The Author-izer

Posts Tagged ‘Ghostwriting’

These are my links for March 27th through April 21st:

• BBC NEWS | Politics | LGA banned words – full list –
• What I Wish I Had Known Before Writing My First Book – by Joanna Penn | The Creative Penn –
• Toward the end of paper | Michigan Today –
• Hardback slump drives fall in sales | theBookseller.com –
• Six Lessons From The Ghost Twittering Saga | davefleet.com –
• When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking – NYTimes.com –

These are my links for March 18th through March 23rd:

• Guy Kawasaki Discloses Ghost Writers, Defuses Issue | davefleet.com -
• BookPage: The Author Enablers answer questions about writing and publishing -
• WordFlood 2.0 -

I haven’t written much about ghost blogging lately, though plenty of others have, and I’ve bookmarked their posts here. I didn’t think I had anything new to contribute to the topic.

Anyway, I seem to be doing less blogging and more writing of other kinds for my longstanding ghost-blogging client, so my authority as a confessed ghost blogger might not be as great as it was. I’m not particularly hip to the industry trends, as it were, though I’m well aware of the ongoing controversy.

I had heard that there were people outsourcing the writing of their blogs to workers in India and Malaysia who charged $4/hr. This seems a bit counter to the idea of ghost-anything: no one is likely to think you’re the one writing the posts if the blogger is manifestly sub-literate in English.

Of course, you only care about things like that if the purpose of your blog is to establish your credibility in your field. For most consultants and coaches, it is. But there are other uses for blogs. One is to provide “spider food” for search engines and attract visitors to your website where they will then take usefully income-producing actions.

If the purpose of your blog is to get people to come click on ads, then it hardly matters if the posts are scarcely-coherent clusters of keywords. That’s why “splogging” is so pervasive. It works.

But if you hire some poor slob from Elance to keyword-stuff your own custom splog in order to get money from Google and Amazon, I’d think the last thing you’d want to do is show the thing off to your colleagues, because there’s no possible way it can enhance your credibility.

Yet someone I will not name did just that not an hour ago, posting a link to one such article to a professional group on LinkedIn. Now, there is some actual useful content in that article and the others on the blog. It’s just that very nearly any other possible source of that same information would be more readable and more credible.

In fact, I hope for his sake that no one else on LinkedIn actually reads his article, or if they do, they resist the urge to comment in the group’s discussion section.

But I really, really want to tell this guy to stop being so cheap and hire a blogger who can write. Only not me. I can tell this one is a job I wouldn’t want, even if weren’t already obvious that the blog’s owner wouldn’t pay my rates.

I guess it doesn’t take that many clicks to support paying $4/hr. But what’s it really doing for your business?

These are my links for March 9th through March 16th:

• But ghostwriting Biz Is Good – Jane Genova: Speechwriter – Ghostwriter –
• The Impact of New Digital Formats and Technologies on Publishing : By Melissa Ward : Book Business –
• Printcasting | People-Powered Magazines –
• What Book Publishers Could Learn from Drug Dealers –
• This is not a newspaper: Why ghostblogging doesn’t work « Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog –

These are my links for February 11th from 08:14 to 16:49:

• Independent Book Publishers Association – Member Benefits –
• Planned Television Arts –
• Virtual Author’s Assistant course $499 –
• Elgan: Here comes the e-book revolution –
• Seeking book endorsements may cause nausea, shortness of breath « Online Community Strategist –
• PR-USA.net – Top 5 Self-Publishing Authors Earn $60,000 in 4th Quarter Royalties from Outskirts Press – That's an average of $12,000 each–much higher than your usual self-published book, but probably not enough to let you quit your day job.
• Be a Ghostwriter — Welsh Scribe –

These are my links for February 1st through February 3rd:

• Book Marketing Maven: 12 Ways to Keep Your Nonfiction Book in the News –
• iPods and iPhones: death for the book trade – IPHONETOUCH.BLORGE –
• U.S. Copyright Office – Forms –
• Grasping for the Book Marketing | The Crotchety Old Fan –
• Ghostwriting Uncovered – How To Become A Ghostwriter –
• The Write Place –

These are my links for January 14th through January 17th:

• January 29—How to Lasso Amazon and Make it Do Tricks»Arizona Book Publishing Association –
• Author shares tips on getting your writing published – Phoenix Arizona news, breaking news, local news, weather radar, traffic from ABC15 News | ABC15.com –
• Ghostwriting, Social Media and Ethics | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog –
• ISTC – International Standard Text Code –
• Are publishers still acquiring books? The answer is YES –
• An Autopsy of the Book Business – The Daily Beast –

These are my links for December 24th through January 1st:

• The right way and the wrong way to approach publicists « Book Marketing Buzz –
• Self-Published Book Distributors – Compilation from SpeakerNet News
• The Writers’ Union of Canada : Ghost Writing –
• ‘Plug Your Book!’: Steve Weber’s free online book marketing guide is Amazon-centric—but still useful | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home –
• Publishize – The Book That Explains How You Can Quickly and Affordably Self-Publish a Book That Promotes Your Expertise – What a gruesome title

These are my links for December 14th through December 19th:

• Bestseller -
• Book Publishing’s Month of the Long Knives « Future Perfect Publishing -
• When PR Ghostwriters Get Busted « THE SAME ROWDY CROWD -
• Social Media for Small Business ebook: Microsoft Office Live Small Business -
• Google Settles Book Suits to Expand Online Publishing -

These are my links for December 5th through December 13th:

• Wyeth’s Use of Medical Ghostwriters Questioned – NYTimes.com -
• scott westerfeld – ghostwriting -
• Learn to Write Fiction » Blog Archive » Book Marketing 2.0 -
• Give the gift of publishing from iUniverse – For the first time ever, gift buyers can purchase any iUniverse publishing package as gifts for the aspiring authors in their lives.
• Successful Self-Publishing: Cooking with Trader Joe’s -