What Inspires? Gumption

What to know how to make money as an author: Put a tip jar on the signing table at your next bookstore or library presentation.

It worked for David Sedaris!  According to an article in The Guardian, Sedaris told people “it was all for me to spend on candy.” he said they were “delighted because it’s funny to give money to someone who doesn’t need it.”  (Bestseller author, Sedaris, doesn’t, evidently.)

Sedaris suggested putting out a tip jar at signings as an “interesting money-making tip for authors.”

I’m inclined to agree: At then end of one evening’s reading at a Dallas bookstore, Sedaris’s tip jar had $350.00 in it–his “best evening.”  Sedaris said he netted “$4000.00 in candy tips” on that book tour.

Will Read for Tips!

Will Write for Tips!

(And if you’re one of those fortunate authors who “don’t need the money” why not put your tip jar out at signings anyway–you can then donate it to one of those “not fun” someones who does need it.)

Back in the day, it was more about how you wrote than what you wrote. There was something to that–still is if you ask the IRA!

Are you ready for a healthy, educational competition that rewards everyone, builds students’ self-esteem, and generates positive public relations for your school?

Enter the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest—an annual event that Zaner-Bloser sponsors to promote legible handwriting. The contest is free to enter and open to all students in Grades 1–8.

Over $100,000 in cash and prizes will be awarded. Prize packages for students, teachers, and schools include an all-expenses-paid trip to IRA’s 57th Annual Convention in Chicago, Illinois, for the eight outstanding teachers of the Grand National Grade-Level Winners! Watch this video to learn more.

Give all your students the opportunity to win. Download contest entry forms today. The deadline to enter is January 23, 2012—National Handwriting Day.

Sincerely,

International Reading Association

What inspires: Pushing Through

“Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food,” -author David Rakoff, from his essay “A Writer’s Day,” published in the spring 2011 Authors Guild Bulletin.

Rakoff shared how he procrastinates, justifies, stalls before settling in to write each day. How in most things, art, for example, one progresses, learns, becomes more adept and so the work gets easier. Conversely: “Writing—I can only really speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit; an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometime forever).”

Still, even with the “terrors and agitations,” Rakoff pushes through—never forgetting for a moment that his is not a life of “mining coal, waiting tables, or answering someone’s phone for a living”— beginning each writing day “suffused with this sense of privilege, shell-pink and pulsing with new hope.”

Rakoff's new book HALF EMPTY, published Sept 2011, by Anchor