[How to Communicate More Effectively is a series of guest posts from Gareth L Powell. In case you missed ’em, here’s part 1 and part 2.]
Once you’ve caught your reader’s attention, you have to keep it. If you’re trying to sell them a subscription or get them to download your latest story, you need to get them interested in what you’re offering, or what you have to say. In order to do that, you’re going to have to show them that your product will bring them immediate and tangible benefits. Don’t just list your magazine’s contents and expect them to get excited. Tell them why those contents are so exciting.
For example:
If you like cutting edge science fiction, you’re in for a real treat this month.
If you’re buying Christmas presents, our book reviews will help you to separate the turkeys from the crackers.
Learn how to maximise your book’s chances of being published in this exclusive article from top editor John Smith.
This is a brand new story from the hotly-tipped young writer, Joel Smidgeon. We predict it will win buckets of awards, and this is your chance to be among the first UK fans to read it.
Here’s some cheery news to balance out the doom’n’gloom of publishing industry lay-offs and bookstore chain incompetence. According to a report from the United States National Endowment for the Arts, 84% of readers who read material online or downloaded from the web are still reading printed books, and furthermore the absolute number of literature readers in the US has grown by 16.6million; this is the first increase in over two decades, and reflects a rise much greater than simple population expansion. Something to smile about, no? [via Mediabistro/Galleycat; image by shaycam]
The team has not yet taken the final step of putting the whole thing into action with a genuine Storm Worm botnet in the wild. From a legal point of view, that could involve many problems. Any unauthorised access to third-party computers could be regarded as tampering with data, which is punishable under paragraph § 303a of the German Penal Code. That paragraph threatens up to two years’ imprisonment for unlawfully deleting, suppressing, making unusable or changing third-party data.
The inevitable New Year’s Resolution wear-off has begun: I resolved to write more and spend less time procrastinating by (amongst other things) surfing the web.
As ever things haven’t quite worked out like that but whilst procrastinating on LifehackerI saw this article from Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and Internet panjandrum, on how to avoid getting distracted by teh webz whilst writing:
Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don’t. Don’t give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type “TK” where your fact should go, as in “The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.”
Second Life may be off the headline radar now the hype has died off, but there’s still plenty happening there if you know where to look. The latest genre author to appear in-world as a public speaker (following after such luminaries as William Gibson, Charles Stross and Terry Pratchett) is Kim Stanley Robinson, who will be donning the form of a coyote while he gives a presentation to Second Life’s transhumanist clade, Extropia. [via NewWorldNotes]
Robinson’s appearance is scheduled for this coming Saturday, 17th January, at high noon Second Life Time/PDT; full details at the Extropia Events blog (to which is also due the credit for the screenshot of Robinson’s coyote avatar, Stan Shackleton).
Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Here’s some cheery news to balance out the doom’n’gloom of publishing industry lay-offs and bookstore chain incompetence. According to 
Once again, the physical space in which you can expect (or even hope) to avoid being relentlessly marketed at contracts in a dying spasm… that’s right, not even your car is a scared space any more, as
The inevitable New Year’s Resolution wear-off has begun: I resolved to write more and spend less time procrastinating by (amongst other things) surfing the web.
Second Life