Writer Mama Riffs on Raising A Writing Career Alongside Your Kids

I’m very pleased to announce my (recently revised) class line-up for 2008.

I have a couple of “new additions” this year that I’m excited about:

Targeting Your Best Writing Markets (which is being offered in February, for those of you who have taken Writing and Publishing the Short Stuff and are looking for the next step)

&

Crafting the Nonfiction Book Proposal (which is being offered one time in June, please read the suggested prerequisites if you are interested)

I’ll be posting a flyer for the entire 2008 year soon. In the meantime, the 2008 schedule is posted on the classes page at Writers on the Rise and registration is now open.

Still Need a Holiday Gift?
If you’d like someone to give you a partial class payment as a holiday gift, feel free to have them contact me at writer mama @ earthlink dot net. They can always make an electronic payment towards your balance. (And they’ll probably notice that I have the best priced e-classes around.)

Here are the two classes being offered in February. Hope to “see” you in then!

Writing and Publishing The Short Stuff – Especially For Moms (Dads Welcome too)!
Finally, a writing workshop that fits into the busy lives of moms! You will learn how to create short, easy-to-write articles—a skill that will make it easier to move up to longer, more time-consuming articles when you’re ready. Try your pen at tips, fillers, short interviews, list articles, how-tos, and short personal essays—all within six weeks. Class begins February 13, 2008. Cost: $175.00. Register.

Targeting Your Best Writing Markets
Learning to sift through and analyze markets is one of the biggest challenges of launching a writing career. This class will help you tackle the markets head on while covering: idea management, how to discover your best audiences, how to allow those audiences to lead you to fresh ideas, how to break a magazine down into the key areas that matter most to freelancers, and how to start specializing right away so your career will achieve lift-off faster. Class begins February 13, 2008. Cost: $175.00. Register.

Here is a Microsoft Word download of the one-pager that I refer to in Writer Mama.

One-pager for Christina Katz from August 2005

Your one-pager should be a simple summary of your bio as it relates to your active platform, as much as your current platform is relevant to the book concept you are pitching. This is one of the three document you can share with agents or editors at a conference, if they are interested, that I discuss in much more detail in my book, Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids.

Needless to say, my platform has grown tremendously in the past two years, as it should. So my one-pager today would look very different than it did in 2005.
When I get back from vacation in July, I will add the one-pager to the Writer Mama website, as promised.

My daughter Samantha and I have been hit hard recently by particularly vicious allergy-related respiratory illness.

Isn’t it always the case that as soon as you decide to take it bit easier on yourself—that’s when you come down with something awful?

I’m sure I’m not the only mom who can relate. I thought I was doing myself a favor by resting up before I have several author appearances lined up and…WHAMMO!

But I will not cancel. My husband is a theater director, so I am quite familiar with the phrase, “The show must go on.”

I’m digging deep into getting my health groove on (and, of course, loading myself up with anything and everything that will soothe the—rather nasty—symptoms).

As of Saturday, I’m taking a family vacation over Spring Break week, combined with travel for author appearances. I’ll be sure to send some reports from the road.

A bit later than originally planned, I will begin weekly writing-for-publication assignments in this blog starting April 1st (and that’s no joke!). This will also give me a chance to finish up the phone consults with the raffle winners so I can offer more!

Amy Mercer, who I spoke with last week after she won a free consult with me, has just exploded with focused determination since we chatted. I’m so impressed with writers who try out things that are suggested to see how they work for them, and then keep what works and leave the rest.

For more inspiration on how to get proactive, visit the new Writers on the Rise blog. Where I’ve posted my letter from the editor on the topic of getting proactive despite distractions/obstacles.

Go Amy Mercer! I’m sending folks to your blog, as I type!

Proactive as she is, I predict that she will have a book deal by the end of the year.

And p.s., for all you other wanna-be authors out there, Sage Cohen has a great article in the same blog on how to get ready to write your proposal.

My Writer Mama book tour starts tomorrow. Though it will go all year, the bulk of my author appearances will happen in the next three months.

For the most updated list of appearances, you may bookmark this page:

http://thewritermama.wordpress.com/upcoming-appearances-workshops/

Tomorrow night, I’ll be appearing at Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon.

Here are the details:

Broadway Books
Tuesday, March 20, 7:00 p.m. @ Broadway Books, 1714 Northeast Broadway Street, Portland, OR 97232-1428, (503)284-1726, Free

Please spread the word. Hope to see you there!

I had my first phone consult with one of the February winners on Friday and it reminded me of some general suggestions for mamas crafting a first book proposal.

I’ll share a few tips here:

1. Keep it simple: Narrow the focus of your proposal so that you idea is very specific. Although I know how tempting it can be, try not to make your future book an amalgam or hybrid book. Just make it a straight how-to, memoir or anthology. If it starts out or evolves into too many dimensions, get feedback from published authors about which aspect is the strongest.
2. Crunch the numbers: If you can’t tell me exactly how many people are in your book’s audience and why they would read your book, how are you going to persuade an agent or editor that your audience is large enough to justify anther book in a jam-packed marketplace? Your local library’s reference librarian loves to help folks conduct exactly this kind of research. This number should be communicated at the very beginning of your proposal.
3. Remember whose is whose: Everything that is leftover after you’ve focused your book proposal is part of YOUR platform. Your platform is yours to keep and develop and do with what you will. It does not belong to your publisher, nor will your publisher build it for you. In fact, it is specifically your platform that makes you more appealing to a publisher in the first place. So don’t skip this all-important phase of development, especially if you are proposing a non-fiction topic.

For example, I partnered with Writer’s Digest Books to write and publish Writer Mama. However, my classes, speaking engagements, consulting services, etc. are my responsibility. Therefore, don’t be afraid of having “too many ideas” when you sit down to write your proposal. Keep track of them all. They just might become part of your platform someday.

If you are not sure what a platform is or how to build one around your topic, you may be interested in my upcoming class: Platform Building Basics for Writers. In this class, I help writers of all levels build a platform that has integrity in small, incremental steps. More information is available at Writers on the Rise on the “Classes” page.