Around 20 members attended Sarah Hall’s Fathers’ Day presentation of the DIY book launch and learned not only how to create a good book “product,” but also how to reach an audience, prepare that audience to receive and read the book, and how to use technology! Notes from Sarah’s talk will be included below.
If you’ve entered or will enter a Writers’ Mill contest between last August and this July, you already have a piece of writing ready for submission to the journal. If you’ve not, please consider this your chance and inspiration to WRITE. Don’t forget, we love to include pictures as well so start looking through your phone/camera/computer (same submission instructions – let us know the name of the image and artist, and which section you hope to find it in. Createspace recommends 300DPI for images, but it’s not something we’ve worried about in the past).
Please consider whether you would be willing to volunteer as an editor. Thank you.
Let’s make this journal another book to be proud of!
Numbers were down at this month’s meeting, with only 14 people present, but the sudden onset of summer was a likely cause. Please mark your calendars for next month—Father’s Day—when Sara Hall will give her much-anticipated multimedia presentation on the DIY book launch. Continue reading Writers’ Mill Minutes 201705
After an amazingly fast response from Createspace, the Writers’ Mill Journals are here, ready for distribution at our meeting on November 20th. For those with an interest in kindle versions of the journal, it has now been released. Find it at
https://www.amazon.com/Writers-Mill-Journal-Journals-Book-ebook/dp/B01M72IB90/
No copies for Nook or iPad though, as the library doesn’t have a Smashwords account (the easiest way to add things to all platforms).
The kindle price is $1.99 because they wouldn’t let me set it any lower. Very strange… Anyway, we hope you’ll enjoy it.
And the Amazon price is $7.95
22 writers, including several new members, left their homes on Father’s Day afternoon to attend a Writers’ Mill meeting with local author Ken Baysinger. A fun, inspirational and informative talk was followed by delicious gluten-free snacks from Jean, writerly awards from Karin for the monthly contest, and a fun all-hands-on-deck critique of Matthew’s story. By the end it was clear lots of us could have stayed longer than the usual 2 hours. But the room would be needed for other events, so we finished at 3 and planned to return next month, July 17th, for more inspiration from Wildfire Writer Christie Krug. Continue reading Minutes 201606
21 members attended May’s meeting and listened to an excellent discussion on all things writing, led by poet, short story writer and novelist Jim Stewart. Jim has generously agreed to a return engagement to lead a poetry workshop for us soon. We really appreciated meeting with him, and notes from his talk will be included in a separate post. Continue reading Minutes 201605
The Writers’ Mill Journal, Volume 5, will be released in time for our November meeting.
Writers’ Mill Members will have emailed their (edited) submissions BEFORE THE END OF JULY to
admin@portlandwritersmill.org
Please send any questions to this address!
Stories, poems, essays, pictures, photos, snippets, etc… to be included in one of the following journal sections – please interpret the section heading as loosely as you wish!
Please include the following information in your email:
Illustrations should include the same information. If you have illustrations to go with your piece, please send them as separate files with the piece (not as part of the word document). Make life easy for us, then we’ll do a better job for you!
Word count limits? Ugh! We’d rather not impose any, but if you keep your total word-count to below 10,000 words, we might avoid ruinous print costs when we put it all together. If we end up with something that takes too many pages, we’ll look forward to your helpful cooperation in fixing it!
Happy Writing!
At the end of the Createspace process, we’re offered the chance to publish our book to kindle. Createspace sends the cover file, suitably formatted, but recommends we use a doc file rather than our nice pdf. This makes sense. pdf files are formatted. Ebooks aren’t. Continue reading Journal News 2015 – Step 14 – Publish on Kindle
The print price of our journal is $3.75
Postage is expensive. If we get enough orders at our meeting, we can share the postage between us and buy them at $4.50 including postage. But why are they $9.95 on Amazon? Continue reading Journal News 2015 – Step 13 – Price