Brascoe Publishing Blog

This isn’t strictly books and publishing and writing related, but I’m sure that won’t matter. We recently hooked up with a blog-swap, a notion that intrigues me - and is designed to ‘drive traffic’ to your site; something that all businesses need, realistically.

The way it works is that you go through the businesses on the list, find one that tickles your fancy, blog about ‘em and then someone else on the list will do the same for you. At least, that’s the theory. What if nobody blogs about you? Surely their business needs to be relevant to yours for it to work properly?

Out of all the other businesses on the swap list, there was only one that took my fancy. Not because it’s relevant (none of them were), but because it is based on green, chemical-free products: Joliv, a home and beauty products small business (of all things) on the central coast of NSW. I believe they recently won an award for their work. They have some cool stuff on their site, and the Joliv blog is full of interesting little tid-bits, if mainly for the girls.

It’s great to see other businesses powering along on the natural and organic line. Gradually I’m seeing more of them, and I think it’s brilliant.

So - we’ll sit back and see if this blog-swap thing will do anything for our blog traffic. I’m a wee bit sceptical (can you tell?) but you never know. Anything’s worth a go, right?

Foss and I went for a long, extended coffee last week with a friend we hadn’t seen for ages. While our conversation meandered everywhere - as a good conversation will do - at one point this lovely mate of ours was talking about the problem she has with accepting editorial comment. She told us that a mate of hers calls it ‘learning to kill your darlings’.

It’s a beautiful phrase, and one with which I agree. Writing a piece of work and sending it off into the world can be excruciating if you are precious about what you’ve written. Many writers, paralysed by the notion of having to change their work, never get published at all. They can’t bear to send their darlings out into the world alone, and live in fear (or defiance) of sound editorial comments.

In many cases, such writers take critique personally; in others, the process of finishing a piece is so protracted that the notion of a piece not being ‘finished’ is abhorrent. Frightening. Tedious. And what would the editor know anyway? They wrote it like this for a reason.

And so on.

There are many other reasons besides these two for not letting the darlings go, but these are perhaps the most common.

Having anything critiqued - but more especially anything that you’ve worked to write over any length of time - is all about learning to let your written pieces go. The phrase killing your darlings is less about sending them to the slaughter than it is about a writer letting go of the ‘darling’-ness: that point at which a writer acknowledges that maybe there is another way to look at the work.

As anyone who has been through a good editorial/mentoring relationship knows, the process works best when the editor is tactful and professional, and when the writer knows how to ‘be edited’.

How do you learn such a skill? A good place to start will be the article we are going to post on our resources page, on this very topic, within the week. Stay tuned.

Brascoe Publishing, in collaboration with Kelli Wright Publicity, is developing a new magazine online. We need a talented graphic designer/artist to help us develop logos, colours and the overall “look” of the site.

You need to have top-level skills, the ability to think sideways and up and down around an issue, a good work ethic, and the ability to get material to us in short timeframes. You need to be able to work to a sometimes-brilliant, sometimes-vague brief, and to generate material that is going to meet our needs as well as our targets. You need to be able to work with enthusiastic ideas people, and with techno-savvy webgeeks as well. You won’t be designing the technical end - we’ve got others to do that - you’re just the person who is gonna help us brand it. Need we add, that it would help if your fees are not horrendously expensive?

You also need to have worked previously in creating work that is destined for websites, because it needs to load fast.

And it would be a plus if you are a metal fan, or you have metal sympathies.

For more information contact us at info(at)brascoebooks.com.au, or leave a comment here on this blog and we’ll get back to you.