Resources for Writers

I’m teaching a workshop, The Synopsis: Four Steps to the Ultimate SALES Tool, this weekend in College Station, so, I’ve been reviewing my notes and getting ready.

I decided to add a handout of resources for writers. That means going through my books on writing and also finding sites about agents and writing. I used to maintain a website of over 50 pages. A lot of those pages housed the archives for my e-newsletter, Doing It Write. About seven or eight of the pages were links. When I re-did my website, I cut those pages out. Going from over 50 pages to about eight pages sure made the site more manageable. It also meant that before I put some of those sites onto a resource list, I had to check to make sure they were still viable.

Even when I still had the links on my website, they were constantly changing. Sites disappear, URLs change – most of the time I didn’t know a link was broken unless someone emailed me. I definitely appreciated it when visitors to the site let me know. I had literally hundreds of links, too many to keep up with.

So far I’ve got about three pages of resource sites, as well as books. I’ll need to quit tonight, print it out and take it to Kinko’s in order to make copies to take with me on Friday. The other handouts have already been sent to Mark Troy at Brazos Writers to be put into attendees’ packets.

Then, hopefully, I’m all set to teach the workshop. Yea! Who wouldn’t be excited about three hours talking about writing the synopsis and using it as a selling tool for your book?