SAFARI FRIDAY searching the web for writers and readers
Safari = Swahili for long journey.
I am on the look out for anything accessible from a keyboard that educates, entertains, intrigues, raises a smile. Anything that helps a writer or reader get through the day or the next draft.
Let me know if you write a website that you’d like featured or discover something that really should be shared.
CATHERINE, CAFFEINATED
This is the first blog I ever followed and is still the one I recommend most often, so I was bound to focus on it in my very first Safari Friday. The fact that it is written by a 30 year old Cork writer and therefore fits neatly into my Irish themed week is almost enough to make me believe in a universe where we are all connected. Almost.
Anyway, it says a lot about the way Catherine Howard writes that her blog caught my attention and has held it for three+ years even though originally I had little interest in self publishing. I was captivated by Catherine’s style. She’s funny and generous, delivering vast amounts of useful information; she’s honest about cul de sacs she’s been tempted down so you don’t have to make her mistakes and she is also highly successful. She published her first book in 2010 because no mainstream publisher was willing to take a risk with a travel memoir about working in Disney Orlando. So far she has sold 12,000 copies of Mousetrapped and if you’re not impressed it can only be that you have never tried to sell a copy of any book.
And she has done that without spending any money. Now you have to be impressed by that.
Catherine has become an acknowledged expert and often lectures on the subject of self publishing, but it is not her only love: she also writes about good coffee and space travel, neither of which power my shower but she manages to make them interesting.
She has released two other full length books and the third is out this year. If I were the CEO of a big publishing company I’d spoil it all and offer her a mega contract.
GOOD FOR
Anyone considering self publishing
Anyone who wants to promote something they have published
Anyone thinking about writing a blog – this is a good model of how it is done.
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5 comments on “SAFARI FRIDAY searching the web for writers and readers”
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BACK TO CREATIVE WRITING SCHOOL
A Good Confession
"Unputdownable" Miriam Stoppard
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I also follow Catherine’s blog it’s very useful and lovely.
Always a good read!
I follow Catherine’s blog, she did a workshop at Faber recently 🙂
Xx
I imagine she writes as she talks in which case I bet it was a good workshop
Yeah, I wish I’d been able to go, but it was on the same day as my class lol 😦
Xx