http://www.joannephillips.co.uk en-gb joannephillips.co.uk 2009-6-4T00:00:00Z joannephillips.co.uk http://www.joannephillips.co.uk/page4.htm#42753 Providing a comprehensive index for your readers gives your manuscript that professional edge. Indexing is a complex and creative skill and a good index should be a joy to use. With selfpublishing increasingly prevalent and more and more publishers expecting authors to provide an index for their book usually at their own expense it makes sense to get to grips with what makes a good index. Ann Kingdom Marketing Director for the Society of Indexers says A great index is one that does its job unobtrusively always taking you to just the right part of the book. Too often index users are frustrated they know that what they are looking for must be somewhere in the book but cannot track it down via the index. One of the problems with authors compiling their own indexes Ann says is that they are often too close to their texts to be able to put themselves in their readers shoes. This is a difficult hurdle for authors to overcome to try and look at the book through fresh eyes when you hav... 2009-6-4T00:00:00Z http://www.joannephillips.co.uk/page4.htm#33624 There has been talk in recent months about publishers in the UK opening their previously closed doors to submissions from unagented authors. It seems that so few agents are taking on sparkling new authors these days credit crunch and all thatYawn publishers are looking to their slush piles to find the writing stars of tomorrow. There is also a growing trend for publishing deals to be handed out to authors who have previously gone down the selfpublishing route. In the latest Writers News magazine Jan 2009 it is reported that novelists Polly Courtney and Melanie Rose have both signed threebook deals with Avon an imprint of HarperCollins. The deals follow the success of their novels which were selfpublished by Matador. If this is the case then do we still need to approach and enlist representation from an agent in the first instance Or is their role in the publishing process becoming sidelined Should authors circumnavigate literary agents completely and either c... 2008-12-10T00:00:00Z http://www.joannephillips.co.uk/page4.htm#27353 What exactly is an ezine and why does your business need one Ezines are everywhere you may even be a subscriber yourself. But for those concerned with internet marketing the humble ezine offers huge opportunities for business promotion. Over the past few years ezines have become more and more interactive and are no longer merely webbased versions of print magazines. They offer targeted information in a dynamic easily digestible format and hundreds of new ezines are appearing every week. So how can an ezine benefit your business Optin ezines and enewsletters are a legitimate way to provide potential clients with sales information. All you have to do is write an article for an ezine or have someone write it for you if you dont have the time or the right skills and include links to your product or service. Submit the article to popular directories for inclusion and wait for the enquiries to flood in. Sound too good to be true Think again. Your market is both large and targe... 2008-7-22T00:00:00Z http://www.joannephillips.co.uk/page4.htm#27124 While the Internet has opened up many new opportunities for ghostwriters not all of them are welcome. Online agencies like Get A Freelancer and Elance list hundreds of projects under the heading Ghostwriting but many of these projects are actually bundles of miniarticles for submission to article directories and blogs. Even sophisticated surfers may not be aware of the amount of marketing that goes into virtually every aspect of the Internet today. Few blogs are written by their named authors. Many forum posts are farmed out to freelancers. And almost all of this content has an ulterior motive to nudge coerce or tempt the reader into a loop of viral marketing. What does this have to do with writers in general and ghostwriters in particular Surely the increase in the scope and variety of freelance writing work is a good thing Not necessarily. Not when projects are advertised with budgets as low as 30 for 30 articles and the writers who win these projects often cut and paste content fro... 2008-7-17T00:00:00Z http://www.joannephillips.co.uk/page4.htm#26706 There are loads of sites out there where writers like myself can find work some of them free some of them paid for. The most recent I came across was a UK based resource that charged 16375 a year for membership before you even got to have a look at the quality of projects or the competition. I dont think so Get A Freelancer was the first site I joined and Ive had a lot of great projects through them. Most recently I won a project to write a motivational eBook for a network marketing Guru cant mention his name Im afraid confidentiality and all that... and had great fun putting that together. But the problem with GAF is the huge competition from parts of the world where a fee of 30 is a lot of money. Many of the buyers stipulate English as a first language but then award the project to a provider who clearly has no such thing. Why Because they are so cheap UK writers just cant compete on price and as a lot of the work is for web content where neither the client nor the reader is tha... 2008-7-9T00:00:00Z