Writers' Roundup: January 15

Don’t you love when your Google Reader is bursting with awesome information? So much good stuff out there this week, including several memoir-specific posts:

• From Pimp My Novel: The Importance of Negative Reviews. If reviewers don’t have anything nice to say, should they say anything at all?

• A guest blogger on Guide to Literary Agents offers Tips for Writing and Selling the Book-Length Memoir. “You need to find the narrative,” he writes. “It can’t just be the random and disorganized (or chronically-arranged) events of an interesting life.”

• At Getting Past the Gatekeeper, a literary agent explains why writers shouldn’t get “prickly” when their submission goes to slush. She also has some fun ideas about planning your dream book party.

• What’s sell-through? Literary agent Jessica Faust explains why it matters how many of your books sell verses how many are shipped.

• Over at The Book Deal: 7 Tips for Defeating Your Inner Critic while writing memoir.

• Literary agent Chip McGregor answers a reader’s question, How do you brainstorm titles? It’s all about the whiteboard.

• The Creative Penn comes through again with 5 Reasons Writers Need to Embrace Technology. Those of you who’ve been ignoring the obvious — that people are online and those people could buy your book — you know who you are!

• Another awesome blog-to-book story, told this time at Copyblogger.

• Joyce Carol Oates, who has published more than 50 novels, is writing a memoir. This piece from the Wall Street Journal offers a glimpse into the author’s writing life.

• And your non-writing link for the week, intended to make you care that newspapers are dying! Via Romenesko, every journo’s fave site for media news: A new study shows most of our news still comes from print media.

Happy writing!