Good Advice on Twitter Bios & Web IDs

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This is an excellent advice blog post by publishing and writing maven Jane Friedman, on crafting one’s Twitter bio and more broadly, your online identity. One of her most salient tips:

[A] little bit of personality is more often than not what starts a conversation on Twitter.”

Jane is an experienced and knowledgeable hand, as her full online bio attests. If you’re on Twitter and a writer, I suggest you follow her. If you wonder how she does her own Twitter bio, here it is:

@JaneFriedman
I share links on writing, publishing & tech. Web editor for @vqr + former publisher of @writersdigest. Bourbon lover & Hoosier native.
Charlottesville, VA, USA · http://janefriedman.com

I’m mulling her advice, including the point about not necessarily using a list to ID oneself, though haven’t yet made a stab at a revised Twitter bio. FWIW, here’s my current Twitter ID:

@philipsturner
Blogger, editor, reader, music lover, honorary Canadian. As publisher, I’ve done Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father & Amb Joseph Wilson’s Politics of Truth.
New York City · http://www.TheGreatGrayBridge.com/

I invite you to follow my tweets too.

My own advice? Remember to be yourself, in personal and professional realms, and allow that confident presentation of self to surface in your online IDs.

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#FridayReads, Aug. 10–“Under the Banner of Heaven,” Jon Krakauer

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#FridayReads, August 10–Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer’s engrossing account of the blood-drenched history of Mormonism, from the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857 to the religious murders committed by the fundamentalist Lafferty brothers in American Fork, Utah, in 1984. The paranoid machinations of the founders of this cultish movement, and its zealous adherents, is startling, as is the secrecy that has attended it in more modern decades. I recommend this book for a greater understanding of the movement that animates Mitt Romney and his co-religionists. Photos of the front and back cover are from the copy I am reading.

Also, while driving on vacation recently we listened to the audio book of Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, read by the author. It was enormously enjoyable.

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Whistleblowers on Speakerfile

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Delighted to have my recent blog essay, On the Imperative of Publishing Whistleblowers, republished today on the blog of Speakerfile, the company I consult for that connects conference organizers with authors who do public speaking. H/t Neal Maillett of Berrett-Koehler Publishers for his piece, Why We Publisher Whistleblowers, which inspired my own, and Mike Shatzkin, who alerted me to Neal’s essay. Also, thanks to Cara Posey of Speakerfile who solicited this post from me.

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#FridayReads, July 27–“Two Lives” by Vikram Seth

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#FridayReads, July 27–Two Lives, Vikram Seth’s fascinating family chronicle of the singular marriage between his Indian uncle, Shanti–an improbable, one-armed dentist–and his German-Jewish aunt, Henny Caro, a mixed couple who managed to build a life together despite the difficulties imposed by circumstance and society, amid WWII and the Holocaust. Seth begins the narrative near the end of their lives, in the 1980s, and then works his way forward and back in time, employing interviews he conducted with Shanti and documentary materials he discovers (letters, photos, school papers, etc.). This is a remarkable book, published in 2005.

N.B.: I first read and enjoyed Vikram Seth’s work years ago, when I read and at Undercover Books sold his debut, a brilliant travelogue about China and Tibet, From Heaven Lake. He went on to write a novel in verse, The Golden Gate, inspired he explains in Two Lives, by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. He is an inventive writer, who seems to never repeat himself.

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The Latest on World Book Night 2013

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Happy to see news reported in Shelf Awareness, that World Book Night, which I had recently written about in this post when I bumped into WBN director Carl Lennertz (pictured below), is proceeding with plans for Spring 2013, to give away tens of thousands of copies of books worldwide in a unique extravaganza of social reading, as was done by the organization and thousands of volunteers on April 23, 2012. I don’t see an exact date yet for the 2013 giveaway, but will report it on this blog as soon as I get that info. Update: It will be April 23, 2013, same as the one this past year.

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#FridayReads, July 20–“Love is a Mix Tape”

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#FridayReads, July 20–Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, Rob Sheffield’s wrenching account of the five-year marriage he shared with his dear wife, Renée, who died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism at age 31. Sheffield tells their tale by opening each chapter of the book by naming the playlists on the many mix tapes that he and Renée made for each other in the time they were together. Sheffield, who is an editor at Rolling Stone, narrates this heartbreak tale in a sweet and disarming voice from a world where music is always on their lips, in their ears, and coursing through their hearts.

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