Wall Street Journal nod

I check my pitiful stats every day just to see how many people are wandering in here. I noticed this morning that a number of people were coming in from a link on the Wall Street Journal site. I couldn't access that link, not being a paid subscriber, but I poked around a little and found a page where I could access it. The site has a link to this blog at the very bottom of a story about Harper Lee and her Presidential Medal of Freedom. The link is near the bottom of the page under " Blog Posts About This Topic." I'm thrilled that they'd link to 'lil old me, but I have to wonder how they came across such a small, obscure blog. I don't yet have the best idea about how the whole blogosphere thing works, but it must work pretty well, since that post wasn't on any of the first 15 Google pages when I searched the title of the post. Thanks, WSJ!

Harper Lee and the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Harper Lee was just granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom for To Kill a Mockingbird. And what better a work to command such an honor? If you've ever read the book, and who hasn't, you know what an amazing work it is. It's so richly textured that you can read it again and again, further dissecting it and finding new aspects of it that contribute to the whole. The bird imagery, the use of light and dark to highlight the character of each of the players- they all add up to a masterpiece of observation and persuasion. There's just the one little thing...I really don't think she wrote it.

Rumors have dogged To Kill a Mockingbird for decades, but here's what tipped me off: she came up with such a richly-textured work as her first novel, and never wrote another book. Say what, now? Someone with that ability couldn't come up with anything else? Apparently not. She also never talks about the book and never gives interviews. Adding to the questions is that fact that she lived next door to Truman Capote, who wrote novels on similar subjects and with similar nature imagery. There's nothing that can be proven, of course, but I'll always have questions. Why nothing else from Harper Lee? Why never talk about a book that won her the Pulitzer Prize?

I live a few hours from Monroeville and poised the question to a native Monroevillian who had been in the town's annual production of the play based on the book, because I'm just that obnoxious. The reaction was swift and severe. No, Capote had nothing to do with it, I was told, and never say that to anyone from Monroeville. They take their native daughter very seriously, going so far as to never tell anyone from out of town where she lives. Apparently she lives there part time and has her main residence in New York. While she's in Monroeville she's treated like a queen and protected from any pesky reporters with questions.

Since the book, Harper Lee attempted a novel but never published it because she reportedly was having too many problems with it. It just doesn't seem to me that someone capable of To Kill a Mockingbird could have that much trouble writing a novel. After that book she probably could have published her shopping list in book form and been guaranteed a certain number of sales.

So, did Capote write it? Who knows? I think that if he didn't, he definitely helped her with it quite a lot. Where was he when I was trying to make that sci-fi novel work? Oh yeah- dead. But, Harper Lee is alive, and if any novel deserves the Medal, it's the one that has her name on it.

Writers' Guild Strike

The Writer's Guild strike is an interesting turn of affairs, particularly for writers of all types. The entire affair has gotten melodramatic much more quickly than I would have imagined, especially with no writers writing it that way (sorry, I couldn't resist). The producer's group spokesman has called the strike "irresponsible," which really made me laugh. Irresponsible? Are lives at risk? It's pretty much a few weeks of Leno jokes, right? Yeah, pretty much. Strikes like this never last long, so I can't see all new movies coming to a grinding halt. Producers make a nice bit on the venues they produce, and actors make entirely too much. So, why drag their feet over the writers' pay? I don't remember any producers getting upset over the latest overpaid actor getting $20 million plus residuals. But since actors get them, why shouldn't writers get residuals? I'd much rather see writers get them than actors.

Imagine if web content writers went on strike. I tried to do that, but I can't see that many people agreeing about anything. I wouldn't mind a piece of those ad dollars that people are bringing in thanks to my content. Nah. Residuals are dependent on someone else's marketing, and I don't think they make anyone a better writer. Flat-fee writing just makes more sense. If you want royalties, write a book. But, that's just my opinion, and I'm not going on strike anytime soon.

Oh. My. God.

You will never believe how low some "business people" are going now to get their cheap content. Apparently paying $2 to people in third world countries to write horrid content in broken English was just too much trouble. Now I've found this. It has to be the laziest thing I've seen since, well, I can't think of anything right this second, but it's pretty freaking lazy. What kind of crap are they going to end up with by using this method? Is it really so much to ask for people to pay for their content? No one is going to read their generic copy, and their $67 is worth nothing more than a tax deduction. Sheesh. What exactly is the internet coming to?

Article Marketing

It's interesting how people try to get their backlinks in so many different ways. I've seen people paying for backlinks, I've seen them willing to do work in exchange for them, and then there's article marketing. The premise, of course, is that the articles have one or more backlinks within them, or they can be in the source box. So, how well does this work?

I think it works pretty well, depending on where the links are located and how they got there. The last I heard about it, article directories had been demoted in the search engine rankings, which makes those links much less valuable. I have also seen people on Digital Point bragging about the thousands of backlinks that they have. Those were likely gained form directories, so there's a limit to how effective they will actually be. On the other hand, I checked this site to see how many links a client already had to their site. The thing is, this person has never marketed their site, has never bought/worked for backlinks, and has never written or bought an article about their site. They had over 2,000 backlinks. How did they get them? Through quality content, perseverance and having information that people want. The site has been around for several years and it offers a genuine place to get information without pandering or over-SEOing. People link to the site because they like it and it will give their readers information.

The bottom line is this: you can either spend thousands over the course of years to get hundreds, or thousands, of articles that provide a backlink to your cheap copy; or you can spend a little up front to get high-quality copy on your site in the first place and let everyone else link to you and spread the word about the site. Article marketing definitely has its place, but it should never take the place of a good, professionally-written site full of relevant information.

Review: Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market 2008

I received my Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market 2008 last week and found it to be a good time saver, but a little padded. The markets are not as plentiful as I would have liked, but that may be because I'm use to the enormous Writer's Market. There are simply fewer markets that cater to children, so the smaller number of markets is to be expected. However, the size of the book can give you a false impression of the number of markets it contains. The market sections are broken up, very frequently, by filler content that is so specialized that I found it useless.

Aside from the filler items, the book itself is a huge time saver for anyone looking to get into the children's market. It has extensive listings for agents as well, negating the need for two separate books. And, if you're an illustrator, there are book and magazine markets, and agents, for illustrators as well. The listings seem more or less evenly divided between those for authors and illustrators.

In all, I like the book and it's saved me hours and hours of searching through Writer's Market for listings that will accept children's fiction, and the agent information is invaluable. But, I would have liked it a bit better if some of the filler had been cut out.

Print Press Releases vs. Web Press Releases

Beginning my press release experience as a reporter choosing press releases to run, there are numerous things I learned about getting a release carried. At every paper I worked for, press releases were faxed in daily, most of which were unusable. But, when we got the rare good one we would run it almost as is. The trick with those was to take out the PR speak and to convert it into AP style. Time after time I did this and finally wondered- why weren't they writing these in AP style? What exactly were they teaching in PR school that made them write press releases that had to be thrown out?

After leaving the newspaper industry, I put my ideas to work to help people around me to get the publicity their companies or events deserved. Every one of them was carried. Every single one. How? By doing what a PR writer should logically do when creating a press release. The object isn't to glorify the client and it isn't to create a ton of information that then has to be waded through and filtered down to its important points. Most reporters don't have time for that kind of nonsense. At least, I never did, so I assume that other reporters don't either. Then, I looked at the local market and considered what kinds of stories had been run lately, and what kind of slant they were usually given.

And lastly, I decided what kinds of markets the press release should be catered to, and how to cater the release to their specific focus. A press release for the city newspaper should have a strong news and/or human interest focus, one for the local entertainment tabloid should have more to do with what about the event will interest locals, etc. Then, I found the fax numbers for the local and regional media outlets that I wanted to utilize. That is ironically one of the hardest parts of print submissions, as many outlets make their fax numbers hard to find. I did find out that a PR book full of contact names and fax numbers comes out every year. That sounded pretty interesting until I noticed that it cost over $800. Without the book, the hunt took considerably longer, but it was accomplished.

Enter the online press release industry...
After changing careers and working in ecommerce for a few years, I came back to writing and PR, where I intend to stay forever. But, the trend now is for clients to commission online press releases. Great! I'll write press releases for the requested markets and email them instead of hunting fax numbers, right? Nope. Online press releases are an entirely different animal. The first few that I wrote confused the heck out of me, as there was no market to write for. So, the release is to be written to...nobody in particular? Pretty much. Many clients who want online releases don't really know who they want it targeted to, and they don't want it sent any further than PR Web.

The online press release is not, as a client recently told me "just an article written in a different format." It is still a press release, and should have many of the same hallmarks of the print release, some traits of the content article, and should come out as a sort of hybrid. To avoid having these releases being simply a resurgence of the useless releases that I once threw in the trash, I had to find a market to target the release to. The release can't be too generic, and must cater to a niche, as much as I hate that word. When writing an online release there is an analysis of the market, much like with print releases. What media outlet would do the company/event/person the most good? What are those outlets running? What are the people on those sites reading? The online market is fabulous because most media outlets display their most read stories, letting you know what their readers like and what they are likely to want to print.

To get the release seen my the right people, especially if the client just wants it sent to PR Web, it has to be SEO'd to the best keywords. If I'm not given keywords I check Overture and see what people are searching on that's related to the topic. You can't go too high, as those keywords present too much competition, and you can't go too low, as those keywords aren't searched often enough. Choosing some lovely words in the middle and getting them woven through the copy to ensure that it isn't too obvious is tough, but it's the best way to get that release out there.

Going back to my reporter days, I remember thinking about how valuable the free publicity from a carried release was. When you calculate the price per inch for advertising, the price of a press release is negligible. I did text ads for a local company last year, and while they got a response from the ads, they were not interested in commissioning a press release. It cost the company more than $800 a month to run ads in the paper- ads that likely didn't get the response that a press release could have gotten them. Getting carried isn't just free publicity- it's coverage that legitimizes the information and makes it more credible. An ad is an obvious sell. A news story is something else all together.