writers.net

This is an ambitious authors' compendium which draws together information from a very wide range of sources. It aims to show you how to write better, how to find writing jobs and publicity outlets, where to conduct research, and how to make contact with writers' groups. In terms of genre, it covers academic and technical writing, journalism, data research, sci-fi, romance, mystery, and poetry, plus writing for the screen, the theatre, and even cybersoaps. Cross discipline issues include advice on editorial policy in magazines and journals, book publication, author's rights, self-publishing, copyright, and censorship.

There are annotated lists of Web sites or mailing lists on each topic, with brief notes giving details of numbers in the forums and the rate of mailings. This is useful information, since some can be too busy. Every entry is credited with its full URL, and there are also lists of FAQs, reviews of IRC and the forums of AOL, the Well, and MSN, as well as what are called 'Megasource Jumpstations' - Web sites specifically composed of lists of useful URLs.


Sandwiched between these listings meanwhile, there are entertaining mini-essays covering related topics. The section on screen writing for instance includes 'A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang', 'Common Movie Cliches', and 'Argot from the Golden Age of Pulp Fiction'. Gach is a creative writing tutor and professional journalist, and he is not afraid to confront the tough and up-to-the-minute world of writers using the Net as their livelihood. He includes lists of publishers and their Web addresses, and even authors' home pages.

On research he deals with search engines, Yellow Pages, how to locate individuals, and how to perform narrow searches on Listservs, Majordomos, FTP, and TELNET - including the differences between various search engines such as Alta-Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, and Webcrawler. There is also, characteristic of his thoroughness, a bibliography of articles reviewing on-line dictionaries [including one Web source which will search seventy-five dictionaries!] plus what I've always wanted, 'Boolean Logic Defined' - a tutorial on the use of AND, OR, and NOT.

A book of annotated listings requires a good index, and this has one, as well as a glossary of Internet terms, though the bibliography is disappointingly skimpy compared with the rich seams of information throughout the book. He offers an appendix of practical advice on navigating the Net which might more logically have been placed as Chapter One, but one can see that his emphasis is on making use of the Net, rather than just another book telling us how to get on line.

In some chapters there are substantial reviews of on-line material and samples from Web sites. In the 'Net Magazines' chapter for instance there is a comparison of the online version of the conventional Atlantic Monthly ('The Atlantic Unbound') with SLATE (the Microsoft site) and Salon - a literary monthly which was so successful it went daily. These historical surveys are particularly useful for pointing to the rapid development of online publishing - listing the flops and policy-reversals, as well as the occasional success stories.

All this is almost entirely US-centred, but this hardly matters in an age when information can be retrieved at more-or-less the same speed no matter where it is located. [I only recently realized that my favourite HTML mailing list is hosted from Turkey!]

My goodness, he's done his homework. A lot of first-hand on-line experience has gone into creating this body of work. If there is a minor criticism to be made it's of a tendency to excessive signposting ('later in this Chapter we'll be dealing with...') which is very common in computer books these days. But this is an excellent reference to the on-line writing world, and it's going to stay close at hand on my (very low-tech) revolving bookcase.