Hey, Jim Hill! » Social Media

Adventures in Children’s Pubishing Query Contest

Jim — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:20:03 +0000

Last week I entered a fun contest over at the Adventure’s in Children’s Publishing blog. They drafted an agent and a handful of writers to review fifty queries, help polish them up, and then take the query down to a log line. Here are the details:

Our new contest/workshop started on Thursday 8/19. We accepted the first 50 short synopsis (pitch) entries up to 175-words. Starting 8/26, those entries will be open for critiques from our panel of fantastic mentoring authors and you, our generous visitors. We hope you will participate. Next stop after that? On 9/2, we’ll get the loglines from our contestants, critique those for two weeks, then the writers will put everything they’ve learned together into a query letter. The query letter competition will be judged by Sarah LaPolla of Curtis Brown.

It’s a great contest idea and has a lot people involved giving good critiques of the queries. Here’s mine in case you want to comment.

Last week, as part of the Cape Cod Writers Conference, I had the chance to read from that story, The Case Against My Sister: Sixth Grade, and was blown away by the positive comments. People seem to love the voice, relate to the hero and worship the villain. I smell a sequel.

I’ll keep you posted as this contest continues.

NaPiBoWriWee Bloggers

Jim — Sat, 08 May 2010 18:33:12 +0000

Lifting this list from Paula’s post with additions from the comments. If I missed you, post your blog in the comments and I will add you to the list.

*UPDATED* I’ve added Nancy Sanders to the list. She’s the author of “Yes! You Can Learn How To Write Children’s Books, Get Them Published, and Build a Successful Writing Career” the book I was lucky enough to win for participating.

Thanks, Nancy!

NaPiBoWriWee Participant Blog Links:

Hey! Greg Pincus Hacked My Mac!

Jim — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:04:13 +0000

A funny thing happened on the way to getting this blog rolling, and it happened over on The Happy Accident. Greg wrote a post called “the Blahgs” about struggling to maintain momentum with your site. He makes some great points and offers ideas to get yourself back on track. It hit home with me, as I’ve been working up the will to build out this blog. But that wasn’t the funny thing. At least not in the ROFLcopter way. No the funny thing is that buried in a folder on my Mac is a file called “comic ideas” and it includes the following:

The Blahgs - funky, freaky, ironic and cynical looks at life in the online age

“What’re you blogging about?”

“The fact that I have nothing to blog about. I’m citing your post from yesterday about the same thing.”

“Cool. I linked to yours about writer’s block from last week in mine.”

“Yeah, my traffic totally spiked.”

“People just love posts about nothing.”

It’s true, when you’re stuck write about nothing. It worked for Seinfeld, it’ll work for you. And me, at least until I figure out what I’m really blogging about.

Addendum

I don’t really think Greg hacked my Mac, but you should read his blog to pick up a lot of great social media ideas.

Sense & Sociability

Jim — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:11:36 +0000

Miss Jane, a secret identity.

My good friend, Beth Dunn, has launched a new blog series at Hubspot focused on online etiquette titled Sense & Sociability . Beth is a big nerd and has somehow found a way to tie her love of social media in with her love of Jane Austen. Odd as that pairing may sound, the column rocks and we get off lucky. She could have paired social media with unicorns, knitting or show tunes.

When the idea came up she emailed me to ask for help. With a subject line of, “Hey, Mr. Awesome Logo Guy” she got my attention (oh, vanity…). We exchanged a few more emails, ideas, color schemes (HubSpot orange!) and the illustration sprang to life.

She’s taking questions now, so email her with your online etiquette conundrums and you just may have them answered by an expert. Me? I’m waiting on the post about auto-dm’s, replies and ‘bots called Sense and Sociability and Zombies.