The First Line

The First Line is a literary magazine in which it's relatively easy to get published. They provide you with a first line, and you write your short story with that. The sentences can always be found at their website and they welcome all genres.

They publish four times a year and are quite well-read. The guideline for entries is usually between 300-3000 words, but there aren't hard and fast rules where this is concerned.

They pay US $30.00 for fiction and US $20 for non-fiction. They will also send you a copy of the magazine your work appears in. You can see the submissions page here. And here is what they've said on their page:

Short Story Submissions

Do you write short stories? If you do, here's an opportunity you don't want to miss out on. Dream Catcher - an international magazine - is looking for short stories of about 2,000 words. 

There's no mention of payment as far as I can see, but this is a good chance to get your foot in the door and be published. I've published a lot of calls for submissions on this blog. And I always try to ensure that they're paid positions. I think that a writer - like every other worker - deserves payment for his/her work. 

Nevertheless, once in a while we have to bite the bullet and give away some of our work to set the ball rolling. Here's what Dream Catcher has said on their site:  

Call For Poets

I'm not a poet, but I know how difficult it can be to get your poetry published, especially if you're an 'unknown' poet. There aren't many magazines accepting new poetry at the moment, so when I caught sight of Iota Magazine's submissions page, I had to tell you about it. 

You can see other opportunities on my call for submissions page here.

Iota Magazine is a small press magazine. They welcome submission of new poetry all year round. Some of the guidelines they've published on their site are:
They do not accept previously published poetry and require poets to send in not more than six pieces at one time.
They require poems written in English only, and translations should be marked as such.
They will also consider poetry anonymously, so a separate top sheet with your details is required.

Compass Books Call For Submissions

Compass Books is a publisher looking for authors who write instructional books. So if you're a writer who speaks at conferences or workshops about your chosen discipline, this publisher may be a good fit for you. They have international authors on their books and are interested in writers who tutor in how-tos like travel, sport, food, writing etc.

You need to submit your manuscript through their website or email (a short proposal). There's a submission form on the site and I would use this in the first instance if I were making an application.
Just so you're prepared, you'll need to send a synopsis, opening chapters, author biography, and full chapter breakdowns (so create this if you haven't got one).

Children Publisher Call For Submissions

Andersen Press is a specialist children's book publisher. They publish children's picture books (mostly pictures with little text for infants) and other children's books (older fiction - up to 75,000 words).

If you're a children's writer or have a kids' manuscript in a drawer somewhere, it's time to dust it off, give it a once over and send it away to Andersen Press.

It's not often that publishers are calling for submissions, so when you see one you have to take the plunge as soon as possible. The only drawback is that Andersen Press only accepts paper submissions by regular post. This means you have to print out your submissions/drawings and spend money on stamps to send them away.

How To Blog – Google’s Top Tips For Success

How To Blog - Google's Tip Tips For Success, is a brief outline of the advice Google gives to Webmasters (bloggers) to help them blog better and improve their sites. I've picked out the most important points from the horse's mouth - so to speak - and created small chunks for your quick perusal below. 

Google's best tips for blogging success

How to blog: design and content

Here are Google's top tips on the design your blog should follow, and the content you should create for it. Many of these are quite straight forward, but it's always good to remind ourselves. It's easy enough to forget. 

Create a hierarchy so each page can be found from static links (I like to group by categories like I’ve done on this blog in the link bar above (where you can see my books etc). Wordpress will do it for you easily.

Create Custom 404 Page For Blogger

It's great news that Blogger users can now create and customize their own 404 page. This is the page your readers arrive at when they click on a link that no longer exists on your blog. You want them to know they're in the right place, but more importantly, you don't want them to leave and go search elsewhere. Your 404 page should be informative and enticing enough to encourage your readers to hang on and look around your site. A 404 page couldn't be easier. 

See this page for the total list of Blogger new, updated features to help you blog better and improve your site significantly.

Create custom 404 page for Blogger

Go to Dashboard. Click on the blog you want to work on and choose, Settings. It's the last option on your the right of your screen (in new Blogger dashboard).
Now choose Search  Preferences. (Click on image to enlarge).

create a custom 404 page in Blogger

5 Ways To Blog When You Don't Want To

Sometimes I just don’t want to blog. Face it, you don’t sit down at the computer every day and think, “Wow, I am so excited to blog today! Let’s see what I can write new about the same subject for the ninetieth bazillion time!” However, you know you have to update your blog regularly if you want to keep your traffic up. With that in mind, here are five tips to keep you blogging even when you don’t want to:

A guest post by Jason Miner

Just do it – Just getting started is the hardest part for me. I will sit there and stare at the screen forever before I just give up. Instead of doing this bad habit I have started to just write. It does not matter what it is. It can be a song, a poem, something silly, even just “I hate blogging” over and over again. When your fingers start moving you will be surprised at how much easier it is to actually get something done! 

How To Add Alt Tags To Blogger Images

Blogger users would be pleased to note that Blogger has introduced some great new features in uploading pictures and adding alt tags. This article is simply to point out the new changes to you and help you utilise them fully to benefit your site. 
A person viewing your images knows exactly what they're about. However, even though Googlebots can read the text on your site, they can't read images. The only way Google and other search engines can know what your image is about is for you to tell them. When someone searches for the image of a white rose in the search panel, you can have the best white roses on your blog but your pictures will never come up in the search results unless the search engines know you've got them on your site. How do they know this? By alt tags! And this is why it's so important to know how to add alt tags.

See this page for the total list of Blogger new, updated features to help you blog better and improve your site significantly. 

5 Great Ways to Hunt For a Writing Job

Quite a number of people love to write, and a decent amount of these individuals actually want to turn writing into a career. This field can be a tough one to break into, but if you consult with these resources, you absolutely have a chance! Read on to get a head start.

Online Writing Jobs
In the year 2013, you really need to be starting online if you want to find a writing job. So many content-driven websites exist, and they are really growing by the day. As a result, content is needed for these sites themselves, and sometimes they're looking to sell out content to other sites in turn. Regardless of your experience or background, it's wise for almost everyone to seek out content-writing positions. 

The Importance Of Knowing Your Niche

Anyone looking to write website content needs to find their niche. We all know that a popular website is one that has understandable and informative content, and that only comes from expertise. Some website owners actually overlook content when creating their website, but this is a colossal mistake. Great writing and content is not only about grammar - that is an only a small part of the equation. You've GOT to have a niche, and know it! Here are five tips to find the niche for you.

Passion

Anyone looking to write about a niche needs to write about their passion. Everyone has something they are truly passionate about, whether it is mountain biking, travelling, or the stock market. When a writer writes about their passion, the reader can tell, because it's much more than work, it's fun! 

Write Search Descriptions For Blog Posts in Blogger

Being able to write search descriptions for blog posts in Blogger gives bloggers a great way of getting the best from search results. 
The search description shows up in search results, so you can grab your opportunity to tell your potential visitors exactly what your post can offer them. New Blogger updates allows you to do this quite easily. 

See this page for the total list of Blogger new, updated features to help you blog better and improve your site significantly.

Write search descriptions for blog posts in Blogger

write search descriptions for blog posts and  pages

Create Meta Tags For Blogger Blog

Blogger's new, improved features means you can now create meta tags for Blogger blogs. This is something new bloggers had a difficult time doing, since the only way to add meta tags to Bloggers was to edit the html - something well avoided if you knew nothing about html. Here's how you can now have your meta tags with ease.

See this page for the total list of Blogger new, updated features to help you blog better, help people find your articles, and improve your site's SEO significantly. 

Create meta tags for Blogger blog

Blogger has also introduced some great new features in setting mode, which are extremely important for your PR rating and SEO. Please don't leave these for later. Do them now. Go to Dashboard - Setting -; Basic; then look at your Description. Make sure you have a description that includes your keywords for your blog before we move on. Don't leave your description panel empty. Also make sure your privacy setting is set to allow search engines to find your blog. Save your work.

Short Story Opportunity

Short Stories are usually the first things to go when magazines are scaling down. If, like me, you're a writer who dabble (or specialise) in short stories, you would've found this to be the case over the last 2 years or so.

A lot of the UK magazines are slowly weeding out their short stories because they cost too much to pay for. Each month, publications are ceasing to be, so those lucky enough to still be viable are doing what they can to stay afloat financially.

Today I bring a short story opportunity you'll be pleased to hear. Please check out the submissions page for calls for submissions and other writing opportunities.

This concerns the UK magazine 'Take A Break' - I know they buy real life stories, but this is not what I'm talking about here. (If you have a real life story you want to sell them, check out this page).

Can You Write For Young Kids?

Can you write for young kids? I once planned to write a series of books for kids. I ended up writing just one before I aborted the idea. The hardest part of the exercise (for me) was choosing the right words and phrases to suit my targeted age group. Writing a story is one thing. Researching words your young audience will understand and approve of is quite another. 

See also: How writers build their characters

How to write an article online

Write your own guide book

Click on any of the (smaller) images below to see more details about them.

Can you write for young kids

image source

Submissions and Updates

As subscribers and readers know, there's a regularly updated page on this blog called, Writing Opportunities.  This is where writers, blogers, verse makers, tip givers etc, can find paid jobs available (mostly) in hard copy opportunities.

Go to that page to see if there's anything there suitable for you. Don't forget we've also got some on-the-spot  call for submissions posts as well. Just type in the term submissions in the search panel at the top, right of this blog (the link will give you some of those search results) to find ongoing call for submissions in the hard-copy publishing field. (Or you can go to the new call for submissions page linked below).

Are Writers Made or Born?

Are writers made or born? This is a question I ask myself quite a lot. I've always loved writing, even as a child. However, I've also spent years experimenting, studying and honing my writing skills. Does this mean that my writing skills are natural or self-made?

Millions of people take classes to learn how to write. They're taught to carefully place one word in front of another, the correct use of tenses, and the order of the elusive subject-verb agreement. Accurate form makes an adequate writer, but does it make a great one? Personally, I think not. 

There a certain je ne sais quoi – the X-factor of writing, if you like – about certain writers. It’s a quality which, in my opinion can be nurtured but not taught. Good form is certainly admirable, but without the inherent skill to make your reader feel what you are, you could very well be writing a dictionary. I’ve showed this letter below in one of my older blogs. It was written for my birthday, by my daughter when she was eight. I’ve retained all spelling mistakes. 

Taking A Break

Hi A Blogger's Books readers, subscribers and stop-by-ers. I'm taking a break from this blog until the end of the year to pursue my writing and editing, and to concentrate on getting stronger as I've been unwell for quite some time.

As you know, my inspirational memoir, Sunday's Child was published earlier this year by Pulse Publishing. I also signed a contract with a separate publishing company to release my health book. At the moment I'm actively sending out my Baby Diaries - A Guide For New Mothers manuscript to potential publishers and have started editing the follow-up to Sunday's Child.

5 Reasons To Have A Crap Blog

Everyone talks about how great it is to have a highly-rated blog. All the big SEO big cats out there extol the virtue of making your blog so 'friendly' to search engines, Google's mother must be blushing with embarrassment. I want to show you 5 reasons to have a crap blog. If these don't convince you, I don't know what will!

Ignore all the SEO advice. Ignore Google, his mother and all his friends. I assure you, you will benefit greatly from doing so.

Why you too should have a crap blog

No spammy comments
No one visits so you don't have to worry about spam comments filling up your spam box. You'll save yourself the precious time you spend answering two-word comments people leave on your blog, just so they can stick up their own crappy links on your site. I deleted more than 1,500 spam comments from this blog this week. 

5 Criminal-Minded Characters Classed as Heroes

Are you writing or reading a book? Think about this: What makes a criminal-minded character? What makes a character a hero? 

Is someone like Puss in Boots or Jack (as in beanstalk) a hero? Traditional stories have conditioned us to believe that the character who comes out alive and well in the end is the one we should admire most. But does this constitute a character of substance, or just a wily individual willing to ‘do whatever it takes’ to be the last person standing? 

Today when we write characters we attempt to represent admirable qualities with human blemishes. These are our heroes because they are the people we aspire to be, despite the fears and faults we keep hidden in our hearts. Fairy stories were the complete opposite. Criminal-minded characters were many times classed as the heroes of said tales. For authors or interested parties, go here to see how writers build their characters.