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Tag Archives: publishing

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New featured images – Writing

The PolyBlog
April 19 2020

I mentioned in an earlier post (New featured images – Headers, website posts, and computers) that I was upgrading my setup on my website for graphics, and I’ve already covered posts related to astronomy, my website and computers, and governance (governance, international development, civil service, a conference and my HR Guide). For my website posts, I used to frequently use an image of a frog typing:

I decided during this update that I wanted to re-purpose that image to just be about writing, so I found other images for my website/blogging options.

But even with that re-purposing, and saving it for writing, I’m left with a second question. Do I use it for MY writing, i.e., my fiction? Or do it use it when I’m writing about the craft of writing? Or both?

I confess up until recently, a lot of categories related to my writing have tended to blend together. For example, while I have 52 posts that are in the “writing” category, only five of them are ONLY in the writing category; the other 47 are cross-posted with publishing, family, even weight-loss. Which is a bit of a question mark for me…if I decide to write about a topic on my blog, isn’t it ALL writing?

When it comes to family, I have written eulogies for my father and mother, and a wedding speech for my own wedding. Back in university, I did a skit nite for stand-up style comedy, and my weekend update sketch is on my site. Those are quite different from most of my posts, and I would say are samples of my “writing”. They cross-post, sure, but they are not posts — they are stand-alone writing projects. I’m also working on a novel that I started back in November … it clearly is NOT a “post”. So I have filed it with my writing category. And for me, I think that is the main defining criteria. When I’m writing something as a project, even though I’m posting it, it is “writing”. Anything else is, well, not “writing”.

Yet in that category, I also have a bunch of posts about the technical side of writing. Mostly articles I’ve read, or reviews of classes / books about writing. And when I think of those, it is almost like post-writing, near “editing”, or pre-writing, generic techniques. None of those phrases lend themselves to an obvious image. Editing perhaps could have a red pen marking up text, but that’s hard to show in a small graphic. I found an image of an editor sitting on a throne, or a pile of manuscripts, but those are a particular type of tone. I found one of a pencil over a marked up page, but the look wasn’t appealing, and the dimensions were wrong. I considered one of a typewriter (old school), one of a kid writing at a desk (wrong tone, wrong dimensions), and one of a pencil on blue sheet of paper (nice colours, nothing communicative).

After eliminating those, I’m down to three options. The first is a piece of text with a magnifying glass and a pencil hovering above it. It has an “editing” / “technique” vibe to it, I guess, but the image itself doesn’t resonate with me. The second is an orange piece of paper (visually appealing), with a burgundy ballpoint pen to the side. I like it, it’s decent. And the third one is a red square that looks almost like a button. With a red pencil above it writing on a piece of paper within the square. It isn’t as communicative as the orange paper with a pen, but it “pops” as a featured image. Plus I feel like the red signifies “editing” somehow. Either will work, but I’m going with the red one.

There is one other category with a similar bent to it, and for lack of a better term for the category, I labelled it “publishing”. If the writing technique comes first, and my writing comes second, then the business of getting those words into the world comes next. I could try to do something more with sales and bookstores, but that presupposes a stage that is separate from publishing. If I went the ebook world, those are likely more tightly tied together, particularly if my main sales venue were to be Amazon. As with governance, I created my own symbol. A four-quadrant circle and stuck different “avenues” or “models” of publishing in the quadrants.

With the decision to wrap these all together in the “writing” category, I’ve even decided to delete the publishing category all together. In the end, it comes down to “writing technique”, “my writing”, and the “business of writing”.

Another category complete!

Posted in Computers | Tagged computers, images, my writing, publishing, website, writing | Leave a reply

Articles I Like: Six Myths About Traditional Publishing

The PolyBlog
December 2 2018

As someone who is interested in writing, I naturally have an interest in the publishing world. I grew up as an insatiable reader, and always dreamed that perhaps one day I would be selling books as an author. Later, I realized it wasn’t my primary interest in life, or at least not my only interest, and that I was more interested in the steady-paycheque world of being a salaried employee of a government entity doing public administration and policy. You know, a public servant, without the snide view of their role. My writing has shifted over the years. Some email … Continue reading →

Posted in Writing and Publishing | Tagged business, models, publishing, self, writing | Leave a reply

Open Access – Global Open Access Portal and Canada

The PolyBlog
May 27 2018

Continuing down the Open Access rabbithole, I found the UNESCO-led site, the Global Open Access Portal. You can even narrow it down to just Canadian access sites. Which I did. And then went further down the rabbit hole with some of the following highlights: University of PEI; Lakehead; Library and Archives Canada; Laurentian; McMaster; Memorial; Mount Royal; Mount Saint Vincent; University of Manitoba; Mutopia; National Research Council; University of Regina; Queen’s; University of Ottawa; Waterloo; Ryerson; Laurier; Windsor; Western; SFU; Sheridan; UBC; Calgary; Northern BC; Toronto; Victoria; York; Athabasca; Brock; Carleton; Concordia; Dalhousie; Guelph; Not just a rabbit hole, a … Continue reading →

Posted in Learning and Ideas | Tagged Canada, open access, publishing | Leave a reply

Open Access – The University of Calgary, School of Public Policy

The PolyBlog
May 27 2018

I don’t know a lot about the ins and outs of academic publishing, so let’s start by making that clear. More often than not, I’m likely to trip over government or thinktank reports than scholarly articles. I don’t have a home account for EBSCO access, or a university library account to access their scholarly journals that way, so in the absence of that type of access, I love the idea of Open Access. And when the University College of London announces they’ve hit their 1M download mark of e-texts through Open Access, that sounds outright awesome. The true power of … Continue reading →

Posted in Learning and Ideas | Tagged open access, publishing | Leave a reply

Articles I Like: The five ways we read online

The PolyBlog
May 6 2018

ThePassiveVoice shared an article about a paper from the Web Conference related to metrics for how people read online posts, news articles, etc. Interesting developments on how they are developing metrics based not on the clickbait sites that spread an article over several click-through pages so they can load more ads, but just how you go through a single article on the page. Grinberg was able to identify five types of reading behaviors: “Scan,” “Read,” “Read (long),” “Idle,” and “Shallow” (plus bounce backs, in the case that someone gets to a page and almost immediately leaves). Not surprisingly, different kinds … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers | Tagged metrics, news, online, publishing | Leave a reply

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