The Writer’s DB Blog

Writing is a solitary activity; it’s useful to have the support of friends. People who will read your latest work and offer commentary. People who, if they hear you haven’t been writing, won’t let you get away with it. People who write themselves, and whose presence in your life helps to foster an environment of creativity.

Some of you reading this probably have accounts on Facebook. They have over 140 million active users, so I feel safe making that guess. The purpose of Facebook is to bring your friends closer, to help make them more a part of your life. That purpose should apply in the context of writing, as well as any other context.

So, I’ve taken advantage of their newly released “Facebook Connect” technology, which allows other web sites to integrate with Facebook. It is now possible, when you take certain actions on the Writer’s Database, to publish the news of those actions to your Facebook news feed, where your friends can see it.

I’ve started with four specific actions:

• When you send out a submission.
• When you receive a reply from a market. (Let your friends celebrate or commiserate, as appropriate.)
• When you update the word count for a manuscript in progress.
• When you add a new market to the Writer’s Database. (Your friends might want to submit there, too.)

When you perform one of these actions, you’ll be given the opportunity to publish the news to your Facebook newsfeed, and you’ll be given the choice of a one-line format or various longer versions, which include different levels of detail. For example, when you submit a manuscript for publication, you can choose to include just the title, the title plus the name of the market, or neither.

Please note: This is beta functionality. I’ve tested it with my own account, but that’s all. And Facebook’s own release of FB Connect happened in a bit of a hurry. If it doesn’t work as expected, please let me know, and please be patient.

The Clarion Writer’s Workshop was the best thing I ever did. One of the many reasons is that it was the most intimately I’ve ever been connected to a community of talented writer-friends. These new WritersDB features are not as good as Clarion—I guarantee it. But I hope they’ll help.