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?

For example, someone I know recently won third prize in a contest from WritingRoom.com for submitting a novel. For her prize, she had her book published, and they are helping her market it, and got it in bookstores. Now her book is being sold at big name retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

She also got a literary agent out of the deal, and is moving right along in her journey to writing for a living. This is only one example though.

Amazon themselves have contests. If you search for “writing contest” on Google, you will get all kinds of results, and all kinds of opportunities to promote your writing.

That’s just the thing though. If you win, that’s fantastic, but even if you don’t, you’re still getting your name out there, and your work is getting read by professionals in the writing field (they still have to judge it right?).

Either way, you’re still getting in some valuable networking, and it can only help your career. That is unless your writing just isn’t good and you build a reputation as a poor author. That’s why you should make sure your work is truly ready to be judged before entering it any contest. It will not only save you embarrassment and keep your reputation in better regards, the judges will appreciate it too.

Key point: The more verbs used, the higher the chance for confusion, the higher the chance your prose is too slow.

Grueling, even.

Adverbs, strings of adjectives in succession, too many verbs all have the same problem. They slow down the prose and worse, they dilute the prose. I call an addiction to modifiers “parts-of-speech abuse.” The more words and commas in your sentence, the more bumps and snags you inflict upon your reader as you drag him along.

There’s a place for complicated style. It’s usually in academic books nobody but academics read. They read them to feel smarter, the same purpose the author had when he wrote the books, both reader and author having a masochistic and self-important approach to literature.

The rest of us like our journeys smooth and painless. I didn’t say simple. I said smooth and painless. Real style isn’t how many words one can cram into a sentence. Real style is how much meaning one can cram into a few words.

So take a look at your prose and count the number of times you use a compound verb, especially compound verbs beginning with had or was. See if you can get around them.

In addition to the pace of your prose, notice also the rhythm and whether it is balanced. The word “had,” for example, is short but dramatic like a cymbal smash in your prose rhythm. It slows down the beat some, and is sometimes a very necessary element if you’re rhythm conscious. In scatting, the sound would be something like had, hadda da, hadda da, badoom badoom badoom. In some instances, the h and a are dropped and it’s more of an “ud” sound, depending on what precedes it. Trim your rhythm accordingly.

Another problem area is the lesser-used future perfect progressive (perfect tenses in general are cumbersome), which almost nobody uses in regular speech. In various forms, it usually comes out something like “will have been traveling.” That’s four verbs to consider in one short phrase. It’s worse if made into a complicated conditional: “If I had been running at the usual time, I would have been being eaten by a mountain lion right now.”

Yick. The grammar is correct, but the sentence is awkward, unpleasant, and unduly complicated, cramming all that time-conscious perfect tense conditional stuff into one long string of confusion. It also creates a weird paradox whereby the sentence is too slow and stumbling (especially for a sentence about running), but it also conveys information too fast to create a nice suspenseful presentation of the action. This denies the full tension and release present within the narrative. “I was ten minutes late, literally running late for my morning jog. Just under the rock eave, a mountain lion’s face fur grew red with the hot blood of a more punctual jogger. Good thing my mother had called.”

Okay, so I’ve embellished that a bit with style and narrative, but my point is clear right? Past perfect tense is slipped in there at the end, when it is needed to indicate the timing of the call, but does not slow down the prose until it is time to slow down and reflect. Some confuse passive voice with past progressive. In this case, “was running,” which isn’t even fully presented, is past progressive showing action while describing idiomatically what was going on. The language serves a dual purpose. This is different, obviously, from “my shoes were pulled on” in contrast with “I pulled on my shoes.”

So go forth, fellow writers, and trim back the hads and the other helping and linking and being verbs. Rearrange those passive voice sentences unless they’re absolutely necessary for some weird artistic reason you’re insisting upon. Keep your prose active, swift, and rhythmically beautiful.