Tag Archives: writing

Resources For Writing Grant Proposals

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Artists, musicians, writers and other members of the creative community rarely “make it big” in a commercial/financial sense. That doesn’t necessarily discourage us from making art, but it would be nice to have some financial support.

While there are many local, national, and international sources of grant money for creatives, one look at some of the applications scares off many artists who are great at making art but not comfortable with figuring out budgets or writing snappy descriptions of their proposals.

A friend who was recently appointed to her city’s cultural council posted on Facebook that all of her artistic friends should really consider applying for grants even though the thought is intimidating. I posted a bunch of helpful links in the comments, which I am reposting here for future reference, and will add more as I come across them:

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Happy Blog Anniversary!

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Yes – it was late May 2012 when I decided it might be a good idea to start a blog to capture the various and sundry useful information I was giving out to friends.

In the past year I’ve written 118 posts, which have been viewed 10,288 times, with 82 legitimate comments left… and 14,060 spam comments! I strongly suggest you set up Akismet or another spam filtering service if you run a blog, as it caught 99.91% of these.

By far the biggest boost to my readership came last September, when my article Why I Volunteered To Play With Amanda Palmer was reposted by Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman, then linked in other articles about the controversy. To this day I still get several visits a week from people clicking an external link from one of those references. The next most highly viewed post, on making Origami paper cups, was reblogged on a few Tumblr sites.

So if you’ve joined me recently, here are the most-viewed posts from the last 12 months:

All Time

Friday Faves 01-04-13

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Happy New Year! Here are a few new fundraisers worthy of your attention – but first, a bit of self-promotion:

As you may recall, following on some compliments about my non-fiction writing (especially from a successful fiction writer) I decided to attempt NaNoWriMo in November. I did “win” by completing 50,000 words of a novel – my first long form writing of any sort.

Enough people have asked to read it that I’ve decided to serialize as I complete editing chapters. I’ve set up a separate blog for my literary endeavors, WhatBettyWrites.com – the first two chapters of Want It Back are posted now. You can subscribe to get notifications of new postings, or follow along via the Twitter acct @WhatBettyWrites and/or Facebook Page WhatBettyWrites. Feel free to leave feedback on that blog – most helpful to me would be things like “This chapter was interesting/boring/confusing because of ….”

And now on to other interesting links:

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Planning For And Handling Sudden Blog Notoriety

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If you are relatively new to being a public blogger one of your goals is probably to attract a larger readership. But are you ready for the day one of your posts suddenly goes viral?

It happened to me last week – I wrote an article giving my point of view on a topic about Amanda Palmer. She referenced the link in her subsequent social media communications and suddenly I had 4000 page views in 48 hours! Here’s how I prepared for this (in general – you can’t tell what post may go viral) and what I did to manage the resulting visibility:

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