The Idea Farm's Blog

15 Best Writing Blogs for Writer’s to Follow These are some of the best writing blogs from thousands of blogs throughout the internet. These blogsites offer varied information from grammar to submitting your work to publishers. They are helpful to up-and-comers as well as more established writers. 1.   Daily Writing Tips Daily Writing Tips - Daily Writing Tips as the name suggests publishes daily articles to help writers enhance their skills. Daily articles on grammar, business writing, spelling, misused word s, writing basics, writing quizzes, vocabulary, punctuation, fiction writing, freelance writing, and more! 2. Writer's Digest Magazine | Write Better, Get Published, Be Creative New York, US Writer's Digest is the No. 1 resource for learning better writing and getting published. Writer's Digest seeks to inspire and inform writers and help them succeed in all their publishing endeavors. 3. Advice to Writers | Writing Advice Blog Los Angeles, California, US 4. Live Wri...

  The mere idea of an opportunity to grow your business can be exhilarating. However, when examining different approaches you might use to invest in your business’s growth, marketing is probably one of the avenues that would be worrying to explore. The digital marketing world is constantly changing, and it can be difficult to keep up with new trends while running your business. Even talking with different agencies about pricing can be a tedious thing. You may be tempted to take on the marketing yourself or outsource it to a freelancer. However, this may not be the best long-term option, as a marketing agency can provide extensive and cohesive services that grow your business. So, what does outsourcing digital marketing involve? If you’re unsure about what to do for marketing your business, we’ve got some advice for you. A digital marketing agency can help grow your business and though the cost may seem a little high they will give you better results than going it alone or the costl...

Author, Kurt Vonnegut  In 1956, Vonnegut, though a published author, was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His money making solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which utilized his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game diligently to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut’s own notes in the margins. With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein honed the original rules, straightened out the lumps in GHQ’s endgame, and created art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble — nearly 70 years afte...

Obtaining permission to use text involves a four-step process:  1. You must clearly and specifically identify what material you want to use and how you want to use it. Your first stage is to identify the material you want to use and the rights you will need. Commercial Use : If you are seeking permission to use text on behalf of an advertising agency or a company selling a product or service, your use is more likely to be categorized as a commercial endorsement, which will trigger additional legal issues.  2. You must send a permission request letter to the publisher or rights holder. Your permission request letter should give the details about the text you want to use, how you expect to use it, and the permission you want. There are two different types of request letters you can use: • One simply informs the rights holder of your needs and expectations that you and the rights holder will later complete and sign a separate permission agreement. • The other serves as both a...

A legal battle between the Andy Warhol Foundation and the photographer Lynn Goldsmith over a portrait of Prince is at the center of a pivotal discussion about copyright. Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the Pop artist’s classic silk-screened portraits.  On May 18, 2023 the Supreme Court sided with a photographer in a dispute with the Andy Warhol Foundation over the late artist’s use of her photos as the basis for his own series of portraits of Prince. The justices issued a narrow interpretation focused on one of four factors used by courts to determine the “fair use” of a copyrighted work and the “purpose and character” of the use. The factors include “the nature of a copyrighted work,” “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole,” and “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted wo...

  If you are a professor or graduate student, you know more about your field of study than most of the writers giving written sermons on opinion pages, Quora pages, Sub-Redditt’s, Twitter feeds, and possibly bookshelves right now. Your research and education informs your point of view. You know what you’re writing about — but commentators might know better how to write for a general audience. This means that the voices who have the most to contribute to public discourse are often getting drowned out. If this is something you struggle with, here are some writing tips to reach a broader audience: Don’t approach your introduction like it’s the warm-up before you get to the good stuff. Approach it like your only chance to attract your reader into your thoughts. Your lead is your opportunity to engage your reader: You’re conveying that your words are worth the reader’s effort. If you have writer’s block, look at the opening paragraphs of a practiced columnist, someone like Maureen Dowd ...

Caren Beilin's novel  Revenge of the Scapegoat , winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award for fiction, is both comical and tragic.  Revenge is marked by repetition, with an ending that mirrors its beginning. And the substance for its action is the restoration of objects from the protagonist's past that she hoped would never return. The Vermont Book Award, given out annually, "shines a light" on a book and focuses readers' awareness on work they may have otherwise missed. Iris, an adjunct college writing teacher in Philadelphia, thinks of herself the family scapegoat. When she was in her teens, she received two letters from her father that she saw as encapsulating his hatred for her. Now 36, she's left all that behind — until one day both letters reappear in a UPS package from her father. While Dad says he was decluttering the family home, Iris sees the letters as if they were a message from the Unabomber. She depicts them as "things that had torn through me...