Avoid Resource OVERLOAD!!!

Deciding to embark on your writing career can be both exhilirating and scary as hell!  As most of us--book lovers turned aspiring writers/authors--are avid readers it's only natural for us to want to buy every writing resource we can get our hands on. After all, the experts do advise {taken from one of my resources, of course :)}, it's important to learn everything you can about the industry you plan to delve into it, right? Only thing is, when you combine ones thirst for knowledge with ones love for buying & reading books, it'll be no time before an excited, aspiring writer finds themselves at the overwhelming stage of RESOURCE OVERLOAD! Between the Writer's Digest book club offers and your own browsing of the book store's resource aisle, you can have everything from the basic poket/tabletop dictionary and thesaurus, grammar & style guides to every year's annual Writer's Market. Believe me when I tell you, the available titles are endless!

I wish someone had told me then what I'm about to tell you: "STOP! SAVE YOUR MONEY!"  For one thing, many of the resources regurgitate the same information. Secondly, none of these books will catapult your writing career. Only effective marketing & promoting will do that.

Now, on that point--marketing & promoting--besides a good dictionary & thesaurus, maybe a manuscript formatting guide, resources on the marketing & promoting is what you need to spend your money on, if not a good publicity coach. One such resource that I recently added to my library is  Red Hot Internet Publicity by Penni Sansevieri. For all other resource books, utilize your public library and the internet.

Hope you found this tidbit of information helpful.

Happy Writing & Publishing!
L.A. Jefferson

In the Meantime

In The Meantime...

As ready as I am to get deep into my next novel, Reconciliation to Hell, I and the inspiration to write just can't seem to get on the same page! I can't really call it writer's block at this point in the game because I haven't really gotten started writing. Not really, at least. During the composition of Unfinished Business I started the first draft for it, but that was it. Now that I'm FINALLY ready to move forward with my next major writing project, I can't seem to get focused. One possible explanation for it is that while I'm finished writing Unfinished Business, I'm just getting started with promoting it. And there's so much to do!

But you know what, I can't harp on it. Instead, I'm spending my free time doing the next best thing to writing--reading. In addition to reading some of my backlog of novels on my bookcase, I'm taking the time to read through my numerous writing resources. I have books on grammar, style, character description, plot building, and then some. When the time is right my writing will begin.