Monday, September 19, 2011

Competing for Cash

Writer's Digest magazine is running several genre-specific contests in which the winners get $1,000 in cold, hard cash. Sound interesting? Better get that manuscript dusted off and sent in; the deadlines are all coming up in October!

Contests in the Young Adult, Sci-Fi and Thriller genres have an October 1 deadline. Romance is October 15. Crime is October 22, and Horror is October 31. (Yeah, Halloween. Clever, huh?)

For all genres, manuscripts need to be 4,000 words or less, which is short-story length. Each costs $20 to enter. No time for professional editing at this point, but if you want to have manuscripts ready for future contests, there's no time like the present for getting them ready. Visit TW&E's Editing page for information on submitting a sample for editing.

Best of luck in the competition(s) of your choice!

Friday, September 16, 2011

A Wonderful Story, With a Lesson

Congratulations are in order for editing client Jacob Singer, who has just released the e-book version of his new book, The Vase with the Many Coloured Marbles!

With a title that's a metaphor for the country of South Africa, the book is actually two books in one. Book 1 is about Emma, a young woman from Cape Town, South Africa during the rise of the government's apartheid laws. It's a fascinating look at how those laws affected real people, something you won't read in the history books. But Emma wants to escape from the social norms of her class that are every bit as restrictive as the official race laws. The two are so intertwined that she must leave her home and forge a new life for herself to escape them. Emma's views on South Africa's leadership and social makeup are extremely poignant, and as relevant in today's world as they were in hers.

In Book 2 the story continues, centered around Emma's daughter, Marla. The characters are based on the author and people he knew while growing up in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Will Marla ever find out her mother's secret? Will Josh ever love anyone but her? Will she follow Emma's example and get involved in changing her country, or merely observe from the sidelines? And what will become of Emma? All are answered by the end of Book 2: Marla.

The questions this book will raise for you, however, are many. What do you really know about apartheid? For most Americans, the answer is probably little more than the name of Nelson Mandela (with only a vague idea of his role), or a foggy view of really ugly racist attitudes. But it went much further than that, dictating where people could live, the types of employment they could seek, where they could travel, and the type of education they could get. Entire cities were structured around the country's racial profiling. People arrested for violating the apartheid laws spent real time in prison, just for trying to live their lives in freedom and seek a better life for themselves and their families. Those who worked to overturn the laws were often the targets of terrorist tactics, as you'll see in the book. It was a fearful, brutal time, yet also one when a good person's true character could soar to greatness. The racism that existed in America during the Jim Crow era was mild in comparison to South Africa under apartheid.

So if you want a good story that will open your eyes to life at another time in another part of the world, download a copy of The Vase with the Many Coloured Marbles for your Kindle, iPad, or computer. And watch for the printed version of the book, soon to come. I certainly enjoyed editing it, and you'll enjoy the read. (You've gotta love that British spelling in the title, too!)

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Panda Changes Everything!


Those of you who remember Cyndi Lauper's song from the '80s about money changing everything probably have that tune running through your head after reading that headline. (Well, okay, I have it running through mine.) But if you have a website and you want to get traffic to it, Panda is most definitely something you need to learn more about.

Do you write your own website copy? If so, and if you've been to any SEO seminars in the past few years (that's "search engine optimization" for the uninitiated), you've probably been given the advice to cram as many keywords as you could into your website copy. It didn't have to be particularly interesting or well-written, just as long as it contained bunches of the keywords people would search on to find whatever you were selling. You didn't even need to write any text yourself, or pay anybody to do it for you; you could just get it all from article banks where professional writers posted content you could pick up for free! How easy was that?

Well, all of that changed when Google rolled out its Panda update. While Google's always tweaking its algorithms that determine which sites get to the top in search results, Panda was a major change. Companies who had learned how to play the SEO game well enough to consistently rank at the top have been reeling from the penalties Google imposed on them and trying to figure out the new system ever since. You probably heard about the penalties imposed on J.C. Penney's site for using what Google deemed "black hat" techniques to game their search algorithms.

One of the big changes with Panda was that sites started getting penalized for using copy picked up from "content farms". This is great for good copywriters like me, because it means that now your site needs to have unique, fresh content. You can't just use the same article that countless other sites may have also picked up from the same article bank. And it can't just be a bunch of mediocre copy with keywords stuffed into it, either. The content needs to be interesting, relevant to your site's purpose, and "shareable". If it's something people would post a link to in their Facebook or Twitter update, you're golden (in Google's eyes, at least).

Sites that were making a lot of money from advertising, but had minimal original content, were penalized, too. An entire industry seemed to have sprung up in recent years of sites with not much to offer but a bunch of advertisements. Those sites aren't getting to the top of the search engines any more. Got to have that good content to get SEO mojo these days.

Also considered a black-hat technique was what some companies were selling as link-building services. They'd add links to your site from all sorts of unrelated sites, just to boost the number of other sites linking to your site and raise your profile in search results. Now, if you have a lot of inbound links from sites that aren't related to what your site's about, it subtracts from your Google ranking.

Next, Google rolled out its "+1" button. This is similar to the "Like" button on Facebook, but for search results. It enables people to have input into the search results they see. And, Google hopes, it will increase the popularity of "good" sites. But if people were gaming the system before, surely some will do the same with this. Companies will start selling the service of having a bunch of people hit the +1 button for your site (if they haven't already). So I'm not sure of the impact this will eventually have on search rankings.

The latest enhancement to search results is that now you see several sub-pages of the main domain ranking first in search results. If your site has up to 12 relevant pages other than your home page that are often visited by people, they'll show up in a two-column list underneath your main URL link when someone searches on a keyword where you rank #1-10. So it behooves you to create quality content that will draw traffic to several of your site's subpages, not just lump it all on your home page, so you'll have something to display in those "12-packs".

Panda includes many more changes than these, and since Google is pretty secretive about their algorithms, not all of the new factors are well known. But the game has definitely changed. Bottom line: you need new website copy. And it had better be well-written, interesting and relevant to your site's purpose. So, anybody need a good copywriter? ;-)