writeralley blog

It’s been a challenging week over at Writeralley Classifieds. We spent the weekend cleaning up after a particularly malicious DDOS hacker attack, which attempted to bruteforce destroy our entire server. I guess it’s a tad bit worrying that we’re having to deal with such a destructive act of cyber vandalism at such an early stage ……but nevertheless, it happens to the best of them and the fabulous folks in our IT dept moved fast to protect us. Everything’s fine now (Yay!)

Good news too that, having backed up for the umpteenth time this week, we’ve now opened up the writeralley™ self-service advertising portal. It works a bit like Google Adwords, users can create and submit ads online that then run across different alleys (U.S. cities) as either a text or banner ad format.

Feel free to have a look around (http://advertising.writeralley.org), prices will be kept reasonable, so as writeralley grows not just local businesses but individuals can reach targeted customers in their geographical area.

Cheers for now,
Hannah x

Writeralley now welcomes musicians and indie bands to showcase their work to the music industry, and get a record deal; as well as artists and photographers to exhibit their art portfolios for potential employers, art schools and clients. You can upload an entire gallery of photos, videos and multimedia content – there’s even a category now for stand-up comics to showcase their video performances as well.

It’s completely free to post on writeralley, and it’s open to everyone!

Good news, the industry project has finally kicked off! Alleypedia, a free, open encyclopedia for the english language publishing industry that anyone can edit and improve, is now up and running.

As daunting as it is exciting, alleypedia is a unique wiki, originally conceived to help users of our classifieds site find accurate, reliable information on publishers and literary agents who might interact with them through the manuscript classifieds section.

We hope, due to the monumental breadth of this industry encyclopedia, that will reference everything from profiles on mainstream theater producers and book publishers to the type of obscure stuff, still only found offline in places like the Writers Handbook and A C and Black’s Writers’ and Artist’s; alleypedia will be of interest to a diverse mix of writers and professionals, both inside and outside the publishing industry.

Indeed, the project uses the same software as Wikipedia, deliberately looks similar to Wikipedia, and is deliberately licenced under the GNU Free Doc Licence, to provide a wholesome touch of familiar wiki stability.

As the project proclaims on it’s extensive FAQ page: “Alleypedia’s goal is to create a free universal encyclopedia for the publishing industry, the largest in publishing history, both in terms of breadth and depth, and to become a reliable resource. It’s an ambitious goal which will probably take many years to achieve.”

Don’t think we’re underestimating that last part… this is a HUGE job and will take a very very long time. Even wikipedia doesn’t have a working archive of entries for ALL operational literary agents and publishers in the United States, for example…

So that Alleypedia doesn’t end up as a complete derivative work of wikipedia/wikibooks/Jimbo wales related engineering work, we want to encourage authors, publishers, and other industry related parties to write orginial articles and pages. Or, at the very least take care of their own company or service provider page.

This is a collaborative effort afterall, and even if the internet is growing beyond control, publishers should still care what’s said about them online… Alleypedia allows them to control this process.

We hope the industry will find Alleypedia useful. If they do,  I guess we’ll have to do something about prettying up those URLs. Maybe even move the pages from the writeralley subdomain to alleypedia.org.

Time for a cup of tea,

Hannah

Thanks very much to our friend Emma Barnes, Managing Director of Snowbooks and Onix Central, for helping us promote writeralley™ to serious author’s in the UK.

The purpose of writeralley™ is to be useful for authors and traditional, advance-paying publishers, like Snowbooks, through it’s extensive organization and quality manuscript listings.

If other publishers (big and small) can help promote writeralley™ amongst the worldwide author community, for instance, by placing a mention to us in their rejection letters, it can help us do our job better and connect talented writers with publishers who will give them the break they’re looking for.

writeralley™ is good for our industry.

Imagine what it will feel like to hold that first published copy of your book in your hands. Have you given any thought to where you might hold your first book signing? With writeralley, getting from manuscript to traditional publishers desk is a lot easier and faster than you might think.

Often, the reason it takes so much time finding a publisher, is not that your manuscript is bad, or that it lacks literary merit, you could be a fantastic author worthy of publication, it’s just that your manuscript didn’t land on the right editors desk, at the time when their company was looking for your particular genre of work. But with writeralley, whereever you live in the united states, writeralley can help give your manuscript a voice.

Try and think of posting on writeralley as a bit like a special craigslist dedicated to help connect writers with editors, and relevant parties in the publishing industry and hollywood. It’s so easy and safe to use, writeralley is already getting the interest of new york trade publishers and literary agents, scouting the site in search of the next twilight or Harry Potter. Even big publishers with submission policies which officially don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts have started browsing the manuscript classifieds at writeralley.

The genres are all based on library of congress classifications, which is part of the reason writeralley is so useful to traditional publishing houses, because it provides a structured environment for acquisitions editors all over America to search for specific types of manuscripts and proposals; and producers for plays and filmscripts, and find exactly what they’re looking for.

With writeralley, you don’t have to have an agent, you don’t have to shop your work around for months, or even endure all of those rejection letters, you can find the right publisher for your manuscript by posting on writeralley today.

Even if you haven’t finished your manuscript, you can still make a listing for your forthcoming book or proposal and get contacted by publishers whenever you’re ready. So, start thinking about that first book signing, because within a matter of months writeralley could help you get there.

A good place to start is to firstly thank our kind friend, Dave Kuzminski, editor of the rather marvellous Preditors & Editors resource for supporting writeralley™ and what we’re trying to achieve.

As promised Dave, a link to Preditors & Editors will appear at the top of each manuscripts category,  providing a safe information venue that writers can go to get background information on publishers who might contact them on the basis of their listings. For writers who don’t know, preditors is probably one of the best and most comprehensive resources in the industry for writers of all genres. Definitely a must for the newbie

The idea for a craigslist-type classifieds dedicated to helping unpublished writers, artists and maybe journalists find the right publisher for their manuscript, is admittedly a new idea, but it is the first of it’s kind on the internet. As always, new ideas take time to get to know and like, and we hope writeralley™ will be taken seriously as a credible resource.

For those who are interested, writeralley™ was rather comfortingly conceived in SF, and evolved as a pet side project in the editorial dept of Schiel & Denver book publishers, addressing the need for a unified place online where both publishers and authors, of all sizes and backgrounds could go to give and receive submissions, and connect. Like a massive submissions pile, intricately organized into Library of Congress book classifications and literary genres, writeralley™ will hopefully through it’s extensive organization give a voice to the many talented writers out there who every year try to get their work published.

With mostly free postings for services, jobs, personals and housing, writeralley™ is seeking to do something extra special, in fostering that inimitable community spirit of small-town America amidst the chaos of a busy publishing classifieds. But if writeralley™ achieves only one thing, being a useful resource for writers and publishers, and eliminating the need for those heartbreaking rejection letters, all the weeks of research and expense to get this idea off the ground would have been worth it.

Authors, we look forward to reading your original and highly saleable listings. Publishers, feel free to open an account and become regular browsers. We’re sure you’ll find some literary gems.

Please feel free to leave comments or feedback …we welcome both and it will help us make the site more useful for everyone.

Hannah

(editor, S&D and writeralley™ co-ordinator)

P.S. if you’re a publisher reading this, please consider mentioning writeralley™ in your rejection letters to authors? Afterall, what may not be a good fit in your backlist, might be a bestseller in someone elses…and even great writers have at some time in their career experienced rejection. If we all help each other, the industry can only benefit.