Thursday, November 16, 2006

Email Accounts

I’d like to share a bit of unsolicited advice with any writers perusing this blog.

It would behoove anyone who intends to submit a story for publication to invest a little time and get an email account independent of their ISP. I feel bad for writers when I send out a rejection (or worse, an acceptance) and it bounces back because they’ve switched providers or couldn’t afford the service any longer. Sometimes writers send an email notifying me of their email change, but it isn’t like I can pin a note to the original submission. From now on, I’m going to ask them to send the story again from the new address and I’ll swap it out with the old one.

Don’t be the writer who gets frustrated and sends an angry letter regarding how long you’ve waited for word about your submission, only to receive an email telling you that your story was rejected three months prior to your old account.

Get a Yahoo or Goggle account (or another of your choice, it doesn’t matter) and try to use it for writing purposes only. If you switch your ISP or it doesn’t work for some reason, you can always access your independent account at a friend’s house, at a library, or wherever.

Don’t let the second choice do the happy dance with your book or magazine deal, get an independent email account

3 comments:

Stewart Sternberg (half of L.P. Styles) said...

I have maintained a dial up account that I use only for the email address. After reading your posting, I am more convinced now than ever that I need to go get a website and get an email address through that. Hopefully by the end of the year it will be satori@houseofsternberg.com. sigh.

Rick said...

I have another suggestion that Beth gave me. Sure I'd like to say that I have ideas of my own, but I can't because I don't have enough of them.

She said, "Well, I keep telling you to go to Godaddy.com and reserve your own name as a domain so you you'll have a cool email account. William obviously listened to Deborah."

But anyway, it seems pretty obvious to even us web-impaired people that if our email address ends with your website address, that when and editor sees our email address, if they want to learn more about our work (I'm sure that that happens all of the time, right Chuck? Right? Maybe not? Maybe never?? Okay, it's a faint dream???), they can go to our website and check things out.

Here's two more things she taught me that I probably should have thought of- first, use the automatic signing funtion to make sure that my name, website, and blog address are added automatically to all emails. Second, I was typing in the blog link manually because I didn't realize that in addition to adding automatic signatures you could easil attach web links to them as well. So, instead of typing "http://thewriterandthewhitecat.blogspot.com/" I just typed "The Writer and the White Cat" and used a link button to make it link to that web address. So the email reader doesn't have to see the web address of my blog, they just see the title- the hypertext address stuff is hidden.

I don't wish to seem technologically impaired, but after I type this, my son is going to explain to me how to use my VCR.

Charles P. Zaglanis said...

Yeesh, Rick! You're only 10-15 years behind the curve. hehe

I sometimes visit a website or blog if I'm interested in a submission.