Your business

Jane Friedman offers 10 suggestions for making sure your website attracts eyeballs. An example: When cross-posting from your site to social media, give each of your posts a personal touch, tailored to that audience. "Be sure to link to new blog posts on each social media network where you’re active. But don’t just post a link. Offer an intriguing question, lead in, excerpt, or explanation of why the post might be interesting to people on that specific social network."

The Book Designer site has 17 suggestions for authors who publish their own books, even if they are working with a professional book designer. The list includes links to other resources, such as a guide to making PDFs for LightningSource, the leading print-on-demand publisher, and advice like this: "People have expectations about what books should look like, and going against those expectations can cost you in legibility, readability and, eventually, in readership."

It's a bane of the struggling freelancers' life — markets that pay writers late, or not at all. On WordCount, Michelle V. Rafter offers tips for shaking your check free from the accounting department, and ways of dealing with the most recalcitrant ones: "You know the old saying, 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,'" Rafter writes. "If you’ve been burned by a publication, you should have a very good reason for ever wanting to work for them again."

You know how every new movie seems to spin off a dozen related products? Writers can do the same, Joanna Penn writes on The Book Designer. Penn offers some pointers on creating video, audio, and other multimedia products: "You can use video interviews with experts in your niche for blog content but also for your products," she writes. "You can use Skype for free video calling and then Ecamm for the Mac and Pamela for the PC in order to record in the split screen mode."

Brad Frazer takes questions about the often-esoteric details of U.S. copyright law. For example, does registering a work published in an electronic format also cover later print versions? Yes, Frazer writes: "Except for sound recordings and derivative works like a screenplay (in which the words are changed), one registration of your copyright in the book as a PDF (or whatever the required Deposit Copy file format is) will cover multiple print formats of that same book."

In order to help freelancers navigate the labyrinth of contracts and legalese — and increase their chance of negotiating reasonable and fair terms — the Freelance Committee is undertaking the task of building a reference contracts database. To help out, please submit your relevant writing contracts or clauses from the last three years.

So says Carol Costello on The Book Designer, where she summons dark memories enroute to a series of tips for authors hawking books: "Thousands of wonderful books go by the wayside because book promotion is haunted by the Ghost of Selling Past. These nightmare scenarios involve Girl Scout cookies, school raffle tickets, magazine subscriptions — and even chocolate bars," Costello writes. Authors "equate promoting the book they love with these selling horror stories."

If branding is a key to success in journalism now, then how can you use Twitter to achieve that? Here's one new way the giant microblogging service is rolling out, according to the 10,000 Words site. In short, you'll soon be able to add a Facebook-style cover photo that will appear on the web and many smartphone and tablet apps. See some samples here. More from Twitter's announcement and AllTwitter.

The Poynter Institute's Tom Huang starts with a confession before listing six questions a writer should ask and answer before making a story pitch to an editor: "Back when I was a cub reporter, I used to pitch story ideas by proclaiming that I wanted to write about “the homeless,” or “drug gangs,” or “teen mothers.” While these were interesting and important topics, that’s all they were — topics. They didn’t have enough shape or specificity to be ideas."