I’ve signed up for Writing for Social Media: Prose That Works for Web 2.0. (external link) Starts the first week of February and runs for a month and a half. The course number is English X468. I previously took a Creative Nonfiction course through Berkeley Extension (internal link) and I liked it very much.
When I self publish I will have to do all the promoting myself, one reason I was never interested in non-traditional publishing. Still, today, mainstream publishers are helping out less and less with promotion. They expect you to bring in an audience, in fact, some publishers won’t take on a title unless an author has a certain amount of subscribers or followers on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook.
Here’s the course description:
Learn to write effectively for social media, specifically blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Establish a coherent writing process; learn editing techniques; and examine the interplay among context, content and style. Classes focus primarily on workshop critiques, peer editing and weekly composition of posts and tweets. Note: This course focuses primarily on content writing and editing, not Web technology.
This is the description of the teacher:
Timothy Peters, B.S., M.A., is an experienced writer and content strategist with a focus on marketing and corporate communications for financial services and technology companies. He also has experience in corporate branding and the application of brand positioning to communications. Past projects include virtually every form of corporate communications writing: annual reports and corporate collateral, white papers, by-lined articles, website concept development, website content, blogs, and business plans. He also reviews fiction for Publishers Weekly magazine.
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I’m looking forward to this. I’m too gabby on social and I know nothing about Twitter. Speaking of which, can we please drop “media” from social media? I’ve been ready to do this for two years and I am surprised our ADD society hasn’t yet taken the plunge.
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