Your Inner Circle Writers' Week

I wanted to introduce to you a new idea for escalating the excitement in the already-pretty-exciting Inner Circle Writers’ Group.

Most of you know, if you are members of that group, that every Monday - or at least, all those Mondays that I remember to post the thread - there appears a slot called ‘Marketing Monday’, which is the group’s ‘shop’. This is where members can post direct selling links, or links to their own pages or websites, advertising their books and/or services. It’s popular, and it’s much more effective than trying to sell something through the main newsfeed of the group, as I tend not to approve those attempted posts. Why? Because if I did - and there are several hundred waiting right now - I and everyone else in the group would be swamped by advertising for one thing or another, and none of us want that. So Marketing Monday was designed as a way of channeling those sorts of posts to a more interested audience - you then have a choice whether or not to take a look at the thread, and the fact that you do take a look indicates that you are just slightly more likely to actually buy something listed there. If it appears along with a tsunami of other ads in the main feed, the chances are that you will ‘switch off’ and perhaps even lose interest in the group and its activities, and we wouldn’t want that.

But I also think that the same principle can be applied to other functions within the group, and so have come up with several other threads which you can make use of as you see fit.

On Tuesdays, for example, I will start running an ‘ICWG News’ thread. Here you can post snippets of news, things that have happened of interest, things you have heard about and so forth. This doesn’t mean that you can’t post such things to the main feed of the group, or that I will in any way ‘forbid’ such postings in future - I won’t. But a ‘news’ column could be a way of getting you to think more in terms of news and progress and interesting snippets, and I think there’s a place for it. Let’s see how it goes. Snippets can include links and images and so forth.

On Thursdays, member Susannah Bell suggested that she help me run a Review Thursday, which is a channel designed to get you to write reviews on other books. This is a much-needed function, as I am sure you would agree. Your books and stories are like seedlings, buried beneath the earth. To grow, and to receive attention, they need the nutrition of regular reviews. The reviews don’t have to be long or elaborate, but they do need to appear. If for some reason the algorithmic politics of a particular site prevent you from posting a review there, then you will be invited to share it in this thread as well. Or you can highlight reviews that you have received. The whole idea is to raise the profile of reviewing as an activity, and to get more reviews written.

Then, on the last day of the working week, there will be a thread called ‘Flash Fiction Friday’ in which the challenge will be to grip, glue, guide and give a thrill to readers with a comment in the thread of under 100 words. That’s right - tell a story, or share a bedazzling excerpt, or trick us with wit in under 100 words. This is to hone your skills as writers. There’s nothing quite like restrictions of amounts of words for training the fiction-writing mind and hand. Every Friday, you’ll have a chance to show us what you can do with words - which is what you’re in this game for in the first place, presumably.

So: Marketing Monday, News Tuesday, Review Thursday and Flash Fiction Friday. What about Wednesday? (Maybe we should have a feature called ‘What About Wednesday?’) Do you have any ideas for threads that are needed in the group? Please let me know.

Any questions? Drop me a line at

grant@clarendonhousebooks.com