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Feb28
How To Write Content in a Web Video World

If you want to get somebody's attention, you better get it fast.

Steve Bryant just published another essay about the viewing habits of us web-heads. He has all sorts of funny graphs and personal stories--all to prove the point that the web video generation has no attention span whatsoever.

Check this out: "Hollywood needs to embrace the rabble. More short films, smaller DVD release windows, more extra footage on the DVDs themselves. Hell, give us clips on the DVDs and tell us to upload them wherever. Or: Start making videoblogs of a movie's filming process, the way SNL is doing with their rehearsals."

Punchy leads and short short stories will always be the best way to hook a web reader. But what does this sea change mean for content? According to Steve, we are going to need a lot content to keep readers coming back.

Movie-makers can always add extra interviews and cut footage as special features on a DVD. What can writers do for a supply of special features, to create what Steve calls "constant media?"

Hollywood_postinternet

Feb28
I'm Obsolete!
After this post, you will never have to read The Publishing Spot again. Duotrope is a search engine for writers, indexing the submission guidelines, pay scale, awards, length, media type, and genre of 1,600 different writing markets. Sixteen hundred different... Continue Reading
Feb27
Stripping for Writers
Do you feel like stripping naked when you talk about a work-in-progress? Some writers hate discussing unfinished projects and others love to show you everything. Over at Shaken & Stirred, the writer Gwenda Bond has been blogging her creative writing MFA... Continue Reading
Know Your Pulp Fiction History
Sarah Weinman, one of our favorite book reviewers, just wrapped up a roundtable discussion about the thriller, sort of like Oprah's book club for the hardboiled set.The talk revolved around The Triumph of the Thriller, a new scholarly book by... Continue Reading
Feb26
Flash Non-Fiction!
Heads up, flash fiction fans...Last week I met Katherine Sharpe who founded 400 Words, a journal dedicated to 400-word short, short non-fiction. She'd dedicated a whole paper and virtual magazine to the task of telling your autobiography in 400-words or... Continue Reading
How To Look at the Big Picture in Publishing
Following an exhausting week at my day-job, I'm starting the new week with a tired brain. Luckily, the tireless reporters at Publishing News haven't been slacking, and they have some important insider gossip, straight from an exclusive "agents briefing" at... Continue Reading
Feb23
"Never forget that writing is a business" : How To Stay Current on the Writing Business
"[My Christmas lights have] been burning night  and day for weeks and should have been taken down already. But like any chore not related to day-to-day survival, they'll probably stay up and lit long into spring. Things in New York... Continue Reading
Feb22
"All memoirs are, to an extent, fake" : How To Defend Your Memoir
"Maybe memoirs were Bad," wrote Dave Eggers in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. "Maybe writing about actual events, in the first person, if not from Ireland and before you turned seventy, was Bad." Our featured guest this... Continue Reading
Feb21
How To Stir Up Some Controversy
My good friend Dan Bell is stirring up some controversy over in England. With his characteristically elegant prose, he's attacking the way men are raised in the U.K.--whether or not you agree with his strong beliefs, I believe his essay... Continue Reading
"What you've written for the book is not sacred" : How To Build Better Public Readings for Your Book
 The last time I saw Josh Kilmer-Purcell read, the audience was treated to back-up singers and dirty jokes. Climactically, we all got pelted with candy. All fledgling writers can learn from the reading style of the man who wrote I Am... Continue Reading
Feb20
"Collaboration instead of competition" : How To Build an Online Community
"The Memoirists Collective is a group of four established, recently published memoirists who met online through MySpace.com, and have banded together to start a revolution in the world of book promotion, through collaboration instead of competition." If this writing site... Continue Reading
Feb16
"From China to Brazil, There's Always a Detective Story" : How To Use Pulp Fiction Influence in Your Writing
"[F]ancy talk of protecting the good and destroying evil and seva and service would elicit only laughter. Even among [cops], this was never to be spoken about. But it was there, however buried it may be under grimy layers of... Continue Reading
Feb15
"The most valuable thing a writer can have is time" : How To Balance Your Day Job and Your Writing Life
"There is a certain pleasure we take in thinking about how bad it gets, Sartaj thought, and then in imagining how it will inevitably get worse. And still we survive, the city stumbles on."That's a hardboiled line from Vikram Chandra's... Continue Reading
Support Your Local Litblogs
Sometimes I get so wrapped up in publishing news that I forget to mention the army of litbloggers supporting contemporary writers.Yesterday, I finally joined the grand conversation at MetaxuCafé, the home of countless litbloggers and webby writers. From Bruno Schulz... Continue Reading
Feb14
"Write The Book You Need To Write" : How To Write A Long Novel
You don't see too many 900-page books anymore--they are a tough sell to a world swamped with web pages, magazines and 24-hour news. After carrying around Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games for three weeks, I remembered the lovely feeling of... Continue Reading
Fan Fiction Rumble
People have been arguing about fan fiction all week.  Every once in awhile, I publish interviews and news about fan fiction writers. I love these little handmade, obsessive communities that spring up around popular stories.You can keep track of the... Continue Reading
Feb13
"I Was on a Mission" : How To Plan for a Creative Writing MFA
"We are built like this only, to see apparitions, to construct a vision of the world inside this lonely palace of bones, to live in this dream and be terrified of dying out of it, to suffer this nightmare made... Continue Reading
Feb12
"It Operates in Our Lives Like a Soundtrack" : How To Use Popular Culture in Your Fiction
"A face floated above the staggered roofs, huge, luminous brown eyes that went and came from behind the parapets, larger than any of the windows, and there was a gleaming brown touched by blue light, half-open lips and swirling hair,... Continue Reading
Don't Hide Your Stories Away
New York City has been frozen solid for two weeks. My boiler has crashed twice this month and all my friends are hibernating. There is only one reason to suffer through all this--to experience one of the most supportive writing... Continue Reading
Feb 9
H.P. is CC'd!
After a few weeks of planning, The Publishing Spot alumni Nick Mamatas just released a copy of his cult novel, Move Under Ground, with a Creative Commons (CC) license. You can now download a free copy of his novel that... Continue Reading
Don't Abuse Your "I"
Don't abuse your "I." That's what Ed Champion taught me while he pondered a recent controversy over at the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass. The debate swirls around the way we write about Islam, and this New York Times... Continue Reading
Feb 8
Interactive Stories from the Future
We don't pay enough attention to interactive web writing, even though our kids will take the genre for granted someday.Think about it. Hypertext gives a story all these features that will be standard storytelling tools twenty years from now: access... Continue Reading
Feb 7
Pulp Fiction vs. Bollywood
"Where is your Five Easy Questions feature?" That's what everybody wants to know. Well, I'm hard at work on an interview with the incomparable Vikram Chandra, the man who delivered a 900-page novel that will change the way you think about... Continue Reading
Feb 6
Who Is Writing Novels About Our Web 2.0 World?
I just finished watching The Machine is Us/ing Us, a brilliant look at the way the Internet has changed writing. It opens with a pencil scribbling on paper and ends with text being fed into Wikipedia. Besides being a great... Continue Reading
Feb 5
Neil Gaiman Is Coming To Town
It's a big week our little corner of the blogworld. Susan Henderson just announced that the writer Neil Gaiman will be visiting her LitPark website this week.Who is Neil Gaiman? Out of all the writers who came of age during... Continue Reading
How To Connect Your Stories To Other Stories
You could write the Great American Novel, publish the whole thing on a blog for free, and never find a reader. You are one blog in a practically infinite sea of content on the Internet.The folks over at Gothamberg have... Continue Reading
Feb 2
Reading Bruno Schulz
Every few years, I like to re-read the magical Polish novelist Bruno Schulz. If you don’t know who he is, you should be reading him. Here’s a basket of fruit from his book, Street of Crocodiles: “the shiny pink cherries... Continue Reading
Feb 1
How To Publish With A Creative Commons License
Creative Commons (CC) licenses have allowed a new generation of artists, programmers, and muscians to publish content in a unique way--making it legal for your fans to play with content that you produced.The CC license prevents anybody from profiting from... Continue Reading

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