my writing week 3 (26)

Hi all,

We're halfway through the year and there is no way that I am going to check my 2010 writing goals because I know I ain't even close to achieving them. I think I planned to have finished editing the novel I was working on by now, but I been sidetracked by other writing activities and life experiences.

Last week I spent a bit of time researching and writing an article on the benefits of ebooks for the disabled. Like the first article I wrote, it was too long. I added few anecdotes back into an article on dementia because I wanted it to sound more personal and it too is now about 600 words. I will probably spend hours this week deleted this word and rewriting that sentence to get them close to 500 words.

I did a bit of redrafting of a novella. I am on the second last scene and I have rewritten it a few times now. I changed the occupation of the main character to something less cliched for a sci-fi thriller - he was originally a cop - and I haven't be able to quite make the scene work yet.

You may have noticed the newish marketing trend of video trailers for books. I've looked at a few of them on YouTube and they haven't convinced me to buy the book. An article in The Age said that publishers are picking and choosing which books they make trailers for, they reckon crime and romance are most suited, but are unsure if any sales are generated by trailers.

Advertisers say that a consumer needs to see an ad (trailer) a few times before it has any effect, but who is going to watch a few stills with a voice over more than once? Maybe it will/does work in some cases, but whatever the success you can be sure that there will be plenty of people trying to make money off desperate authors by selling them the idea of the necessity of book trailers.

I have to ask: is YouTube potentially that great a market? Do people who watch it read books? If they read, do they read sci-fi? Perhaps ibooks is already sending book trailers recommendations to ipads. I also wonder how many university creative writing courses already offer a trailer making subject.

The problem in the online world is that there are too many opinion leading websites and blogs, thousands of them, so even if you convince one website or blog that your book is great, the potential sales aren't probably going to increase by all that much. The market is too fractured and gets more so every day. Publishers like new writers to have a following on the web, but where? Twitter has been singled out in the press and by writers who have tried to twitter themselves to success as pretty well useless. The vast majority of people who befriend a writer on twitter are not going to buy their fiction novel. Is it any different with Facebook? Myspace seems lost to music, although I did buy Matt Browne's great novel The Future Happens Twice after he befriended me.

Last week I was kept entertained with the posts on my writing groups site with a bit of flaming of the Australian publishing industry going on. An Aussie publisher wouldn't make it out of a room full of rejected authors. I actually critiqued a story last week, and I should finish reading the rest of the novellas nominated for the Hugo this week.

Like the previous week, last week I felt like a writer.

Graham.