Today, in the age of social media, anyone can publish and distribute their own writing. But how do writers find their audience in this newly democratised publishing world? And how is writing itself adapting to the new platforms of social media?

This presentation was first delivered at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance on Wednesday 2nd March 2011. It looks at how writers work in social media, focusing on the concept of community, and the role of writing in building and maintaining online communities. If you like the presentation and would like more detail the author is happy to talk to groups and organisations about writing for social media and developing online strategy.

Damien Walter is a writer and blogger and regular contributor to The Guardian website. Email him at damiengwalter@gmail.com of follow him on Twitter @damiengwalter

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Now that the novelty of the internet is wearing off, writers seem ever more determined to turn their words in to cash. Here’s how you can recycle work, be a bit inventive and bring some money in. I write voluntarily for LeftLion because it gives me an online presence as well as unlimited access to authors whose interviews I am then able to recycle and pitch to other publications. A recent interview with Sir Andrew Motion springs to mind.

I had a 1,000 word feature accepted by Leaf Magazine who don’t pay but instead offer a free one page advert. This can be used to promote other work you may be involved in or if you are hungry enough, you can sell on to your contacts in the book trade who might have something they have a budget to promote. Cash is always the preferred method of payment but when it’s not, you just have to fight with the tools you’ve been given. Also included in Issue 3 is a 1,500 word travel piece about making a literary pilgrimage to Ljubljana. This, if you plan it right, can gain you free accommodation and travel expenses which helps offset your donation of free words.

Before you turn your nose up at this seemingly desperate behaviour, be under no illusion that a writer is bottom of the food chain. You are a street peasant living by your wits, constantly on the move to keep warm, grateful for a cardboard box to keep out the rain. This is why you recycle your words.

For the Leaf Writers’ magazine I focussed on Motion’s current project Return to Treasure Island (2012, Canongate) as it fitted neatly with their themed issue of ‘travel’. My true master though was Writers’ News who do pay and so I saved Motion’s best quotes; the things that drive him, his vision for modern poetry and what he feels are the best words he has ever written. My only problem was that both publications came out in February. But it is a calculated risk that can be justified if approached professionally. Leaf is currently establishing itself (this was only their third issue) and so they won’t have the same visibility on the high street.

The Huffington Post recently sold for 315million to AOL after costing next to nothing to set up. A commentator joked in the Independent that the real profit came from failing to pay all their contributors. With this in mind, why am I writing this blog for free? Which corner of this website is my cardboard box hiding in? Maybe these blogs will become a series, something that could turn into a book proposal or a regular column in a new magazine. Maybe it will lead to some panel work at a conference as it has done in the past. Whatever it is I’ll find it because you just have to.

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Approximately a year ago I started attending the meetings of a Leicester based speculative fiction writing group called The Speculators. What I’ve learned since first attending my first meeting with The Speculators are a lot of strategies that help me cope with the process of writing. As a year has passed it feels like this is a natural time to look back and share half a dozen of the things I’ve learned from spending time with The Speculators.

1. Silence is golden. It is important to be able to work without distraction. Eliminate as many distractions as possible. Having two hours of silence set aside each week just to write with no interruptions gives me the space to work on hard problems.  Busy cafés or pubs are also great places to work because the background chatter and ambient noise filter out any meaning from the background noises which can pull you away from the concentration needed to write.
2. Befriend other writers. It really helps getting people you know, but who can also be reasonably objective, to look at your work and comment on it. Knowing the group of people you get your regular critiques well helps you because knowing their interests lets you interpret their comments more accurately. Aside from getting feedback, it’s good to have a safe environment where you can make mistakes, and also have a space where you can watch and learn from friends as they develop, each with their own highs and lows.
3. Have models. Reading widely and paying attention to how novels and short stories work is really important. If you are stuck on specific project it’s useful to try to identify a previously written story with techniques similar to the ones you want to use and then working out how that story’s been written. This means if you’re stuck trying to use a form of third-person narration to go away and look at a story which has the form you want to use in it. If you want to know how to write a murder mystery then go and read lots of murder mysteries and look for common patterns and ideas between the  stories.
4. Know yourself. It is a common, yet accurate, observation that when writing fiction you are limited by your own experiences and interests. They are inescapable. In the past year I have learned to submit to that and use fiction as a tool to question my beliefs and the world around me. Understand that if you attempt to know yourself, and what you think about the world you live in, then the fiction you write will be better and truer than if you’ve not made the effort to examine yourself.
5. Telling the truth. This point follows from the last. I have found it a good strategy when writing fiction to adopt and use events I’ve experienced or personal beliefs in fiction. It can be heavily disguised, sure, but having some kernel of truth in a story makes it easier to write and the final story more interesting. There’s a manifesto written by Rudy Rucker called “Transrealism” which has become a major influence on me and my work.
6. Progress is glacial. If you’re always trying to learn and experiment then you’ll always be improving. Your own improvement is slow and hard to observe, but over time the changes are dramatic and you will eventually notice them. Writing isn’t a race of any kind against anyone. It’s a long and often solo walk in the countryside.

Poet Mark Godwin asks, are we facing a digital poetry revolution?

Poetry is to be heard. At the moment we are perhaps on the brink of a revolution. Unlike bards of old who had to travel the roads to disperse their words, and who were eventually finished off by the power of print, poets of the digital age now have an opportunity to create a new audio tradition.

I’m not sure, but I think that SoundCloud in the next few years could expand with an explosion of heard poetry.

If you are a poet and like to speak and hear poetry then I suggest you consider putting your voice on SoundCloud.

What’s SoundCloud? Well, it is a virtual place where musicians get to share their work. Audio files are large and difficult to share by email, so an easy way of sharing such files was created by the SoundClouders. And there’s nothing stopping poets, or anyone, projecting sounds to fatten that cloud.

I’m putting up Digitally Produced Audio Poetry, but there’s also good old fashioned clearly delivered poetry with nothing other than the presence of voice. There’s not a huge amount of good stuff on SoundCloud as yet, but hopefully more poets will cotton on to The Cloud as somewhere virtual for their sounds to soar.

During my SoundCloud surfing I met a poet called Philip Larkin, sending stuff up into The Cloud from Hull. Now, if you can resist, don’t click this link: http://soundcloud.com/philiplarkin

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So it seems like common sense to use a wordcount as a measure of work done on a piece of writing. From one perspective the word is the basic building block of writing, the brick from which we build our walls. It’s a common sense assumption popularised by the pulp writing ethos where words written literaly equated to pennies earned, and by participatory writing programmes like NaNoWriMo where just getting the words down on paper is the goal. I’ve grown up as a writer with the pulp ethos, and will continue to fail at NaNoWriMo as long as my fingers are able to type, but increasingly I wonder if wordcount is a counterproductive way of measuring our progress as writers.

In fiction at least, it is not the word that is the basic building block, but the scene. When I’m writing well, I’m not thinking about how many words I’m putting down on paper, any more than a draughtsman counts the number of strokes in a drawing. I’m thinking about what I need to do to make the scene at hand live and breathe. What do I need to say about the location? What narrative information do I need leading in to and out of the scene? What do the characters want, and what is going to change for them as the scene turns? Beat by beat the scene plays out on paper, and scene by scene the story is built.

Now I can sit down and write two thousand words and not write a single scene. Alternatively, I might spend the same amount of time and only write two lines of dialogue, but if they are two lines that turn a pivotal scene and bring the sory to life, I’ve made more progress. Or in the time taken to write that two thousand words, I might just sit and let my imagination flow and discover a wonderful new level of depth in one of my characters which I then capture in two hundred words and again, though the wordcount is less, the progress is greater.

Wordcount satisfies our most literal need to feel we have made progress with the work of writing fiction. But in satisfying that need, in pushing through to some arbitrary wordcount it is easy to neglect the space that the imagination needs to do the real work of creating a rich and meaningful story.

As alternatives to a wordcount I use two things. The first is a scene count. If I write a full scene in a sitting, including dialogue, description etc ec then I am happy. Alternatively, I like to put aside a block of time, usualy two hours, during whch I will work on the story. I might write three thousand words, or I might find the deep motivation of a character, or might just draw a little doodle. Its amazing how many times the doodle ends up as something more important than the three thousand words!

The imagination works in mysterious ways, and it’s wonders are not always best measured by counting words.

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Today has been a day of short stories. Not writing them, I haven’t done that for a while. No, today has been about other people’s short stories, two competitions in fact. The first involves the Saturday Night, Sunday Morning competition we ran as part of the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Day. You would think that drafting up a brief, promoting it and allocating a judge would be pretty straight forward but it is far more complicated than that as I am learning. Without going into details I’d like to share a few pieces of advice so that if you attempt something similar, you can keep the drama to the page.

Firstly, if this is run by a voluntary group then be clear about specific roles and criteria. For example; where are entries sent to, who collates them, have you consulted the judges as to whether they need a shortlist or if they will read the lot, paper copies or electronic, what timeframe are you working to, who consults losers and winners, whose monitoring submissions and keeping up promotion if standards or quantity drop, etc. Yer get meh? As we say in Notts.

There’s loads of other stuff you need to think about but you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. On the bright side, problems can always magically turn into solutions. This doesn’t come from ‘thinking outside the box’ or ‘creative thinking’, it results from pure panic when you realise what a monstrous time-consuming beast you’ve just created. So let’s say you expected ten entries and you got five hundred, what to do? Get them libraries involved, you know the ones that the government want to close down, they can enlist the services of local reading groups to sift through them. Or perhaps some students on a local MA need some practical experience of the literature scene to bolster those CVs. Then there’s other local organisations like the Nottingham Writers’ Studio who may gain added experience to include in future funding bids, to build into a mentoring scheme. Etc. Writers use words to alter situations and moods, we can be magical too.

The other short story experience today is a new twig on the LeftLion writing branch. We have started a ‘creative writing’ feature and hope to have one illustrated story published online per month. This could potentially lead to a ‘best of’ collection – if we ever find the time to go for funding, or we may decide to publish the magazine monthly in which case we will finally have space to welcome fiction onboard. Then of course there is the new website which should go live pretty soon and will have a dedicated page for literature. So we’ll be looking for audio files as well as making little films of those wonderful stories you’ve just started to send through. But sorting all of these things out will take time – as will reading your entries, but it will happen, trust me. I don’t sleep. We don’t sleep. It’s the first rule of Write Club.

And so in offering to give up even more waking hours to reading I have also found a solution for a problem I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We need to change the name of our spoken word event ‘Scribal Gathering’ because someone has already bagged it. And here it is, unintentionally falling onto my laptop. Write Club.

The first rule of Write Club is quality spoken word events. (repeat three times on stage with a menacing grimace). By the way, this scrap will take place at the Nottingham Contemporary on April 2nd as a warm-up to that feisty word minstrel Kate Tempest. So get yer gloves on and come and have a go if you’re bard enough.

Submit your creative writing to Write Lion.

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I’ve been asked to write a little about the experience of winning the first East Midlands Poetry Slam, which I’m rather honored to be doing. This has honestly been somewhat of wish-fulfillment for me, as well as a pretty nostalgic reminder of how I got to this point, thanks in no small part to Leicester’s writing community.

Slam was actually how I first began performing poetry, having mistakenly stumbled into the Brighterside Poetry Slam in my third week of university having mistaken it for a regular WORD! evening. I’d never been on stage before, and was nervous enough about reading my still relatively unrefined work to an audience, let alone competing publicly. I was terrified, but something about the friendly atmosphere and laid back attitude of the place made me stay, and I threw my hat into the ring, eventually coming in at third place, much to my utter amazement.

From then on I was hooked. The encouragement and appreciation I received that night from the audience, judges, compare, and competing gave me the enthusiasm to keep writing, and the courage to share my development with an appreciative and supportive crowd. I eventually wrote my dissertation on performance poetry, citing events like WORD! as vital to the creation not only of new culture, but of greater development for community and individuals alike.

This may all sound a bit excessive to describe the experience of winning the Slam, but this really is something of a dream come true. I love writing, and since I first took to the stage over two years ago, I’ve kept myself motivated by thinking ‘Maybe one day, I’ll be good enough to be booked at WORD!’. Winning this Slam has totally reinvigorated my faith in my own creativity, and it’s an honor to be awarded such a prestigious accolade. More importantly, it’s an honor to have been judged and accepted by my fellow poets, whose work I’ve admired for years, and who’ve motivated me to greater heights.
So thank you Leicester, and thank you WORD! I promise, I plan to make this only the beginning of my path as a poet.

If you pay to enter a writing contest are you being scammed? Yes, almost always. Why? Because you should never pay to submit work for consideration. Ever. It doesn’t matter if there’s a cash prize or even if as a runner-up you get published, because that’s not how a healthy publishing environment works. The first rule of getting your work published is an honest market should never ask you for money.

The reason that paying to enter a writing contest is a scam is this: there is no guarantee of publication when entering any competition; the chances of winning anything are also slim, and if publication by a route other than vanity presses is your goal there are other, maybe, non-paying markets on the internet for you to try first.

Consider this. If you send a submission to a market, be it an anthology or a magazine, then you are already entering into a form of competition. You are in competition with every other writer on that slush pile for the editor’s attention. The difference here is that you’ve not given the publisher any money. If any money is involved between you and the publisher, then it’s from the publisher to you for the right to publish your work.

Of course that relationship is still open to exploitation. While I have no real problem with the writer not being paid or being paid only in a complimentary copy of the publication their work is featured in, there is still the risk of an unscrupulous publisher exploiting this relationship to steal work or make a financial gain which in any other industry would be deemed highly unethical. But the loss involved in these unfortunate cases is still less than when you’ve paid to enter a contest.

What if the publisher says the entry fee is required to finance the production of the anthology of winning stories? Sorry, still a scam. If the anthology or prize has a genuine audience beyond writers seeking publication for their work then there are alternative ways to raise the money from individuals interested in the anthology. The website Kickstarter is a possibility to be noted here.

By paying to enter a writing contest you are defrauding yourself. If publication is what your only goal there are other alternatives. If you win the prize offered by a contest think of all the losers who lost their money and consider how important the contest is to those who haven’t entered it. I doubt that any prize which requires you to pay is large enough to generate attention beyond its contributes and their loyal readers.

My feelings about this are very strong, but you might disagree. If so, why?

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