Critiques as a fundraising tool and more...

Moonrat, the anonymous Editorial Assistant, has announced a fundraiser to fight Lymphoma.

You can buy tickets for a raffle to have a critique of a

query letter

a children's picture book manuscript

first chapter of YA/MG manuscript

a partial manuscript (50 pages)

or a full manuscript evaluation.

For those who are not writers or are not interested in a critique you can enter into a raffle to win a book listed from Moonrat's personal library.

The prices for the various raffles are reasonable at only ten and twenty dollars depending on the raffle you enter. The contest runs from today until next Tuesday, October 7th at 8 pm (Eastern Time I assume.) Check out all the rules and such here and be sure to pass on word of this to all your writer friends.

Speaking of critiques, my friend Becky Levine announced on her blog that she just signed a contract with Writers Digest books to write a book currently titled The Critiquer's Survival Guide.

Huzzah!

Becky has other good news that a book she and Lee Lofland have been working on is now listed on Amazon.com even though it is not due to be published until July of next year. Cool. Another reason to celebrate.

Onto other news, I wanted to mention that Blogger has a shiny new gizmo that I added to my blog. It is the Java script for Followers. This allows other Blogspot users to display their icons on their favorite Blogger sites as well as have those feeds accumulate in the Blogger dashboard. (You can also still follow those feeds in your Google Reader as well.)

I have been slowly adding myself as a follower for the various Blogspot blogs I follow - even those ones who have not added the "Follower" code yet on their pages. So if you notice on your dashboard that you now have "followers" - one of those might be me. To make your followers visible on your blog you simply have to add that code to your template.

I think this feature is just one more way to share links in the interwebs.

Another recent addition is the Blogrush bar. My friend Ann Wilkes added one several months ago and said

"(i)t helps generate more traffic to your blog. Like Google's Adsense, it looks for similar products. It's like swapping links without doing a thing. If you sign up, be sure to use the link below because I get even more traffic for referrals. It's easy, free, and so far, I've seen no downside."

I have now had Blogrush installed since about June and frankly it has not done much for me at all. Perhaps my titles just are not pithy enough to make many people go, "ooooh, I gotta see that," but I am not ready to jettison the code from my blog either.

Here's the direct link to Blogrush if you would like to test it out on your blog as well and in turn give me a little more referral traffic.

On the last topic of the day, I recently received an email suggesting that I would receive payment or a sample product for posting on my blog an unbiased review of a website. I was curious, especially when I saw the URL.

I clicked on the link and laughed. The URL was www dot UTI dot biz. See I am not even going to put a link to them. I looked at it for about two seconds before shutting it down.

Yes, the UTI stands for "urinary tract infection."

Ahem.

Here's my review:

If you have a bladder infection you should go see a doctor and not a website.


Linda