About The Twitter Job Search Guide Authors

Susan Whitcomb (@susanwhitcomb)as founder of Career Coach Academy, claims to have helped thousands of job seekers find success and to have trained hundreds of other career coaches. She has, she says, authored many best-selling books, including RESUME MAGIC, JOB SEARCH MAGIC, AND INTERVIEW MAGIC. She has a niche and a platform. She’s classifies herself as a personal branding expert.

Chandlee Bryan (@chandlee) is the president of a career management firm, a job search expert, and social media evangelist, according to the book liner notes. Her past experience includes recruiting, career counseling, and consulting. She has a relatively high profile among social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and some personal blogs.

Deb Dib (@ceocoach) is described as a “careers industry trend leader, communications expert. She’s a career coach, and the jacket notes list some other marketing-ese about her skills.

About the Twitter Job Guide

Those who aren’t excited about marketing jargon, coaching, and jumping on bandwagons may not be bowled over by the origins of this book project, but it must be said that there are some useful nuggets in THE TWITTER JOB SEARCH GUIDE. For readers who are social media novices, much space is dedicated to explaining the phenom, especially Twitter and how to use it. The step-through of how to set up your Twitter profile, complete with graphics and bling is worth a look. Those who have a measure of proficiency with Twitter will find that material skip-through-able.

The Guide is not unlike many books on how to find a career, period, Twitter or no. There’s a lot of common sense, resume advice, how to describe yourself in marketing terms, and so forth. Some of the appendices are worthwhile. You’ll find lists of relevant Internet gurus, job board recommendations, and comments from a dozen or so successful tweeters (those who engage on Twitter.)

Bottom line

This book is very much an exploitation of the current rising popularity of networking via social media sites and will give the novice to intermediate user a leg up here and there. It is well organized, written in a bright, breezy kind of voice, and not inaccurate. However, read it quickly since social media changes week to week and you never know how long web and email addresses will be viable. If you’re looking for work in this economy and feel like you just don’t know where to begin, this book might crystallize your thinking and get your feet moving one in front of the other.

More:

Make money writing for content mills

Why your book needs an agent or editor

Women Day by Day

Writers and agents are at war. There’s a battle  in a fairly well-known agent’s blog. Agent Chip MacGregor published a guest post about agents refusing to read slush pile stuff. A writer took exception and commented that she consigned Mr. MacGregor’s blog to her slush pile and 86ed it.

Attitude is everything. Mr. MacGregor retorted the writer’s comment was “stupid. For me, dissension never warrants bandying about the word “stupid.” It’s an offensive word, especially when  translated – “How dare you call me out? You’re stupid.”

Why neither writer nor agent is stupid

Writer – agent is a business arrangement. No one owes anyone anything unless and until a contract is negotiated. Writers may submit whatever they want to whomever will allow it over the transom. Agents are free to read or not to read. I’m puzzled by apparent animosity between the two groups. Writers and agents, most especially writers never before published. Is it a battle? Is there need for a battle?

If an agent decides not to read anything coming across her desk this week, and sets fire to all, cool. Do it. How does that indicate lack of prowess in writers?

If a writer chooses to submit dreck and embarrass herself, not attending to mechanics of producing publishable writing, does that indict other writers, all writers heretofore unpublished?

How agents and writers can  stop the battle

I shake my head when this perpetual argument, good agents vs. bad writers, sparks. It’s like silly arguments about should bad writers go ahead and write for content mills. There is no right answer. Both are just arguments. They make great article and blog fodder for articles and blog posts.

Some “professional agents” have a chip on their shoulders as big as a Sequoia. Their halos blind their own vision. they get puffed up with a sense of bloated importance. Read some tweets at Twitter, or blogs in the blogosphere, or columns in publishing industry periodicals. some agents are rational and compassionate, remembering how all written work begins – with an idea, often a great idea.

Having been a publisher and editor, I empathize. Some awful stuff is submitted by writers who don’t have a clue and don’t want a clue. Burn them!

Controversy draws readers. Is that what perpetuates the battle? If junk lands on an editor/agent/publisher’s desk – it should be junked. Why bother to chastise the sender, indict writers, yammer at anyone who has ever or ever will make a submission? And is there any purpose for less than conscientious writers to whine about rejection?

How agents and writers, authors, can use their time

Now, both agents and writers could resign themselves to the state of the publishing nation and realize it’s all in flux anyway. Five years from now neither writing nor agenting will resemble the current paradigm. Agents may not even exist. Sad, but true. Chill the battle.

Agents, you might simply vow to never read anything that doesn’t come in from, say, a subagent who screens the stuff before they bother you with it. spend more time, then, shopping the bright, shiny stuff that sets your soul afire. You know, deep in your heart, there is no King, Steele, or Updike in that pile.

Writers, stop whining when work is rejected. Don’t write slanderous challenges to the editor or agent who says you need to clean up your work. Authors and writers can use the extra time to learn self-editing. Read books. Take classes — a grammar brush-up? Learn how verbs and nouns must agree. Understand that not every line of dialog can begin with the name of the person being addressed. Learn the difference between “effect” and “affect.” Learn that punctuation rules are seldom optional, and a comma is not something sprinkled liberally about a page for embellishment. Commas have functions. Hire a ghost or an editor to help you succeed.

At the end, isn’t it stupid to be intolerant or set oneself up on a pedestal, whether writer or agent? Am I right, people?

How to land an agent!

More reading

Must have web links for successful writers

Stop bitching and sell your writing

Brad Pitt doesn’t belong in your headlines

Digital photography is one of the hottest book topics around and everyone is writing a book about digital photography. I got a review copy of Derek Pell’s Shoot to Thrill. There is some value here for writers who wish to incorporate photos into their queries and submissions. However, I’m not inclined to recommend the book. Shoot to Thrill could have been more thrilling.

Mr. Pell, who says he has written some 20 books, writes this one in his version of a detective mystery style. It’s too trendy, reaches too hard to be funny, and is fairly offensive to women, all at the same time. The first thing I noticed is the goofy jargon.

Nobody move – you’re surrounded. Must be a couple hundred books on digital photography starin’ at you….There’s nothin’ but sunny-side-up o the subject….believe me I’ve read ‘em all.

By the end of the first graff, I was done with apostrophes in place of missing letters. The rest of the text is liberally sprinkled with references to “you guys” and “dames.” To all appearances, women are not capable of reading or of taking good photographs. The pity is, if you wade through all that, there are good tips in the book, especially for those who want to shoot photos to illustrate their writing. Pell was evidently a shooter for UPI and other outlets for some time.

His images are engaging. The chapter called Gestures is particularly effective – showing how to catch action and expressiveness.

It’s conceivable that some readers will find this book funny, and that’s cool. But it seems the important information and the point of the non-fiction how-to book are lost in a bigger-than life parody. You can’t be all things to all people. Adding humor to non-fiction is great. Drowning readers in a laborious stretch to bury content in style makes the author completely self conscious. He’s lost his way and his point.

If you have a quirky sense of humor, you’re a macho kind of guy or just curious, give the book a look and let me know your take on it. One of the most valuable sections is the appendices where there’s a good list of resources and references online and off. You can find them listed, Pell says, at  ZoomStreet, his web site.  All you dames out there – pass on this book, maybe. The website is better than the book.

Shoot to Thrill
Derek Pell
isbn: 13-978 0 1231 4240 7
$24.99 U.S. and $29.99 Canada

More info for writers:

Should you hire an editor or a ghost?

Four essential thoughts on self publishing