Publishing questions

discussed at another webinar attended the last week, organised with several editors and publishers, by Writers Digest University.

A short outlined of the most interesting:

- How efficient is the self-editing? You always need another clean pair of eyes to read and have some critical inputs about your manuscript. It could be a friend or somebody you pay for. Up to your resources, you could ask for a full lecture or just for some fragments you feel insecure and unhappy about.

- Is self-publishing affordable? From the financial point of view, yes. From the point of view of your efforts, you need to dedicate a lot of time as you are the one and only doing the design, editing, promotion and PR plans, marketing strategy, even selling. I

- How do you write a memoir? A memoir is different than an autobiography and should be organised following the usual novel writing rules, with tensions, characters with voices and profiles and so on.

- How useful is social media for a writer? You need an online presence, but having in mind a limited efficiency and a use according to your well defined aims. For example, Twitter could be good for marketing, Facebook for events and blogging for creating content about your work. In my opinion, I would use all of them, at various paces. You could post some fragments of your manuscripts online and then tweet it to a list of followers among which you have publishing agents. Or, even to find some other authors as well to whom to start a conversation and, why not, to give you some suggestions.