Many authors simply dismiss Twitter. They imagine Brooklynites and Los Angelinos strolling city streets while on their smartphones punching tiny keyboards. If the demographics of your book’s readers don’t match those who use Twitter, why bother? No one seems interested in tweeting what they ate for lunch, where they went shopping, or the funny thing their kid said. How can you say anything meaningful or… [Read More]
In 1953 Walter Cronkite anchored the first episode of You Are There with a reenactment of the Hindenberg. The early days of CBS news embraced a style grounded in reporting events based on eyewitness accounts, authoritative sources, and observational methods and packaging them into a story. After the end of WWII, CBS deployed the news editorial talents of Edward R. Murrow, Eric Severaid, and the… [Read More]
Too often I hear writers say they don’t see the point of social media, while others say they will use it after they’ve written their book. It’s a common refrain: writers just want to write. Many writers shy away from social media because they think it is nothing more than hype and sales. These are the same people who use Google search engines, rely on online… [Read More]
Until I picked up Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints, I had never heard the term “straight-edge,” much less anything about a movement of it. At first, I thought the world Henderson created was 100% fiction. I could not have been more wrong. This is understandable, as I was born at the tail-end of all the action and, to add salt to the wound, I grew… [Read More]
