Book Reviewer & Editor, Robert Medak

Robert Medak began writing book reviews for Allbooks Review in February of 2006. He has been expanding his services ever since and now offers editing for manuscripts as well as a variety of writing applications including freelance articles and Internet content. Robert is the co-founder of a creative writing workshop and he has facilitated courses for writers at Writers' Village University (WVU).

Through his writing & editing business, Robert’s mission is to offer businesses, individuals, and writers help with their writing needs. He is joining us today at Writers in Business.

In doing research for this interview, I went to visit your web site and blogs. You have a lot of information to offer. Can you tell us a bit about each blog?

I have numerous blogs, some are about freelance writing, about writing in general, book reviews, and about animals and items for children. I also maintain two blogs for AllBook Reviews. I have also started some at other sites but there is not much on them yet.

With your writing & editing business, do you find one of your services is in more demand than another?

Writing is the most in demand at this time, mostly writing articles and book reviews.

Does writing or editing work keep you the busiest?

Writing keeps me the busiest, but I also enjoy editing. Doing editing and writing helps me improve in both areas. I feel that one should always strive to improve in whatever they do.

Do you have a preference for working with fiction or non-fiction? As an avid reader, I enjoy both fiction and non-fiction and all genres.

I’m also interested in your courses for writers. What topics are you teaching? What aspects are covered? Are your courses available online?

I created a course about how to overcome procrastination, the creative writing workshop is a series of writing prompts to help new writers get started, I have facilitated courses on different aspects of writing at the Writers’ Village University. I do not do much there, as my time is spent writing articles online. They are online at WVU. I have also approached my local library to have an ongoing writing workshop for people thinking about writing. I would cover all aspects of writing, publishing, marketing, and promotion.

I understand you have a new book in the works. Please tell us about it.

I have been asked many times about how to break into freelance writing. I decided to write a book about the subject. I also presented a course at the October 2009 Muse Online Writers Conference “So You Want to be a Freelance Writer.”

You can visit Robert at Stormy Writer and at RJM Book Reviews. He is also an expert at Ezine Articles.

Employee or Self-Employed?

As your writing business grows, there may be times when you need to hire help. You also may be providing writing services and wonder if you are working for a company as an employee or if you are really self-employed.

The Internal Revenue Service has strict definitions they use when determining if someone is an employee or a subcontractor. You can learn all about it on their web site using this link: Employee vs Independent Contractor

Start All Over - A Writer's Journey with D. Kai Wilson-Viola

Today I’m pleased to welcome D. Kai Wilson-Viola to Writers in Business. She writes about writing, blogging, freelancing, artwork, supporting friends, publication, studying for a Creative Writing degree and more, whilst keeping her sense of humor, her wits about her and her purse always within sight.

The following post is from Kai’s blog, Work Back to Now and is something many of us experience in our writing journey.

Late last year, very quietly, I retired from writing. My last story sold about six months after – and only because I wanted to find out if I was right to quit.

Actually, that’s wrong. I’ll phrase it a bit more accurately.

I’ve always thought of my writing as water. It’s essential to life, refreshing, can poison, and be very bad for you in high doses, but it can heal. It can support, or it can turn on you. Elementally, I’m more at home with water than anything else. And water, with pigment is ink. If writing is water, imagination is pigment.
Up until last summer, writing was the ‘thing’ I did.

It was my ‘thing and the whole of the thing’ as Terry Pratchett would put it, but nevertheless, I had no reason to claim to be a writer, other than it was something I did. Writers are one of the luckiest – and overburdened – careers in the world. You need no qualifications to get into the ‘club’ – which is why, increasingly professional organisations expect writers to actually pay their dues by getting publication credits. Basically, you can say ‘I’m a writer’ – and bash out some words, and that’s it. I had nothing to show for it though, and I began to feel like a fraud.

That’s one of the worst feelings in the world – it creeps into you – insidious, and sickens you. It makes the water you’re drawing from that well brackish and bitter. Every word I typed, just for emails felt like a betrayal. The pigment I was adding wasn’t ’settling’ right, and in turn my pens clogged up (I know, I’m taking this metaphor WAAAY far). I even stopped journaling for a while.

For those of us that live and breathe our stories – those that pour our lives into writing, for those that dabble - anyone that writes for the joy of it, whether it’s once a year at the Nanowrimo, or daily, butt so far into the seat that it’s memory foamed to your rear end, it’s hard to explain. People think that writing is just sitting down and bashing out words.

And they’re right – that’s part of it. Another part of it entirely is being so drawn into it as a craft, that you can’t help yourself – giving in wholly and fully, till you’re a shell, and everything that you are is contained in the novel or story, essay or poem you’re working on (and thank god writers have stupidly good regenerative powers).

I’ve been telling people for so long that I’m a writer – that it’s all I can do to stop the noise and clamour in my head, that I’ve forgotten how to be anything else. But even then, in the last few years, I’ve burned out, and forgotten how to *be* a writer. I was going through the motions – like a relationship that everyone knows should have ended long ago, and is just a soulless shard of the passion it once contained – or a friendship that’s grown apart. I thought I’d grown apart from my writing.

Turns out – I hadn’t. One of the major aspects of head injury, of any kind, is disassociation – part of it is fear, because if you can *see* where you excelled and can’t do it anymore, where does that leave you? Another part of it is inability and tiredness – I barely cope with the ‘immediate’ around me, let alone anything else, so writing took a back burner. I worked on pieces for Uni (I’m two years through a three year degree in Creative Writing and Psychology) but…there was nothing there. It had caved in, or sealed, and I thought that was it.

It’s not.

It’s just the beginning again. I forgot the joy of finding untapped sweet spots, where it’s so pressurised and solid that stories gush free from underneath my feet – I forgot that if my stories are water, there are rivers, streams, estuaries, feeding back to the sea. And that it’s fine to bathe in them – it’s acceptable to dream, and revel and remember everything again. It’s a bit of a pain that it’s gone at the moment, but it’s OK.

I decided, because this is a fairly common ‘complaint’ of writers, and because I’m able to, that I’d blog this. So…start all over.

Take my hand, I promise I won’t let you drown; the water’s cold, and you might get a couple of stains in places you never thought of before, but it’s too much fun to miss. And you never know what those stains might invoke for you….

You can visit Kai online at Work Back to Now.

15 Commandments for Getting FREE Publicity by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

A huge retailer once said that advertising works, we just don't know how, why, or where it works best. What we do know is that advertising's less mysterious cousin, publicity, works even better. It is the more reliable relative because it is judged on its merit alone and carries the cachet of an editor's approval. It also is surrounded by the ever-magic word free. The two are easily identified as kin.

15 Commandments for Getting FREE Publicity (An excerpt from The Frugal Book Promoter) By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

1. Educate yourself: Study other press releases. Read a book like Publicity Advice & How-To Handbook, by UCLA Marketing Instructor, Rolf Gompertz, a SPAN member. Order it by calling 818-980-3576. Join publicity oriented e-groups.

2. Read, read, read: Your newspaper. Your e-zines. Even your junk mail, a wonderful newsletter put out by the Small Publishers of North America (www.spannet.org) and one called The Publicity Hound (www.publicityhound.com.) My daughter found a flier from the local library in the Sunday paper stuffed between grocery coupons. It mentioned a display done by a local merchant in the library window. My second book, HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED, became a super model in their lobby and I became a seminar speaker for their author series. Rubbish (and that includes SPAM) can be the goose that laid the golden egg.

3. Keep an open mind for promotion ideas: Look at the different themes in your book. There are angles there you can exploit when you're talking to editors. My first book, THIS IS THE PLACE is sort of romantic (a romance website will like it) but it is also set in Salt Lake City, the site where the winter games were played in 2002 and, though that's a reach, I found sports desks and feature editors open to it as Olympics© fervor grew and even as it waned because they were desperate for material as the zeal for the games wound down.

4. Cull contacts: Develop your Rolodex by adding quality recipients from media directories. The website www.gebbieinc.com has an All-in-One Directory that gives links to others such as Editor, Publisher Year Book, and Burrell's. Some partial directories on the web are free and so are your yellow pages. Ask for help from your librarian - a good research librarian is like a shark; she'll keep biting until she's got exactly what she wants.

5. Etiquette counts: Send thank-you notes to contacts after they've featured you or your book. This happens so rarely they are sure to be impressed and to pay attention to the next idea you have, even if it's just a listing in a calendar for your next book signing.

6. Partner with your publicist and publisher: Ask for help from their promotion department even if it's just for a sample press release.

7. Publicize who you are, what you do: Reviews aren't the only way to go. E-books are big news right now. Katy Walls, author of The Last Step, coordinated an anthology of recipes from authors who mention food in their books (yes, some of my family's ancient recipes from polygamist times are in it). It is a free e-book, a promotional CD, and great fodder for the local newspapers. You can download it at http://authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com (click on the Free E-books tab). Use it as a cookbook and as a sample for your own e-book promotion.

Think of angles for human interest stories, not only about your book but about you as its author. Are you very young? Is writing a book a new endeavor for you? Several editors have liked the idea that I wrote my first book at an age when most are thinking of retiring, that I think of myself as an example of the fact that it is never too late to follow a dream.

8. Develop new activities to publicize: Don't do just book signings. Use your imagination for a spectacular launch. Get charities involved. Think in terms of ways to help your community.

9. Send professional photos with your release: Request guidelines from your target media. Local editors won't mind if you send homey Kodak moment--properly labeled--along with your release. Some will use it; it may pique the interest of others and they'll send out their own photographers. It's best, however, to send only professional photos to the big guys.

10. Frequency is important: The editor who ignores your first release may pay more attention to your second or twenty-fifth. She will come to view you as a source and call you when she needs to quote an expert. This can work for novels as well as nonfiction. I received a nice referral in my local newspaper because I am now an expert on prejudice, even though my book is a novel and not a how-to or self-help piece.

11. Follow Up: Shel Horowitz, author of Marketing Without Megabucks (www.frugalfun.com), reports that follow-up calls boost the chances of a press release being published. Voice contact builds relationships better than any other means of communication.

12. Keep clippings: Professional publicists like Debra Gold of Gold & Company do this for their clients; you do it so you'll know what's working and what isn't.

13. Evaluate: One year after your first release, add up the column inches. Measure the number of inches any paper gave you free including headlines and pictures. If the piece is three columns wide and each column of your story is six inches long, that is 18 column inches. How much does that newspaper charge per inch for their ads? Multiply the column inches by that rate to know what the piece is worth in advertising dollars. Now add 20% for the additional trust the reader puts in editorial material.

14. Set goals: You now have a total of what your year's efforts have reaped. New publicist-authors should set a goal to increase that amount by 100% in the next year. If you already have a track record, aim for 20%.

15: Observe progress: Publicity is like planting bulbs. It proliferates even when you aren't trying very hard. By watching for unintended results, you learn how to make them happen in the future.

Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T. For a little over 2 cents a day THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER assures your book the best possible start in life. Full of nitty gritty how-tos for getting nearly free publicity, Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares her professional experience as well as practical tips gleaned from the successes of her own book campaigns. She is a former publicist for a New York PR firm and a marketing instructor for UCLA's Writers' Program. Learn more about the author at CarolynHoward-Johnson.com or HowToDoItFrugally.com.