Welcoming Paul Kilduff

I'm pleased to reveal that Mywritingblog.com has been chosen as one of the venues on a virtual book tour by the Irish author Paul Kilduff to mark the launch of his new book Ruinair. Here's some info provided by the literary agency which is organizing the tour.

Paul Kilduff is excited to bring his first nonfiction work, entitled Ruinair, on a virtual book tour. Paul's book is a witty travelogue which sees him get his own back on the airline that overcharged him and significantly delayed him on a flight from Malaga to Dublin:

'Stung by a ten hour delay and a E300 fare to Spain on his native "low-fares" airline, Dubliner Paul Kilduff plots revenge - to fly to every country in Europe for the same total outlay, suffering every low-fares airline indignity. Armed with no more than 10kg of carry-on baggage, he endures 6.00am departures, Six Nations-style boarding scrums, lengthy bus excursions, terminal anxiety and cabin crew who deliver famed customer service.'

This book will have you laughing out loud at Kilduff's sharp wit and the hilarious accounts of his misadventures. Anyone who has ever flown with a low-budget airline and has lived to tell the tale will identify with Paul's experiences.

Ruinair has enjoyed the position of bestselling nonfiction title in Ireland during its first seven weeks of publication and has received wide critical acclaim. Paul is also the author of four fiction novels, the most recent of which is The Headhunter. He will be happy to discuss all aspects of his work, both past and present, on the day - in particular, the transition from fiction to nonfiction writing. He is also happy to talk about his travel writing or to lend writing tips and inspiration to any aspiring authors out there."

My blog will be hosting Paul on Friday 30 May 2008. Full details will be posted nearer the time - but in case you want to know more about the book before then, I've included links to the title at Amazon.co.uk below.

If you live elsewhere in the world, you may prefer to order the book from Paul's publishers Gill & Macmillan, which you can do by clicking on this link.

I'm on Twitter!

Well, I've taken the plunge and joined Twitter. My Twitter ID is nickdaws and you can visit my Twitter profile page here.

For those who don't know, I should explain that Twitter is a mini-blogging/social networking service. Once you have joined - which is free - you can post short updates or 'Tweets' of up to 140 characters. Updates are displayed on your profile page and instantly delivered to any other Twitter users who have signed up to receive them (your 'followers').

I'm obviously very new to Twitter and still finding my way around. One thing I am clear on, though, is that I intend to use Twitter as an extension of this blog. So anyone who signs up to follow me will be automatically notified every time I make a new post here, by courtesy of the free Twitterfeed service.

In addition, I plan to use Twitter to publish short items that don't really justify a complete blog post, e.g. useful websites I've discovered or other people's blog posts that I think are worth a look. I might also use Twitter when I have some important news to pass on and don't have time to create a blog post.

In the spirit of Twitter - which is meant to answer the question 'What are you doing now?' - I will publish some personal updates as well, but I don't intend to overdo this. So don't expect to see many updates from me along the lines of, 'I'm going to the shops now'! Simply, I hope that people who find my blog of interest will get extra value by signing up to follow me on Twitter.

Finally, if you have a blog and are wondering whether to sign up with Twitter too, I highly recommend reading this post and this one on Darren Rowse's excellent Problogger blog. This is really what made me realise that it was time to jump on the Twitter bandwagon! But, of course, you don't need to be a blogger already to join Twitter.

Who wants to take over a writing blog?

No, not this one! My colleague and near-neighbour Linda Jones is looking for someone to take over her Freelance Writing Tips blog. In a post made yesterday, she writes:

Time is against me. As much as I would love to continue with this blog, and have plenty of information and ideas that I could upload, it's just not happening.

I think the small matter of having a family to spend time with, and a company to run has something to do with this. If you are interested in taking the baton (is that the expression? Oh you know what I mean!) then please get in touch.

Linda says she has made no attempt to monetize her blog, other than setting up an Amazon bookshop. However, this is certainly an area that could be developed in future.

If you are interested in taking over an attractive-looking blog which has already built up a solid readership, please contact Linda directly via her blog.

Free Short Story Contest

I recently heard about a new short story contest which, unusually, is free to enter. It's being run by Claire C (sorry, I don't know her full name) of the Bebo Author blog. Full details of the contest can be found by clicking on Bebo Author Short Story Competition.

The contest is for stories of at least 1000 words. There is no maximum word count, although as it IS a short story contest, I'd guess you probably shouldn't go over 10,000 words.

The contest is open to anyone - you don't have to be a member of the social networking site Bebo - and stories can be in almost any genre. Claire says: 'I don't want to restrict you but I don't want literotica or gore with the sole intention of making me sick.'

A variety of prizes is on offer. They include $50, $30 and $20 Amazon vouchers (or the equivalent in cash paid via Paypal), plus a growing range of other prizes donated by sponsors.

The contest judges are professional writer Samantha Priestley and Catherine Sharp, a technical writer who runs her own blog, Sharp Words. The closing date is Friday 21 March 2008 (so you don't have loads of time!). Stories have to be sent to Claire in the body of an email (no attachments) at claire-at-beboauthor.com (change the -at- to the usual @ sign). For more info, as mentioned, click through to the contest information page.

Good luck!

More Info for Bloggers

A little while ago in this post I mentioned a new service called BlogRush that aims to help bloggers attract more visitors. I know a number of you signed up with BlogRush as a result of that post, so I hope you are reasonably pleased with the results you are getting.

I thought you might like to know that the people behind BlogRush have just launched a new (and, again, free) website called TrafficJam. TrafficJam displays the most popular blog posts in the BlogRush network, both overall and in specific categories.

I was pleased to find that my recent post about the new Qassia revenue-sharing website was at number 18 in Traffic Jam's Writing & Literature category, so it appears on the first page for this category. The rankings are updated regularly, of course, so my post may have gone up or down by the time you read this!

For BlogRush members, TrafficJam provides an opportunity for your best posts to gain extra publicity. And it's also very useful for seeing the post titles that are attracting the greatest interest from readers (coming up with good titles for your posts is the key to getting more visitors from BlogRush)

But even if you're not a BlogRush member, you might still want to use TrafficJam to review the most popular posts in any category. If you're looking for ideas for topics for your own blog that will attract readers, TrafficJam should prove a useful research tool - and it's also a good tool for discovering blogs you may not have seen before covering your area/s of particular interest.

Qassia: A New Revenue-Sharing Website

I recently signed up with Qassia, a new revenue-sharing content site that also operates as a web directory.

Like certain other sites such as Helium Knowledge, Qassia lets anyone upload articles to its website. Unlike most other such sites, however, you then receive a full 100 per cent of the advertising revenue generated by the Google AdSense ads displayed beside your own content (most other services split the revenue from advertising 50:50 or less).

Content on Qassia is called 'intel' (short for intelligence). Intel can be anything from full-length articles to an interesting fact. One of the many innovative features of Qassia is that new intel is rated by other Qassia members. The average rating given to your intel determines how high it appears in search results in the Qassia web directory for the topic in question.

As well as giving you the advertising revenue generated by your intel, Qassia also allows you to include a link back to your own website (or any website of your choice) on the same page as each piece of intel you contribute. This could help drive extra traffic to your site, and should also help boost your site's ranking in the search engines. As you may know, most search engines rate a website's popularity according to the number of incoming links it has, especially when these links are non-reciprocal (as is the case with Qassia).

Qassia operates in its own internal currency called Qassia Dollars. These are earned by posting intel and by rating intel posted by other members. Qassia Dollars cannot currently be converted directly into cash, but you can allocate your Qassia Dollars to any number of websites you want to promote. The more Qassia Dollars you allocate to any particular site, the higher up the Qassia rankings it appears. I must admit I don't fully understand this yet, but no doubt all will become clear in due course!

I'm still getting the hang of Qassia, but I can already see it has the potential to become huge. In some ways it reminds me of Kwickee, the mobile phone content publishing company I was involved with a few years ago (see this link for historical information!). Kwickee was ultimately unsuccessful, but in my work as a group editor for them I saw hundreds of articles submitted, many of which I think would now be prime candidates for Qassia. Articles about local tourist attractions (as were many of the Kwickee articles I edited) are a case in point - so if you wrote any of these for Kwickee, this could be the perfect outlet for them. On the other hand, I'm not sure that Qassia is really a suitable place for posting fiction.

Qassia is still in pre-launch phase, and currently you can only join at the invitation of an existing member. However, I'm more than happy to invite any reader of this blog to join through me! Just click on any of the Qassia links in this post, and follow the on-screen instructions to sign up. It's free of charge, of course. I found it all reasonably intuitive, but if you have any problems, do feel free to run them past me and I'll help if I can.

Oh, and look out for my first bit of intel, my recipe for the Greek vegetarian speciality briam! And yes, this did start life as a Kwickee article!

BlogRush - A New Way to Get Visitors to Your Blog

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that for the last few weeks a small box has appeared in the right-hand column of my blog headed 'From the Blogosphere' (you may need to scroll down a bit to see this). The box is part of a new - and free - service for bloggers called BlogRush.

BlogRush aims to help bloggers attract more traffic. The way it works is that when you sign up (which as mentioned is free) you get some code to put on your blog. The code displays the BlogRush widget - the little box I've mentioned - which shows the titles of the latest posts on five other blogs in a related field (writing, in my case). If any of these piques your interest, you can click on the title to visit the blog concerned.

But what makes BlogRush particularly interesting for bloggers is that every time a visitor sees the widget on your blog, the title of your latest post is displayed on the widget of someone else's blog. So, in effect, the titles of your blog posts are being syndicated across the 'Blogosphere', and hopefully some of the people who see it will click through to visit your blog.

I've been evaluating BlogRush for a few weeks now, so here are my initial thoughts. First of all, the programme is NOT likely to generate hordes of visitors for you. I'm finding that I get about one visit per 400 impressions. I might be able to improve this a bit by creating more compelling titles for my posts, but realistically I think it's unlikely anyone will do better than around one in 300.

So is BlogRush a waste of time? Well, I don't think so. For one thing, even though most people may not be clicking on my blog title, they will still be seeing 'Nick Daws Writing Blog' on a wide range of writing-related blogs, and that can't hurt as far as getting me and my blog's name recognised.

A second feature of BlogRush I like is that, as well as impressions earned every time someone visits your blog, the system also allocates extra 'bonus' impressions. In my case, I am getting roughly one bonus impression for every one that I earn (so for every 100 visitors to my blog, the title of my latest blog post gets shown about 200 times on other people's blogs). I understand that new blogs with few visitors get a higher ratio of bonus impressions, on the basis that they need the extra traffic most!

A third 'plus' is that you can also introduce new BlogRush members, and you earn extra impressions every time someone views the blog of someone you introduced. This works down through eight levels. You don't need to do anything special to publicise BlogRush either. The widget has a tab on the bottom for people to click if they want more information, and anyone signing up via your blog will be credited to your downline. This is the first time I have mentioned BlogRush anywhere, but I have already recruited three other bloggers into my network from this source.

A final benefit of BlogRush has been unexpected. On various occasions I have noticed an interesting-sounding title on my blog's widget, and have clicked through to view the blog in question (there is no objection from BlogRush to members doing this, by the way). By this means I have discovered a number of other interesting blogs that I might otherwise never have known about.

Overall, if you're a blogger, I think BlogRush is well worth giving a spin. OK, it may not bring you thousands of extra visitors overnight, but it's a free - and in my experience hassle-free - way to help build up your readership. And any people who come to your blog via BlogRush are likely to have a genuine interest in your blog's subject area. They are more likely to stick around and become regular readers than those who simply arrive via a search engine listing.

Anyway, if you'd like to know more about BlogRush, just click on any of the links in this post, or on the tab at the foot of the BlogRush widget on the right. There is a very professional five-minute video on the information page which explains exactly how the system works. If you decide to join, simply click on the button below this and follow the on-screen instructions to get your widget code.

Incidentally, if you do decide to join, you will find that there is a longer video you can watch that explains exactly how you can check your stats, change the colour and size of your widget, block certain posts from being syndicated, and much more. Again, I highly recommend watching this, as it explains some features of BlogRush you might otherwise remain unaware of.

Good luck, and see you on BlogRush!

Postscript: Just wanted to say it's great to see that so many of you have decided to take up this opportunity, and I've been delighted to see your blog posts and titles already popping up in the widget on my blog. If you're having any problems getting BlogRush set up, do feel free to ask me and I'll help if I can. You can put a comment on this blog post, or contact me via my homepage at www.nickdaws.co.uk.

Guest Blog: Specialize, Specialist and Specialism...

Today I'm pleased to publish a guest post by my friend and colleague Dr Suzanne Harris. A little while ago I wrote an article on Suzie's blog about five things I wish I'd known when I was starting out as a freelance writer. Suzie's article, below, is a good example of two of the things I mentioned in particular. One of these is the value to a freelance of specializing and becoming an 'expert' in your field. And the other is the importance of enthusiasm, a quality that Suzie has in abundance! I hope you enjoy reading her piece...

When I started out as a freelance writer, some seven years ago now, I had no idea what to actually write about. I had the passion and the drive, but I didn't think I knew enough to write a full length book. Frustrated, I sat down with a pen and paper and brainstormed. After around half an hour I had a pretty impressive list of things I knew something about, or could research. Top of my list was health. As a long-term sufferer of a debilitating illness, I knew more than most about coping with chronic pain, prescription medication, alternative therapies and other methods of fighting the ill effects of nature-gone-bad. A health writer was born.

Steadily, I created the persona I needed to sell articles and, ultimately, my book. I was so excited to be the author of a real how-to book on alternative health and I really felt as though I could make a difference. But as time passed I became restless in my niche. However, it was to be another four years before I finally found the courage to reinvent myself. I knew the importance of specialising; I already had a lucrative career as an alternative health writer, making it hard to decide to change direction. Then, quite by accident, I started to get work come to me in the form of finance writing. I almost turned it away thinking it was beyond my knowledge, but I didn't and I found I was comfortable working with the topic.

After doing a few paid jobs I decided I would like to be a finance writer alongside my health writing - after all, two specialties are better than one. It sounds easy, but specialising is actually a challenge. Before people accept you as a writer on a topic you need to be viewed as an 'expert' and to be an expert you need experience; the good old catch22 had reared its ugly head. Not to be put off, I asked a few colleagues, Nick being one of them, about how to go about establishing myself in another area. The advice I got from them proved to be sound and soon I had deleted all my old blogs, set up new ones to reflect my change of attitude, and approached some companies with ideas. Before long the work was pouring in. I secured a regular column with a B2B print magazine, creating content on Bankruptcy for pts.com and negotiating with a finance publisher on a number of book ideas. In a short space of time I managed to become an expert.

Achieving these new positions wasn't easy and a few times I had to rely on charm and a few exaggerations of the truth, but in the end it paid off. Most of them asked what experience I had. Luckily running my own writing consultancy gave me a heads-up, and I also dropped into emails that my book idea, The 30 Day Money Diet for Women: The Only Book That Helps You Gain Pounds!, was under consideration by a publisher (and still is). From there, as the odd job came in, I simply added it to the list I gave to prospective employers, so that by the time I approached some of the bigger companies my experience list was impressive. Now all I have to do is write it all!

To keep up with me and what I'm up to you can always check out my blog or find me on My Writers Circle.

Before I go there is one piece of advice I want to share that was given to me when I started out and that is to believe in yourself even when the rejection letters are flooding in because one day someone will say yes. And it's true. If someone had told me ten years ago I would end up as a published author and freelance writer I would have laughed, but through perseverance and hard work that's exactly what I am doing. And to prove anything is possible, I trained my husband, Mark, to be a freelance writer, and he is now successful in his own right. He now works for the New York Times company about.com as their MP3 guide !

Another Day, Another Guest Blog...

I'm getting around at the moment, in a virtual sense anyway. In my post yesterday I told you about my article on Linda Jones's Freelance Writing Tips blog about my typical working day.

Well, I've now had another article published as a guest writer on someone else's blog. That "someone else" is Dr Suzanne ("Suzie") Harris, and you can see my article on her My Digital Desk blog (she also has a number of others, including a book reviews blog and one on business and finance).

The title of my article is Five Things I Wish I'd Known as a New Freelance Writer. As you may gather, it comprises five pieces of advice I wish I'd been given at the start of my writing career. I hope will be of interest to anyone seeking to make a living - or at least an income - from their writing today.

By the way, I originally met Suzie because she bought my Write Any Book in Under 28 Days course and wanted to interview me about it for a book she was writing. She assumed I lived in the USA (all my publishers' sales websites are written in US English), and was quite surprised to discover that I lived only a few miles down the road from her in the English Midlands! She has now moved to Wales with her family, but we still keep in regular touch. And the best news is, she has promised to write a guest article for my blog very soon!

My Thoughts on the Simpleology Blogging Course

In my post yesterday I mentioned this new course on blogging for fun and profit. As I said in that post, the course is currently being given away free to anyone who has a blog, so long as they mention it in a blog post. I promised I'd let you know a bit more about the course after I'd evaluated it, so here's what I thought...

To start with, accessing the course proved more tricky than I expected. As you may know if you've taken up this offer, once you've placed the pre-written post on your blog, you then have to enter the URL on this web page. I assumed after doing this that I would 'simply' be taken to the course material, but not a bit of it. Instead I was taken through a series of steps that involved confirming that I wanted to sign up with Simpleology, setting a user-name and password, viewing a 'one-time offer' of something or the other, and being invited to download various items of free software.

Indeed, so laborious was the process that I was on the point of deleting my original post and apologising to anyone who had acted upon it. However, after jumping through all these hoops, I did eventually arrive at a page where I could access the free blogging course. And I have to say, it's very well done and informative.

The core of the course comprises 15 lessons. Each of these lessons is around five minutes and plays in a browser window (you DON'T need to download any special software to watch them). The lessons start with the absolute basics - i.e. what is a blog? - and move on through topics such as what to blog about, what blogging software to use, how to attract more readers, how to make money from your blog, and so on. Nowadays I'm quite an experienced blogger, but there were a number of suggestions that I hadn't thought of, and I definitely plan to act on these in the months ahead.

Alongside each lesson, there is an interactive quiz you can take to test your understanding of the points covered. You can also download the lessons in printable (PDF) format and as audio files (for listening to on your MP3 player). Some bonus materials are included as well, including interviews with a number of well-known bloggers in the Internet Marketing field.

Overall, it's a highly professional course, and if you have a blog I do recommend checking it out now while it's still free. But - as mentioned above - do be aware that accessing it will involve negotiating what seemed to me an excessive number of hurdles. It's worth noting that you don't have to accept ANY of the offers made to you or download any of Simpleology's proprietary software in order to view the course. Once you're logged in to the Simpleology 'WebCockpit' page, you'll see a heading 'Daily Targets' at the top left. The blogging course can be found in the right-hand column under Electives. Click on Blogging, and the course material will all be set out for you.

Finally, I should say that Simpleology appears to be a personal development system for organising your life, and in particular your business. Their logo has the strap-line 'The Simple Science of Getting What You Want'. By signing up to view the free course, you also become a member of Simpleology, and get access to a lot more course material as well. Personally I haven't looked into this - I'm not sure it's quite my thing really - but if you're interested in learning more, obviously the opportunity is there for you.

Free Multi-Media Course for Bloggers

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

Blogging for Storytellers

...That's the title of a new downloadable report in PDF format by Mywriterscircle.com member Nelodra (real name Leah Witmond). And the good news is that it's completely free of charge. You can get your copy by clicking on this link to the download page at Lulu.com.

Leah enjoys creating short stories based on characters she creates in the computer game Sims 2. You can see a number of her stories - and tales by other Sims 2 aficionados - at Leah's Sim Tales website. In her new report, she provides a detailed, step-by-step guide for anyone who would like to follow in her footsteps.

Of course, not everyone will want to write fiction about Sims 2 characters. In her report, however, Leah has provided a handy guide to setting up a blog using the popular (and free) Blogger platform, and much of her advice would be just as relevant if you are thinking of starting a more conventional blog or ficblog using Blogger. I particularly appreciated the generous use of screengrabs illustrating what you should be seeing on your computer at each stage.

Congratulations to Leah on creating her report and making it available free to the online writing community. And, incidentally, I've also had lots of good feedback on my free 'Christmas Gift' report about devising and selling ideas for movies - click here to read my blog post about this - so I've decided to leave the link up a bit longer. By the end of next week I will definitely remove it, however, so if you're at all interested in this subject, please get your copy now!

Another New Opportunity to Make Money From Your Website

My post a few weeks ago about Money4Banners generated a lot of interest, so I thought you might perhaps be interested to hear about another new opportunity to make a bit of painless extra income from your blog or website.

WidgetBucks works in a similar way to Google AdSense. You copy and paste some special code into your website HTML. A banner advert is then displayed on your site, and every time someone clicks on it, you get paid a fee. As with AdSense, you can choose from a range of different banner sizes and colour schemes. You can also choose the type of ad displayed (e.g. video games), or let WidgetBucks analyze your site and automatically display ads that are relevant to the site's content. The latter method is how Google AdSense works, of course.

So what advantages does WidgetBucks have over AdSense? Well, as mentioned, unlike AdSense you can choose the type of ads displayed. The ads themselves tend to be a bit jazzier than those generated by AdSense, and the WidgetBucks site is more user-friendly. And they are giving all new publishers a sign-up bonus of $25 (admittedly, you do have to earn another $25 before you can withdraw this, but I guess that's only fair). The ads themselves supposedly pay about twice what AdSense do. And finally, they have an affiliate program where you can introduce new members and get 10% of whatever they earn in the first year. So, to me anyway, it looks a pretty good deal all round!

If you'd like to see what a typical WidgetBucks ad looks like, I've put one on this page of my Stop Spam Email site - it's under the paragraph about E-Cloaker. Just a word of caution, however. I'm finding that the ads show up in Internet Explorer, but I don't see them in Firefox. Also, the main WidgetBucks site doesn't display correctly in Firefox on my PC, so again it's probably best to view it using Explorer. Hopefully WidgetBucks will address this issue soon.

Anyway, if you have a website or a blog - both are equally welcome - and you'd like to generate a bit of extra cash from banner advertising, it's well worth checking out WidgetBucks. Note that you will need to apply including details of your blog or website, and wait (about 12 hours in my case) for your application to be approved. As far as I can see, most mainstream sites will be accepted, but understandably there are some exclusions, notably sites with "adult" content.

Responding to Some Feedback...

I always welcome feedback on my writing courses and other projects for writers. Positive feedback is nice, of course, and thankfully I get plenty of that. However, in some ways negative feedback is more useful.

So I was actually pleased to see this less-than-flattering post on US author and writing teacher Tod Goldberg's blog and follow-up comments by some of his readers, as they give me the chance to try to answer the concerns raised and, hopefully, clear up a few misunderstandings.

Tod's post seems to have been inspired by an email he received from the marketing arm of my publishers, the WCCL Network, inviting him to join their affiliate program. The email referred specifically to my courses Quick Cash Writing and Write Any Book in Under 28 Days.

I would start by saying that I had no involvement in writing or sending the email in question. It was written by WCCL's marketing department, and obviously there is a certain amount of "marketing-speak" in it. I'm not going to criticise WCCL for this, or apologise on their behalf. I will just say that affiliate programs are commonplace on the Internet, and almost every big online retailer from Amazon downwards has one. I make no secret of the fact that anyone with their own website can join WCCL's affiliate program and earn a sideline income helping to sell my courses (and any other of the wide range of products sold by WCCL). You can read more about WCCL's affiliate program in this recent blog post if you like. But of course, if you think affiliate programs are the devil's work, you don't have to join!

Moving on, in the comments section "Lucy" writes: "DO NOT waste your money on the Nick Daws course. It is on a CD which is protected, meaning you cannot use it easily on different pcs, and now I run Windows XP it will not work at all. I emailed the company and they say I have to pay another 15USD for a new version which will work. Take my advice and spend the money on a good old-fashioned printed BOOK that you can use where and when you like."

I do have some sympathy with Lucy here. It is frustrating when you buy software and Microsoft then produce a new version of Windows and it no longer works. However, I tend to think that her ire should be directed more at Bill Gates and co. for producing operating systems that are not backwards-compatible.

Lucy evidently bought one of the earliest versions of my Write Any Book in Under 28 Days course (the only one of my WCCL courses which is not sold as an instant download), in the days of Windows 2000. When - presumably years later - it wouldn't work on the new Windows XP operating system, WCCL asked her for $15 US (around 7.50 UK pounds) for a replacement, XP-compatible CD. When you take into account the cost of the CD-ROM, postage to anywhere in the world, packaging materials and the labour involved, I doubt if they are even breaking even at this price. So I don't think in the circumstances they are being unreasonable. After all, imagine demanding that Microsoft provide you with a free version of Windows Vista because two years ago you bought Windows XP. I can hear Mr Gates laughing now!

My other courses are all sold as instant downloads in the universal PDF format, so migrating to a new operating system is much less likely to cause problems. And, of course, anyone buying Write Any Book in Under 28 Days today gets the latest version of the CD-ROM, which is fully compatible with both Windows Vista and earlier versions of Windows (and you get 24/7 advice and support from WCCL's dedicated helpdesk site if required).

And finally, if you don't want to mess about with CD-ROMs at all, my Write Any Book in Under 28 Days course is also available in an audio version!

Finally, "Gordon" has some interesting criticisms. He writes: "The whole tacky marketing tangle surrounding Nick Daws needs thorough exposure. He runs a number of schemes with identical pitches: Essential English for Authors, Quick Cash Writing, Write Any Book in Just 28 Days and How to Win Contests, as well as at least one non-site, Stop Spam Email, that gives trivial anti-spam advice probably as a vehicle to host advertising. It doesn't take a genius with Google to find these are part of a walled garden of sites on the WCCL Network affiliate marketing circuit..."

I suppose I should express my gratitude to "Gordon" for name-checking all of my WCCL writing courses! Contrary to what he seems to be implying, however, they are all quite different. Write Any Book in Under 28 Days is my course for anyone who wants to write a book in the shortest possible time. Quick Cash Writing is aimed at people who want to start earning from writing as soon as possible, and covers shorter writing projects such as articles, greeting card slogans, and so on. Essential English for Authors is my new course on grammar, spelling and punctuation. And How to Win Contests is my course on how to write winning slogans for consumer competitions (aimed primarily at a UK/Eire readership).

"Gordon" is right that there are cross-links between the sales sites for these courses and between the free writers' resources sponsored by the WCCL Network such as Mywriterscircle.com and WritersFM. It would be amazing if WCCL did otherwise, as all these sites belong to them, and presumably anyone interested in buying one of my writing courses might also be interested in joining my free forum, or vice versa. So, OK, consider me and my publishers exposed. It's a fair cop!

My Stop Spam Email site, incidentally, is not part of the WCCL Network. It's a private project I worked on some time ago, when I was trying to improve my website design skills. You won't find links to it from WCCL sites (apart from a couple of my blog posts such as this where the topic seemed relevant). OK, the site may not be cutting edge, but in my view it contains sensible advice on how to tackle the spam problem. Yes, it has some ads on it, but these barely cover the hosting costs. If Stop Spam Email was meant to be a money-making scam, I would definitely be starving in my garret by now!

Finally, "Gordon" writes: "As to the blurb - "He enjoys a life of holidaying with his beautiful wife, playing his part as a regional celebrity, and occasionally putting finger to keyboard to write another book" - I spluttered my tea out! I met the guy a while back. His long-time partner, Jayne (mentioned on his own website) would be surprised to hear that he's off holidaying with a wife. His local celebrity extends to being a member of Lichfield & District Writers, a small-city writers' circle. And he holidays no more than the rest of us. Those considering this course should ask themselves why, if he has such insider knowledge and is so successful, he needs to sex up his circumstances and why he needs this mess of marketing schemes."

OK, I hold my hands up. Jayne and I aren't actually married. We've been together for 20 years and most people assume we are married (apart from the nice lady at the local leisure centre who still insists on referring to Jayne as my "sister"!). I'm sure that's what WCCL's copywriter did too. However, to spare "Gordon" choking on his tea any more, I have asked WCCL to change "wife" to "partner" the next time they update the Write Any Book in Under 28 Days sales page.

And yes, I support my local writers circle, Lichfield & District Writers, even though I'm not a regular visitor any more. I really don't give two hoots about being a local or regional celebrity - I much prefer a quiet life - but I suppose you have to grant WCCL's copywriter a bit of artistic licence. As regards holidays, Jayne and I do actually go away more often than most people I know. In the last year we've been to Lanzarote, North Wales, Greece, Venice and Cyprus, as well as a few places around England. It's not something I want to boast about, but we both enjoy travelling and don't have any other expensive hobbies, so it's our one luxury really.

Anyway, there you go. I've gone on a bit longer than I intended in this post, but I don't like to leave criticisms of me and my courses unanswered. I hope that at least if anyone sees the blog post in question now, reading this as well will help them to form a balanced view.

Please note: As previously stated, comments on this post are now closed. Thanks to everyone who replied, supportive or otherwise. Please do not post any further comments here, as they will be automatically deleted.

Karl's Christmas Screensaver

It's the start of December, and time to get into the Christmas spirit! So why not make your computer a little more festive by downloading the free Christmas screensaver just produced by my colleague and publisher Karl Moore and available from his blog at www.karlblog.com?

Karl's Christmas screensaver displays 100 beautiful festive scenes from across the globe, smoothly shifting from one image to the next. It's free of charge, and naturally it is also spyware-free, adware-free, and so on.


I should mention that Karl's Christmas screensaver is quite a large file. It's 35MB in total, and took around ten minutes to download on my broadband (cable) connection. I don't think I would recommend trying to get it this way if you're still on dial-up, therefore!

To download Karl's Christmas screensaver, just click on any of the links in this post, which will take you to the relevant post on Karl's blog, and click on the Download link (under 'Want to Download your Copy?'). It's a .exe file, so I recommend that you save it to anywhere on your PC (e.g. the desktop), then double-click in the usual way to launch it. The Christmas screensaver will then be installed on your PC. Of course, you can remove it permanently or temporarily at any time via your computer's Control Panel.

Finally, as I've mentioned Karl's blog here, I'd just like to recommend it to anyone who is interested in personal growth and self-development. It's a fascinating and inspiring blog, with an addictive mixture of odd facts, inspirational quotes and stories, random acts of kindness, and much more.

The same, incidentally, applies to Karl's forum at www.karlforum.com, which is great place for chatting with like-minded individuals and discussing some of the matters Karl posts about in his blog. Neither of these sites is commercially-oriented, but if you'd like to know more about the growing range of self-help products and publications sold by Karl's company, the place to look is Self Help Street. Do check them all out!

Stephen King's Top Seven Tips for Writers

...That's the title of an article I saw the other day on The Positivity Blog by Henrik Edberg, a 26 year old student from Sweden.

In his article, Henrik has set out seven pieces of advice for writers gleaned from horror writer Stephen King's book On Writing - which I highly recommend, by the way. Here's the first (and shortest) of the seven items:

1. Get to the point.

Don't waste your reader's time with too much back-story, long intros or longer anecdotes about your life. Reduce the noise. Reduce the babbling. In On Writing King gets to his points quickly. Get to your point quickly too before your reader loses patience and moves on.

The other tips in this article on The Positivity Blog are all well worth reading too. OK, none are Earth-shattering, but it's all solid stuff, and relevant to all types of writing, not just novels and short stories. Check it out!

Have You Seen Yuwie?

Yuwie is the latest social networking website, following on from others such as MySpace and Facebook. However, it's unusual in that it shares the revenues it generates with its members, on the basis that the more you use it, the more money you make.

The Yuwie site is rapidly climbing the Alexa ratings (Alexa gives you one opinion about the popularity of a site). It's already made it into Alexa's top 3,000 sites on the Web, despite only just having been launched.

The way Yuwie works is that you join for free and get credited with one page view every time you visit a page on the site (even just to update your profile). They pay you for referral page views too, down 10 levels, so if you introduce just one or two people and they do the same, you can end up getting thousands of page views every day. Each month they announce their payout per thousand page views, and you get paid accordingly.

It's early days with Yuwie, and too early yet to say how successful it will prove. But if you're interested in earning a pain-free sideline income and the other benefits of joining a social networking site (e.g. your own free blog), Yuwie is well worth a look. And it won't cost you one red cent either!

Incidentally, if you're interested in earning a sideline income, check out also my recent posts about The Marketing Pond and AGLOCO (both also free of charge).

Feed Your Imagination!

Just wanted to direct your attention to a great post made by my colleague Karl Moore on his blog yesterday.

The title is Today, Feed Your Imagination. As Karl says, "When you're inspired, and are free to let your imagination soar, you are capable of great achievements." And he goes on to offer ten random ideas to fuel your imagination and set your creative mind free. My favourite idea is probably number seven:

Get lost -- literally! Take any random train journey and see where you end up.

...Although I'd love to know what sort of ticket you should buy before embarking on this strategy ;-)

Karl's post is aimed at anyone, but I think it's particularly relevant for writers. If you're feeling in a rut, or even suffering from writer's block, why not try out one of the ideas in Karl's article? It could provide just the tonic your imagination needs to start firing on all cylinders again!

Google Documents and Spreadsheets

In a couple of posts recently I've mentioned the free Google Documents and Spreadsheets service. I thought perhaps I should say a bit more about it.

Google Documents and Spreadsheets is one of the ever-growing range of free services from the search engine giant. In recent months I've been using Google Documents quite a lot.

Google Documents is the new name for what used to be called Writely, Google's free online word processor. Essentially, it lets you create documents using your web browser instead of a word processor such as Microsoft Word. The documents are then saved online for as long as you want them. There are several advantages to this.

1. It means that you can work on your document using any computer with an Internet connection. No need to keep switching disks or USB drives if you want to do some writing at home and some at the office.

2. Your work is automatically backed up on Google's own servers. Even if your own computer is damaged or stolen, the documents won't be lost.

3. Google Documents auto-saves your work regularly. If your computer is prone to occasional random crashes (as mine is), this can be a life-saver!

4. You can also allow one or more other people to access and edit documents using the 'Share' facility. I have used this for working collaboratively with my friend Simon, my co-author on 50 Great Ideas for Creative Writing Teaching.

5. In addition, you can publish your documents on the web for anyone to read. I did that very thing in my post about AGLOCO yesterday. There is no need to have your own website or know anything about HTML or FTP.

6. Finally, with Google Documents you can save easily to and from Microsoft Word, HTML, Rich Text Format (.rtf), and plain text (.txt).

I have found Google Documents especially handy for creating blog posts, and for the last few months all my posts (including this one) have been written on it. One reason I like using it for this is that Google Documents makes it very easy to create hyperlinks to other websites. You simply highlight the text you want linked and click on the 'Link' icon in the Google Docs toolbar. A pop-up box then appears for you to enter the URL of the site you want to link to, whether you want it to open on a new page, and so on. Once I have written my post, I simply copy and paste it into my Blogger account.

Are there any drawbacks to Google Documents and Spreadsheets? Well, obviously it doesn't have nearly as many formatting features as a word processor like Word. Also, as it's web-based, if you lose your Internet connection, you won't be able to access any documents stored on it. For this reason, I highly recommend that if working on your great novel, you save a copy on your own PC as well. Personally I tend to use Google Docs mainly for short documents such as blog posts, articles, outlines, notes, email newsletters, and so on. It has largely replaced the text editor I previously used for many of these purposes.

I don't know much about Google Spreadsheets, as I haven't yet had occasion to use this facility. If you regularly use spreadsheets, however, most of the above advantages will also apply.

To get a Google Documents and Spreadsheets account, click on any of the links in this post (or click here) to go to the homepage. If you click on Take a Tour of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, this will give you an overview of all the features on offer, including some I haven't mentioned. If you already have a Google Account, you can sign in from the homepage and get started straight away. If not, it is easy (and free) to apply for one - just click on Create a New Google Account on the far right of the screen. You can use your Google Account to access other free services such as Google Calendar as well.

You should find Google Documents and Spreadsheets quite easy and intuitive to use, but if you get stuck at any point, click on Help at the top right of the screen to access the extensive Help files.

Happy (Google) writing!

Ten Quite Interesting Things About This Blog

Here are a few things about My Writing Blog you might be interested to know...

1. The blog was started in November 2005, since when it has been visited around 22,000 times. This will be the 194th post I have made on it.

2. The largest number of visitors (38%) come from the United States. After that comes the UK with 34%. The country with the next highest visitor numbers is Australia, with 4%.

3. You can subscribe to My Writing Blog by entering your email address in the box near the top of the screen. All my posts will then be sent to you by email as soon as I make them. As of today, 242 people subscribe by this means.

4. If you use an RSS feed reader such as Google Reader, you can also subscribe to my blog using the links in the right-hand column. Using a feed reader removes the risk of emails being blocked by an over-zealous spam filter.

5. Comments are welcome on any of my posts. Just click on the 'comments' link at the foot of each post and enter whatever you wish to say in the pop-up box that appears. You can log in with your Blogger/Google account if you wish, but anonymous comments are also allowed.

6. You are also welcome to include a link to your own website in your comments. If you want the link to be clickable, it will need to be written in HTML. Note that all comments, especially those with active links in them, must be relevant in some way to the post concerned.

7. There is now a large amount of content on my blog. If you wish to search for a particular keyword or phrase, one method is to go to http://www.google.com/ and