about a month, and soon they will all be dispersing. They were in the family room laughing and talking, remembering stories. I was in the kitchen and the sound of their laughter, their familiar voices, gave me a sudden explosion of happiness. All we have been through together, the ups and the downs, has led to this point and, for that moment, it was all good.

Maybe you disagree. Happiness is longer lasting for you. Happiness is a choice. You remember periods in your life when you were just really happy. Tell us about it.

When was the last time you were happy, really happy?

© 2010, kimmanleyort. All rights reserved.

One sure way to get repeat work from a client is to him/her feel good.  With most clients who are hiring freelance writers to provide web content, making them feel good means making them some cash.

That IS the reason they hired us in the first place, is it not?

Let’s face it, whatever we write for the Internet is sales copy, because sales copy is not just about selling a product; no we are trying to motivate readers’ emotions towards a positive movement in one direction. Whenever content attempts to be authoritative,  it is pitching.

As  hired guns, the freelancers’ job sometimes means that we are to provide content that will not only draw potential buyers into the marketing vehicle, but we need to direct them to the checkout lane. We could create a title that is just the right hook and content that builds an emotional crescendo in the reader, but we could still fail by blowing the trigger, or  Call To Action (CTA).

We’ve all seen those big neon yellow and/or orange banners that scream  words such as ‘Buy Now!‘ or ‘Don’t Miss Out!‘, those are CTA’s. In web content a CTA is most often ‘click here‘. But after writing content that is loaded with emotional benefit that greaes the potential buyer up so they can slide into the cart easier, why do we blow it with a typical ‘click here‘ or ‘act now‘?

We can increase the conversion rate of our content if we put just a wee bit of thought into our CTA. Think about this; content is typically talked about as having three distinct sections, Title, Content, and Call To Action. We are always trying to target a particular audience with the bait of the title, reel them in with content, and net them with the CTA. But, we often think that if the content is solid, the net is a mere after thought and we settle for any conversion rate.

We need to target the prospects with our CTA as well.

I own and operate an ecommerce retail store that sells biker leather apparel and accessories. My helmet pages were getting a lot of looks that were delivered from one of the store’s blogs, but the conversion rate was dismal.

To change this, I rewrote product reviews so that instead of the CTA being ‘Check out our fine selection of helmets here‘ to ‘Be legal and be free ~  strap on one of our radical DOT  half-helmets‘.  Knowing that most bikers have a thing about being free and rebellious towards helmets. So, half helmets are huge in states that require helmets, and all helt states require the lids to be DOT approved.

The conversion rate from those articles climbed 5 points. Huge! Especially when you consider that the effort spent was less than thirty minutes.

Imagine if we can make something like that happen for our clients. What would happen if we sold them content that out of the box outperformed what they already had published?

Open your mind and the possibilities will glow like fireflies in a jar.

© 2010, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

Of all the writing I do, I look forward to writing 55 word fiction most. Writing those short and restricted tales are a great challenge which often causes me to sweat, curse, and throw stuff until I get them to the point I feel satiated.

Add masochist to the things you have learned about me.

I mean, let’s be real, who else would find complete and utter pleasure in trying to write a complete story by using exactly 55 words, no more, no less? Could only be a pain for pleasure idiot like myself.

The 55 word story was conceived by the founder of the New Times newspaper of San Luis Obispo, California. Steve Moss ran a short story contest in 1987 based on the following restrictions:

• The story content had to total 55 words, not including the title
• The title could not exceed 7 words
• One or more characters
• Conflict
• Resolution
• Setting

My introduction of the format came in 2002 shortly after I joined a Flash Fiction workshop. All of my attempts at writing seemed to run on and on and on, so I joined the workshop in hopes to discipline myself in ways to trim trim the fat.

The format was suggested to me as my submissions were getting shorter with each exercise. So, I did a little research and started writing primarily 55 worders for the workshop.

I became an addict.

They are a blast to write because of the challenge. I’ll often take one, two, and even three days to perfect the story to my own liking. Imagine spending all that time writing, unwriting, scratching out, smiling, frowning, only to sit back to say “ahhhhhhhhh…”

There are benefits, other than the self gratifying pleasure, of writing in the micro-format. I can use the characters as foundations to flesh out for my character bank for one. The entire story gives me a ‘feel’ for my character and I can start asking deeper questions about them. Questions like “Why did he turn to opium?” and “What events in her life made her live where she does?”

Another really cool thing about 55 word fiction is that a 55 word story can be made into a 110 word story, then a 220 word story and so forth.  Before long, there is a fleshed out short story, novella, or even a novel.

By the way, I have yet to try that double the word count trick, but I’m itching to.

So tell me, have you tried the micro format of 55 word fiction? Did you like it?

© 2010, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

The last few weeks I’ve been horsing around with a new project which led me to write a lot of  SEO tutorials, only because SEO is a requirement to survive this tangled mess we have gotten ourselves into.

The Internet is crowded and we’re all yelling to be heard but the only ones that hear us when we yell are the ones who are close; our friends. Yet, we have something to say and we want thousands to hear it, damnit!

To be heard, we pay the concierge with keywords, back links, and link wheels to get our words to the booths that sit high above the dance floor. We hope those that sit in those lofty booths will give us a nod and a mention, because one word from those dudes and people will give us a look.

We can use every trick in the book to get thousands of visitors to our blogs, but can we deliver? Seriously, the simple truth about success on the Internet, or anywhere in life, is that we must satisfy a need. We must deliver the goods or we will lose all that we spent.

What is it we must deliver? A solution. We are all marketers trying to service a niche were people are clamoring for relief from some problem. Products, ideas, knowledge, or good old fashioned entertainment, we are all selling something. If we’re good, we get repeat customers. If not, we’ll be kicked to the curb quicker than a homeless chick after a date.

That is the measure of success in life. When we advertise and try to deliver, do people come back on their own? Do they bring a friend the next time?

Sound SEO  practice will deliver sheep, but good solid content will always feed them the sweetest of meals. It is a difficult juggling act, but if we take a good look at a lot of the SEO tools as not part of a separate task of blogging, but as agents of freedom, we can find that writing content is getting to be more like writing than advertising.

If you’re not familiar with some of the tools available to you in your blogs, look around, dig into them. But don’t look at them from the pure Internet geek angle, look at them with your writing heart in mind. If you can do this, you’ll get ears delivered to you AND get them to come back time and time again.

© 2009, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

© 2009, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

From The New York Times

The Pentagon may have helped invent the Internet, but these days it is vigorously debating just how to use the Web.

In the coming month, the Defense Department, citing growing concerns about cybersecurity, plans to issue a new policy on social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

People familiar with the department’s review expect it will set limits on who can access networking sites from their unsecure military computers. A public information officer, for instance, probably could; a cook on an aircraft carrier might not.

(The Defense Department also maintains a secure network for classified documents that does not use the public Internet.)

The debate is fueled by the increasing number of grunts who use blogs and social media to communicate with friends, family and the world beyond their wire. But it comes, paradoxically, at a time when the Defense Department itself is increasingly using social media for official purposes, including public relations, recruiting and policymaking.

Some examples can be found here, here, here, here and here.

The military has long had a complicated relationship with the Web, in all its freewheeling, nonhierarchical glory. Blogs since the start of the Iraq war have been censored or shut down by commanders worried about security leaks, or poor decorum.

Last year, a popular blog called Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal was taken offline after the author satirized a commanding officer’s attempts to pressure him into taking an unwanted promotion. And in 2007, the Army issued rules requiring troops to submit blog posts and other Web writings for review, a move that was widely viewed as an onerous clampdown on front-line bloggers.

But some bloggers, like Jean Paul Borda, a reservist who has done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, said that scrutiny varies widely from commander to commander and that troops who avoid discussing sensitive material are usually left alone.

“I had the full support of my chain of command,” said Mr. Borda, who created a Web site called milblogging.com that includes an index to more than 2,400 military-related blogs.

In Vietnam, letters home were often censored. But in the Civil War, they typically were not, and many of those letters were printed in hometown newspapers, providing front-line correspondence for papers that could not afford to send reporters into battle.

Military blogs and other social media serve much the same purpose today, said Terry L. Beckenbaugh, who teaches history at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Matthew Currier Burden, a former Army intelligence officer who started one of the earliest military blogs, BlackFive.net said that military blogs have expanded and diversified, with sites by and for almost every group: parents and spouses, veterans, analysts and troops with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Blogs by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to come and go, thriving and withering with each deployment. Examples can be found here, here and here.

“It’s been a long fight to convince” commanders of the usefulness of the Web, said Mr. Burden, who wrote a book on military blogs titled, “The Blog of War.” “My tenet is: If you restrict it to much, the only ones blogging will be the ones who don’t care about the rules.”

© 2009, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

Lucky’s green cap and jacket helped him blend into the canopy as he scanned the forest with his binoculars. A menacing smile played across his face when he spied the iron pot.

Snap! He looked in the direction of the sound.

He saw the urchins. Good, he thought.

He watched as they jumped at the pot of yellow moons, pink hearts, and green clovers. He saw the earth swallow them and the pot.

Lucky shimmied down the tree and scurried to the edge of the pit. Looking to the bottom of the hole, he saw two sets of frightened eyes that seemed to be pleading for help.

“You two ne’r do wells had better get yer fill of me Lucky Charms. My friends seem a bit frisky.” He sneered as he pointed a crooked finger towards five vipers that were making their way towards the children.

With an evil laugh he turned and skipped through the forest, seeking the Silly Rabbit to boast about his triumph.

© 2009, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

All righty now. That last list, Ten Things A Freelance Writer Doesn’t Need, was so much fun, I thought I’d come back with another. Only this time, I am r-e-a-l-l-l-l-l-y gonna try your sense of humor.

Freelance writers live an pathetic existence in that we really don’t get much free time. Myself, I find the biggest diversion of the day by going around the island in the kitchen to get to the coffee pot, as opposed to making that straight path. Why just the other day, I found a missing poker chip, or I thought it was until I bit into it pretending it was a cucumber slice. It may as well have been that poker chip; it tasted like it had been AWOL as long as the poker chip, which was about four months.

Where was I? Oh yeah….diversions. What is it we freelancers do with all of our free time? I know you’re dieing to find out, so without further delay, I give you the top ten things writers do in the spare time:

We DO party hard, don’t we?

© 2009, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.