So no – you won’t be fined $11,000 each time you receive a review copy of a book and don’t explicitly mention it. While it remains a good idea for you to say if the review copy arrived at your door accompanied by a new Lexus (and honestly, if you’re getting bribes that big, you deserve the fine), the FTC will just write letters to bloggers in most circumstances.

It turns out that the $11,000 fine is more of a maximum penalty. What’s more, since the FTC itself can’t impose fines, it would have to take you to court, turning the whole thing into something of a circus.

Richard Cleland, the assistant director for the FTC’s division of advertising practices, explained to Cecilia King, “The confusion has arisen, I think, because we do have authority to ask for a civil penalty to be imposed by the Federal district court judge in the event that trade regulation rules are violated.” But “there is no realistic scenario that we get from here to there.”

Keep doing what you do, then, assuming that doesn’t consist of receiving crazy bribes.

These features were introduced throughout the second half of August, so sorry if you’ve seen some of them before. But together, they represent a pretty interesting collection well worth investigating.

First, there was something that ensured feed readers would pick up your posts more quickly. It’s never fun to have what you regard as a great piece of work just sit there, unappreciated, for a period.

Next came a “Send To” feature for Google Reader that made it easier to share whatever you come across on your blog. And not one, but two updates related to labels.

Another type of “Share” button popped up on the navigation bar next, with a BlogPress app for the iPhone following on its heels.

Finally, there’s a doodad that helps Blogger users support charities.

Impressed? Let’s hope so. Just listing all of this stuff wore out your humble author, and so the people behind Blogger are surely ready for a breather.

Maha Atal wrote this morning, “AOL is getting some good press these days for hiring journalists such as newspaperman Carl Cannon and Walter Shapiro, a veteran of The Washington Post and Time magazine, in an effort to bolster its original content. The effort, praised in media circles for creating a home for experienced writers and producers, is part of a strategy by new CEO Tim Armstrong to revitalize AOL in advance of a planned spinout by corporate parent Time Warner . . .”

And other online entities are following suit. True/Slant has picked up more than a few writers, and it was founded by a former AOLer. The sports blog known as SBNation conforms to the pattern in both respects, too.

Considering how the print industry is doing, these developments are extremely important. Not everyone can earn a living as a blogger, of course, but the more people who are given a shot, the better.

So if you have any old AOL CDs around, don’t treat them as absolute trash. They might just represent a sort of memento of your future employer.

A recent Royal Pingdom blog post stated, “[T]he WordPress.com blogging service is growing with an average of about 11,500 blogs per day. So, if we use this 11,500-per-day number as a starting point, how much would WordPress.com grow in a year? The answer is: nearly 4.2 million. (365 x 11,500 = 4,197,500)”

The post then continued, “If WordPress.com hosted a bit over 5 million blogs at the start of 2009, and if we take the increasing growth rate into consideration, it looks quite likely that WordPress.com could pass 10 million hosted blogs by the end of 2009.”

Impressive, eh? The fact that WordPress.com’s got such a huge user base should tell you that the software does a pretty good job of facilitating writing. What’s more, since everybody’s used to it, it should make your readers feel at home on your blog.

Of course, whatever works for you is indeed what works for you, so don’t feel any pressure to change. The software behind your blog probably isn’t the first thing that’ll attract people to your writing.

Scribd touts itself as the YouTube of the publishing world. Scribd allows users to upload pretty much any document format, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc., and share as they like. Readers unattached to glossy covers can download the documents and print, read, embed, or share. Authors can charge for downloads, keep 80 percent of sales (as compared to a meager two percent), and control how the e-book is distributed.

Today, Scribd announced a deal with publishing giants Random House and Simon & Schuster, among many others to make books available and offer sneak preview chapters and excerpts.

While Lulu (print on demand publisher) has held steady at 800,000 unique monthly viewers, Scribd in the past few months has rocketed past seven million. Already that’s a significant opportunity for authors looking to bypass the wait-and-hope approach and to take publishing matters into their own hands. It could even be a bridge between authors and powerhouse publishers, displacing agents and giving those risk-averse publishers a good indication of a book’s potential.

Though vanity publishing was forever on the lower rung of the publishing world—a sign an author couldn’t get published otherwise—I think this will change with technology. Vanity publishing will become a way for authors to self-promote at no financial risk or risk of signing away all their publishing rights.

2. People ignore what they don’t understand.

3. Is it concise? Will it fit easily in an email subject line, a Twitter post?

4. Would you click it? Is it catchy? Spreadable? If you saw the headline at random in Google Reader/Digg/Reddit, etc., would it get your attention and compel you to click?

5. If possible, load the important keywords at the front. This is good for search engines and human reader/scanners.

6. Is it honest? People don’t like being tricked and won’t trust you again if what follows doesn’t match what was promised.

7. If too difficult to incorporate all elements at once, define immediate and long term goals. Tailor the title for viral, buzzworthiness first so you can grab the social media/click happy crowd. Rework the title later, after everything as settled, so that it’s search engine friendly for future reference and findability.

Hey, work is work. And it prevents Britney Spears from tweeting about how cute it is her kids are playing in old refrigerators. “We’re recycling, y’all!”

According to the New York Times, writers are being hired by the famous to update blogs and social networks for them, too.

But don’t knock it. It may be that Twitter is actually good writing practice. Poetry is the art of packing meaning into a few carefully selected words. On Twitter you’ve got 140 characters to say something that counts. On Facebook, 160. Web 2.0 could produce the next Hemingway.

That’s not so weird. People are already publishing Twitter novels. Stories told 140 characters at a time. Of course, the reader has to follow in real time. Otherwise the story just comes out backwards.

So, tweet on, fellow wordsmiths. Call it an exercise in concision.

This BBC article says “the writing is on the wall” for writing by hand, and in a couple of generations, our descendants will be looking at our hand-penned notes they we look at documents from the 18th century, when esses looked like effs.

As the digital age progresses and keyboards invade every aspect of our social and professional lives, who needs or wants to have to decipher somebody else’s poor scribbling?

Chickenscratch, we used to call it back home. That’s why we were hammered into proper letters. But really, how often do you write something by hand anymore? We make notes in the margin (and others can never read them), we make grocery lists, etc. Our kids will do the same, likely in some digital form. When they do write it’ll be printing letters, probably. Cursive was supposed to be faster and prettier, but what use is it now?

Well, unlike printed material—which will not go away mind you, just evolve—it’s not a big loss to lose script or to have relegated to a an art form like ancient calligraphy.

If you’re a writer by occupation, though, you know that sometimes things come out differently when you have to write them by hand. I imagine for us in one of the world’s oldest professions, will reserve script—for those of us who’ve actually learned or been taught—for these brief exercises of the past.

Here’s what you’ll need for researching how not to write about sex:

Penthouse letters
At least a couple trashy romance novels
Anything by Charles Bukowski
The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards

These will show you how to never, ever write sex scenes. This passage from David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, as found on the Literary Review’s site, just kills me:

“If Dawn Madden’s breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie’s got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun….
Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he moved up and down, Man-from-Atlantisly. His silver chain jiggled on his neck.
Now her grubby soles met like they were praying.
Now his skin was glazed in roast pork sweat.
Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll.
Now Tom Yew’s body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of him….”

I haven’t read the book, so don’t know the context, but I hope Mitchell meant that to be comical.

Now that you know where to turn to learn how not to write sex, read this article by Steve Almond. The man speaks the truth.

While you’re at it, give a gander to Jessica Barksdale Inclan’s recommendations of who writes sex right.

This is the 21st Century and anyway that’s just mean. That’s why you gotta love a resource like Duotrope Digest—like all good things, the site relies on donations. Google can’t really define “duotrope” as a word, and it sound a bit like swallowing, but this online digest/resource is seriously useful for writers wanting to get published.

Duotrope is a database fiction and poetry writers can search to find not just publishers, but descriptions, pay scales, length requirements, genres, and awards. They even keep track of acceptance/rejection rates, average response time, whether simultaneous submissions are okay, et cetera. Pretty much all the questions an aspiring literary type would want to know.

Anyway, beats hurting your eyes and wasting highlighter ink right?