In this case, LJ has much more in common with something like Facebook than a Blogger or WordPress blog. I have a couple LJ sites in my Google Reader, but the full post text is never displayed. Now I understand why.

Cory Doctorow recently made some great points about communities like Facebook in Information Week, the article is titled How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers will Kill Facebook.

As a casual reader of FFF, I can tell you that between the tree-like structure of comments and the unsigned posts it seems to me more like a self-contained community. To me it has nothing to do with self-promotion; it’s about voice, about knowing who’s speaking, and about having sense of context, continuity, and personality. If FFF is a conversation, what downside is there to having people identify themselves when they speak?

I suppose it depends on what FFF is supposed to be for. If it is just an intimate community meant for the members and those who frequent there regularly, the signing of the posts is probably meaningless. If the FFF is to serve as a promotional vehicle in that is exposes readers to new to them authors, then signing of the posts is really important.

Everyone should go for the Avon thing, b/c hey, why the heck not?

Is the regular staff going to go through everything? Maybe they need some slush pile readers :)

Happy New Year to all!

It’s helpful to readers to be able to sort the posts by author, category and date.

Maybe if I explained my frustration better; I guess, to me, knowing who writes a post gives a frame of reference, and a context, to what is being written. It’s like here at Dear Author, there are around five or so contributors. I would bet that most people who read the reviews, read to see which reviewer is doing the review, because they’ve come to identify with their likes/dislikes and whether they mesh with their own.

At your LJ, you have what? 30 or so contributors? Most of the posts are unsigned so it’s like reading posts from “anonymous” most of the time. The reader of the blog (or in this case me) doesn’t know if the person giving advice about queries, agents, editors, etc is an author who has ten books published, one book published, has offered sound advice in the past or never talked on the topic at all before. In other words, there’s no frame of reference for who they are or what they’re saying.

And like I said, I’ve found that sometimes even if I go direct to the FFF LJ, to see who’s written it, their nickname doesn’t give any hints and even worse, sometimes clicking on their nickname and going to the author’s LJ still doesn’t give any outright idea of who they are. So even if the author doesn’t think that what they’re doing is promo, or doesn’t want it to seem like promo, it would still be a courtesy to the blog readers to provide them with a context within which to frame the author’s post. Maybe thinking of it like that will help?

Angela wrote: “I saw whoever is in charge of the blog ask them to do it several times. But I think if you look back in the archives, you'll see that despite the requests, it didn't happen. I hope you can effect that change in the future.”

I’m the one who nags them about this :) The “tagging” was to help (you can click an author’s name & see the entries they’ve posted), & we added a sidebar link with author sites & with LJ names= Author Name.

I’ve tried again.

I think part of it is that FFF wasn’t actually started for promotion. When I proposed it to two of my friends, it was just to be a space where we could chat about writing stuff. It’s evolved into more than that, but I wonder sometimes if part of the lack of cooperation is because some authors aren’t doing it for promo at all, but just as what it first was intended to be–a space to chatter about writing.

That said, I like it when they tag & sign because we have grown so much larger than the original plan of a dozen authors sharing a space to talk. So thanks for the reminder.

Melissa

I also like the idea that Avon is making the channel clear and available to writers who can’t necessarily navigate the agent terrain.

Jessica

I know that the authors have been asked to do this, in fact, when I was subscribed, I saw whoever is in charge of the blog ask them to do it several times. But I think if you look back in the archives, you’ll see that despite the requests, it didn’t happen. I hope you can effect that change in the future.

As far as tagging posts, doesn’t each user have an account? The template should be able to display who the post author is. FFF sounds like a great bunch of writers with a catchy hook for a blog, but I don’t see any categories? I’d love to find the query discussions mentioned here, but how would I do that?

The authors have been asked to remember to sign their posts and everyone has been asked to “tag” their posts with their names. (not sure if “tags” come through on RSS feeds). We’ll make sure to remind everyone again with the new year. Thanks for the reminder! :)

I don’t know that it is necessary to pull one’s hair out over the query letter. I posted two of my query letters as the inaugural entry at my blog. Frankly I think the one that landed me a publishing deal isn’t as good as the one that didn’t. The query just has to be decent. It’s the full manuscript that people have to love to put money on the table.

And if people are afraid of mean girls, they can always have a mean guy bash their query letter in at Evil Editor’s place. :-)