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writers.net: Every Writer's Essential Guide to Online Resources and Opportunities (Prima writing guides)

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Gary Gach has written the essential guide for using the World Wide Web to further a writing career. Because anyone can publish on the Web, writers can use the Internet to promote and publish their work as well as for research. Gach's book tells how to use your computer connections to get published online or in print in any of several genres, and there are dozen of ideas that will enrich a writers soul, mind, and pocketbook. It is an essential tool for computer-literate writers. --Mason West

Finally, all the information in one easily-accessible place! Gach has delivered an invaluable resource for writers, whether you're a Net newbie or an e-zine publisher. Any writer considering publishing on-line needs to read this.

Writers.net is probably the most "reader-friendly" of all the specialized Internet guides on the market; each of the nineteen chapters of Writers.net is devoted to a particular genre of writing. Writers of mysteries, romances, science fiction, screenplays, and other styles need not burrow through endless pages to get to the sections that interest them most--each chapter is well-structured and organized to give the writer the resources s/he needs before logging onto the Internet and searching blindly for a paying e-publication or research database.

Gach catalogs URLs by the gigabyte, offering links to poetry and fiction mega-link lists, authors' and agents' homepages, research resources, and more. Most URLs listed are followed by a brief description of the site, while some chapters have the look of a printed "bookmark" file from a writer's web browser.

All writers will especially want to study the book's final chapter, which is devoted to Internet censorship and copyright issues, a sticky subject for writers on and off the computer. URLs and descriptions of the more affluent writers' unions and leagues are profiled here, as is information essential to any writer confused about her/his rights.

As with any printed directory of Websites, there is no guarantee that every URL listed in Gach's book will still be valid once you bring Writers.net home from the bookstore (this book is three years old, mind you). To combat the ever-changing climate of the Internet, Gach maintains a Webpage of book updates on his personal homepage, where one may find additions, URL changes, and even a sample chapter from the book.

A new publishing medium comes around only once every five centuries or so, and it's no wonder people are confused by the Internet. Gary Gach investigates the new world of publishing on the Net and provides great literary finds and useful information for established writers, beginners, and all lovers of words

Writers.net ups the ante in printed guides to the Net. Neophyte writers in cyberspace will find it as valuable as magellan found his compass. Experienced voyagers can use it to find whole continents they never knew existed