Wednesday links: Hooks and Twitter

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few.

Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. 4 Steps for Writing a Tantalizing Hook, from NA Alley: Hooks can be pretty difficult to write. For me, the problem is trying to fit a lot of information into very few words. But there’s some really good advice for writing hooks in this post. Excerpt: “We all know part of being a writer is telling the world about our stories. In person, at conferences, on social media and in book blurb copy. But going about that “telling” can be challenging.”

2. 7 Reasons Twitter Isn’t Building Your Author Platform (And How to Fix It), from Jane Friedman: A lot of these tips are ones that I see repeated often, and yet there are still a lot of authors out there who are disregarding them. Personally, I think they make a lot of sense. Excerpt: “Almost as soon as authors were told they should be on social media to build their platform, a counter-contingent of people started talking about how social media was a waste of time. They’d tell stories of using Twitter or Facebook or whatever the flavor of the month was and how they didn’t see any increase in sales or growth in their readership.”