This is the first in a series of marketing posts dealing with crafting your product for the marketplace. Subscribe to the blog feed to get the updates as they are posted. You are a writer. You’d like to get your work published. If you are a beginning writer, your best chance to get published quickly is to submit short pieces to magazines. You might produce articles, short stories, puzzles, and poems. I...

Full title: Macmillan Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours, by Pamela Rice Hahn and Dennis E. Hensley, Ph.D., published by Pearson Education Macmillan USA, 2000. Have you wanted to attend a writers’ conference but couldn’t afford it? Have you considered online courses but passed on them for the same reason? Consider getting a copy of this book, and give yourself a thorough workshop on the basics of wr...

This is the last of three posts on crafting your product for the marketplace. Previous posts were “Editing Your Work” and “Who Is Your Customer?” Writing for peanuts---that's what you'll be doing if you sell each article, story, or poem only once. You may be tempted to skip this article if you’re still trying to get your first piece published. Resist the temptation, because, once you do sell something, you can sel...

This is the second post in 3-part series on crafting your work for the marketplace. See the previous post here. What does editing have to do with marketing? Well, since the quality of your product will affect its "saleability," you need some quality control measures. Publishing houses just don't have the resources to do extensive edits on the mountain of submissions they receive. They routinely reject manuscripts...