[This is all the space you have to grab a reader's attention when your post is promoted on social media. Sometimes you have] a little more space, sometimes you don’t. It works the same way as the first paragraph of a novel, if you don’t hook the reader in that “prime real estate,” you lose their interest.
Let me give you an example or two. When you post a link on Facebook, whether on your timeline or page, you get an image and the best part of a long sentence.
If you use this space to say, “This is part 28 of my series on books…” your blog post may not come across as appealing to read. The same works for guest posts where you introduce people, rather than letting their message pull in interest. “Joining me today as part of the “Lessons from the Writing Life” Guest Post series is Molly Jones…” I am out of promotional space. No one sees who Molly is, or why they should use their limited time to read the post.
Google Plus works the same way. Unless you write an introductory comment to attract attention, you get a blue hotlink and the first sentence. That’s all.
Please do visit Sonia’s blog, Gutsy Living. It’s awesome. http://soniamarsh.com That wasn’t enough either was it? Again, so much of our success in gaining promotion comes from great tag lines. “Sonia’s blog features ordinary people who overcome the challenges in their lives. It empowers me when I read it.”
If you are a Triberr user, you have yet another problem. The tag line from your blog can get in the way of Triberr promoting the first line of your post. All the readers will see for any post is “CommuniCATE features resources for writers which are published twice weekly.” That is useless. Because of this, I deleted my tag line. I noticed my share stats had dwindled and this was why. Here is what a well done post on Triberr looks like. (You may prefer no hashtags in the title.)
So think about what you put in that all important space. It will make a significant difference.
This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it.
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Experts have termed this practice of waiting “creative gestation,” and much like the shaping of a child in the womb, producing quality work requires a degree of time, no matter what genre. By coming back to your writing later on, you’ll find that certain word choices can be improved, images can be sharpened, and other enhancements can refine your work even further. Rather than sending an immature, embryotic creation to editors, you’re handing over “your baby,” fully developed, delivered, and ready.
John Davis Jr. is a Florida poet whose work has been published in literary venues internationally. His poems have recently appeared in Deep South magazine, Saw Palm magazine, and Touch: The Journal of Healing, and he has forthcoming poetry in The Wayfarer. His book, Growing Moon, Growing Soil: Poems of my Native Land, is available through Amazon and other fine retailers. His website is: 
Sandra was raised in Montreal, Québec, and graduated from McGill University. As a young girl, she loved reading the Nancy Drew mystery series and was determined to write her own stories one day. Her career choices didn’t exactly lead her along the “yellow brick road” to writing mystery novels—though working in a bank and experiencing a string of armed robberies did ingrain terrifying memories worthy of a story!
This is indeed not what the 
When I was fourteen, I wanted to sit at a battered Olivetti, with my fedora perched on the back of my head, and rattle off gritty sci-fi novels of intergalactic adventure. Instead I would rattle off essays on the meaning of life, and novels based on the imagined future lives of my friends.
My break came when I was told to go out and meet people. I joined a Theatre Club and they were looking for a play to enter in a performance competition. They had heard I was a writer, and asked me to write a play for them. I had never written a play before, though I had spent some time in amateur dramatics in my youth. Since I was a writer having trouble getting a novel finished, I wrote a play about a writer having trouble getting a novel finished. We took the play on to the competition and won an award.
I am a writer now. Despite the half-dozen odd jobs I’ve taken on since those early days, writing is what I do. I don’t make the money of a JK Rowling, or an E.L. James. Although I believe that quality is vital, that you should strive to produce the very best work you can, there are other factors that influence success. One is chance, which you can’t manipulate. You can’t ensure that your manuscript is picked up by the right person on the day they’re ready for a story like yours. But you CAN do things to increase that likelihood : You can polish your manuscript until it’s as near perfect as possible. Check the submission guidelines to avoid falling at the first fence. Look for an agent to give your submission more appeal. Be open to other forms of writing: you don’t HAVE to be a novelist, you know!
I’ve worked on over a hundred TV commercials, a dozen or so feature films, and am currently hosting the show “Mythbusters” on the Discovery channel. I’ve worked on Star Wars Episodes I and II, Space Cowboys, Galaxy Quest, Terminator III, the Matrix sequels, and A.I. among others. I’ve done R&D for toy companies, acted in commercials and films, and done props and sets for Coca-Cola, Dow Corning, Hershey’s, Lexus, and a host of New York and San Francisco theater companies. I’m also a sculptor, of mixed media assemblage, who’s had my work represented in over forty shows in San Francisco, New York and (of all places) Charleston, West Virginia.”
DISCLAIMER: To be true to my geeky heritage, I would like to state that the negative use of the word ‘toaster’ in this blog post in no way includes “After Dark’s” Flying Toasters, who were always the good guys. Particularly the baby ones. “When there’s a job to be done, the flying toasters will be there…” I wish they would bring that screensaver back.
In 2000 I published a memoir writing course. It has been revised four times and edited by three trained editors: two at University level. I have put countless hours of work into perfecting it, but guess what? If you read through, you will still find very small typos hidden in it like Easter Eggs. That drives me to screaming point!
So, how do we overcome this? Make your work look new! When I started blogging, I discovered that I would pick up mistakes in WordPress’ preview mode that I couldn’t see in the writing window. In preview, the font size differed and words were in different spots on the page. If you’re working in a word processor, you can try for the same effect by changing fonts, changing margin widths, altering text color, or opening the document in a totally different word processor.
I used to correspond with a published author. Her writing advice was the best I have ever been given: “Every scene, every sentence, every word, must drive the plot forward. If it doesn’t move the plot or reveal something important about the characters, cut it. If you can cut it without impacting your novel, it’s just dead weight, dragging your story down.” It is not easy to do. Even with that advice in mind, there were “dead weight” scenes in my manuscript I didn’t want to cut. I tried to make excuses for them, but in the end, I had to admit they served no real purpose, no matter how much I liked them. This one of the things a good editor does for you: gently, but firmly forces you to see where you’ve gone off-track.
Some of these lessons I learned only in retrospect, but writing is a lifelong journey. I can’t regret my mistakes, because they were valuable lessons. “We’re all apprentices in a craft where none is truly a master,” as the saying goes. I cannot wait to see what I will learn next.
Michael W. Roberts just finished the rough draft of his first novel and was surprised by how emotional he got over it. He works extensively in web media, and he blogs about writing, creativity, and communication on his site 
I have converted to digital as much as I can, but there’s a catch. I always need information fast when my computer is off, there is a thunderstorm or my iPad has run out of battery life! I use my iPod touch when I go out, but I still need the ease of paper. Some days you want to jot down an idea before it’s lost; plus I was totally sick of rummaging around my desk trying to find the separate blog post idea folder, the phone bill, my shopping list for the business, the guest post schedule, my e-book outlines! I just wanted one space which had everything. It was a way to save time and sanity.
At 49 I felt compelled to write a book. Not something I’d always wanted to do. I figured maybe it was just time to finally record all those stories about my ancestors who had been in South Africa since the 1800s, as well as my own stories about growing up in a small Zambian copper mining town; plus a two-year stint on a sisal plantation in Zimbabwe. This was before the two countries were independent, when colonial power held sway, when the bush was full of animals. And then there were all those road trips my family took to the Congo, Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania. The time an elephant chased our car for over five miles, forcing my dad to reverse down an excuse for a dirt road before the elephant gave up. The time we spent in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro with a crazy Belgian who kept wild animals for film-makers’ use; as well as that episode in Kenya when the 
I immersed myself in the past and all those feelings I had suppressed. The white girl became more vulnerable, a little less reactive and rebellious; her mother more loving and sympathetic than my own distant mother had ever been; the father more fallible than I’d always believed my own father to be. Overall every character grew, including Africa, a country with which I’ve always had a love-hate relationship. In the end, what I managed to produce was a fully realized coming-of-age story. Both for the protagonists, but especially for me. Through the power of words, I had set down roots in time and explored my own personal myths, uncovered their purpose and grounded myself in a way I might not have been able to do otherwise.
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