Last Lecture: Find Your Tribe
Posted: April 30, 2013 Filed under: Actions | Tags: Book Reviews, literary citizenship, Making a Literary Life, Michael Poore, publishing, Social Media, websites 2 Comments
You’ve all come so far since that first night of class. Remember? Remember where you were just a short time ago?
Think about what you accomplished.
- You got people in Muncie to come to the In Print Festival of First Books.
- You sponsored a public talk about graduate school.
- You gave a kick-ass presentation about social media at a meeting of local small business owners.
- You learned things about publishing that I didn’t know for a long, long time.
- You blogged every week for four months!
- You expanded your circle, your “network,” by at least 200 literary people. Because every week, you had to friend or follow five writers, magazines, publishers, agents, readers, etc. (If you can come up with another name for this than “Charming Notes,” I’m all ears.)
- You reviewed books.
- You reviewed the things you read online.
- You learned how complicated online reviewing is these days!
- You interviewed writers. You spread the word and the love.
- You gave public readings.
- You supported your classmates and plain old showed up to stuff.
- You got involved.
Organizing a Literary Event (I did this)
Posted: April 7, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWhen you put students in charge of organizing a literary event, their whole outlook changes. It’s pretty fascinating.
A couple of weeks ago, I helped four of my classmates, along with our professor Cathy Day, plan an event called “What’s Next: Graduate School for Creative Writers.”
(You may have seen the poster I shared for it) 
Cathy, myself, and my classmates Lindsey, Stephanie, Rachael, and Kayla worked together to get a group of Ball State University writing faculty sit on a panel and tell students about their experiences with going to grad school, the different types of graduate programs offered, and the different jobs available to you with these degrees. Sounds interesting, right? It was. The amount of information that the attendees walked away with was borderline overwhelming, in a good way. So what’s the problem? The amount of attendees! (The turnout was a bit disappointing.)
What did we do wrong? Well, I’m not entirely sure so let me tell you…
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It’s Not Just Posters: Advice for Promoting Your Next Local Event
Posted: April 5, 2013 Filed under: Attend/Organize Literary Events, Uncategorized Leave a commentMy students were required to help organize a literary event. Madison was in the group assigned to promote our campus literary festival OFF-CAMPUS. Anyone who teaches knows that’s it’s really hard to bring “Town and Gown” together. Here are some great ideas about how to make that happen–and the most important thing is that students have to leave campus.
Recently I was a part of the promotional team for Ball State’s In Print Festival of First Books. Throughout the process of trying to gain attendees for this literary festival, I learned that there are a 3 key steps for anyone that hopes to promote a local event in a small town and I thought I’d share them with you all.
Step 1 – Window Shop – Yep that’s right, you have to walk. Go to the most high traffic business area in your town and window shop. You are not shopping for merchandise though, you are shopping for windows. Windows to hang up your posters/advertisements for your event. Go in and ask the owner/manager if they are interested in hanging your advertisement. I recommend doing this before you actually have the posters made. This way it allows you to have a conversation with the owner and explain your…
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Playing the Digital-Word-of-Mouth Game
Posted: April 4, 2013 Filed under: Online Community | Tags: blogging, Chuck Sambuchino, literary citizenship, publishing, Social Media Leave a comment
The infographic in question.
A few days ago at BookRiot, the writer Andrew Shaffer asked the question, “What do readers owe authors?” He was responding to a much-discussed infographic that’s been making the rounds. Shaffer notes that Amazon’s recent purchase of Goodreads highlights the importance of “digital word-of-mouth” and how authors and publishers need to do “everything in their power to increase the chatter surrounding their own books on social media.”
He cites these familiar examples:
I’ve seen readers tweet to writers that they enjoyed their books, only to have the writer respond with a “small request” to leave their thoughts on Amazon in the form of a review. Snider even suggests that readers “download and print the infographic to use a checklist” when buying books, so they don’t accidentally forget to like, tag, tweet, share, or review their new purchases. When did being a reader begin to feel like such a chore?
Since I’m basically teaching a class that encourages students to be “literary citizens” and directly participate in book culture by “helping” authors in these exact ways, I’ve given this matter a great deal of thought.
Literary Citizenship 