M
Madeleine Conway
Guest
I'm sharing this with lovely Litopians because I suspect you will enjoy it and hopefully, no one in my immediate vicinity will hear about it. 
This morning, I did a creative writing workshop with a group of adults. It's an established group and the regular writer who does it is away this week, so she asked for volunteers to replace her. There were 15 participants, really lovely people, ranging from a very sweet old lady in lemon-yellow who said she didn't actually do any writing but she liked the company, to a couple trying to break into story-books for the 5-8 year old market. There was also a lady who is a prolific self-publisher, producing Regency romances, fantasy, fairy tales and some steamier stuff.
We did a character-based writing exercise, and the group were terrific, some really memorable and interesting pieces coming out of it, and they also asked me many questions about my own publishing history and self-publishing versus traditional model, promotion etc. I said that however one published, nowadays, writers have to be up for the self-promotion stuff, and confessed that I'd only recently joined Twitter, started tweeting etc etc. Prolific Author Lady at the end came up to me and said, "How many followers have you got on Twitter?" and I said, quite honestly, about 150. She preened visibly and said, "Amateur. I've got 6000"
I am so owned. Lol.
PS if you do not know Ed Reardon's Week, a half-hour comedy series about a struggling author on Radio 4, it is well worth downloading if you can find podcasts.
This morning, I did a creative writing workshop with a group of adults. It's an established group and the regular writer who does it is away this week, so she asked for volunteers to replace her. There were 15 participants, really lovely people, ranging from a very sweet old lady in lemon-yellow who said she didn't actually do any writing but she liked the company, to a couple trying to break into story-books for the 5-8 year old market. There was also a lady who is a prolific self-publisher, producing Regency romances, fantasy, fairy tales and some steamier stuff.
We did a character-based writing exercise, and the group were terrific, some really memorable and interesting pieces coming out of it, and they also asked me many questions about my own publishing history and self-publishing versus traditional model, promotion etc. I said that however one published, nowadays, writers have to be up for the self-promotion stuff, and confessed that I'd only recently joined Twitter, started tweeting etc etc. Prolific Author Lady at the end came up to me and said, "How many followers have you got on Twitter?" and I said, quite honestly, about 150. She preened visibly and said, "Amateur. I've got 6000"
I am so owned. Lol.
PS if you do not know Ed Reardon's Week, a half-hour comedy series about a struggling author on Radio 4, it is well worth downloading if you can find podcasts.
