Empowering Writers: Keynote Ann Handley Speaking at AWAI

I am so happy to be talking to you. Normally I speak to marketers, but today I'm talking to my people. I'm talking to writers, so I'm really excited about that. So I'm going to talk to you today about how you can level up your writing career to make it ludicrously spectacular. How do we actually use tools that are available to us now? How do we use social media? How do we writers become marketers? I think the key is three things. to be bigger, braver, and bolder, to tell bigger stories, to be braver marketers and braver writers, and to have a bolder perspective, a bolder voice. So that's what I'm gonna talk to you today about. But before I do that, I want to talk to you about Charlotte's Web. Do you guys know Charlotte's Web? Yeah, writers, awesome. So Charlotte's Web, if you don't, actually, who has read Charlotte's Web here? Just raise your hand if you've read Charlotte's Web. Keep it up if you've read it in the last, say, 10 years. A surprising number of people. So that's like, I don't know, like 12 and a half percent of the audience has read it to your kids or whatever. So if you don't know the book, Charlotte's Web is a book written by E.B. White in 1952. And it tells the story of a little pig named Wilbur, who's the runt of a litter, and his relationship, his friendship with a barn spider, a gray barn spider by the name of Charlotte. And the story opens with what I think is one of the best lines in literature anywhere, which is, where's Papa going with that axe? Remember? It's spoken by a little girl by the name of Fern Arable, who is sitting at the breakfast table, and she sees out the window her father walking with his axe deliberately toward the barn. So she asked her mother, where's Papa going? Her mother explains that their pig had had a litter of piglets the night before, and he was going out to kill the smallest pig. Yeah. So Fern freaks out. She runs out to the barn. She pleads with her father not to kill something. You shouldn't kill something just because it's too small, she says. And so her father relents. He says, all right, it's your responsibility now, Fern. He gives her the pig, she raises it lovingly, she bottle feeds it, and it grows and thrives in the arable barn. Eventually, it gets too big for the arable barn, so it's sold to Fern's uncle, a guy by the name of Homer Zuckerman. So Homer has the pig in his barn, he raises it and fattens it up. His plan is to kill the pig. for Christmas dinner. Wilbur doesn't know this until the sheep who also lives in the Zuckerman barn. He's kind of a thug, you know? He's like the thug of the farm world. He's like, dude, I got some news for you. They're going to kill you this Christmas. And at that point, Wilbur freaks out. And he's like, what? I love it here. I don't want to die. I love my life here. And so it's Charlotte the barn spider who hatches the plan to save Wilbur's life. Her plan is to write four words in her web, which is at the corner of Wilbur's pig pen. Four words are some pig, radiant, terrific, and humble. And by the end, she saves Wilbur's life. Charlotte's research assistant is the guy on the far right there. This guy by the name of Templeton the rat, who essentially becomes her lackey who like runs down to the garbage dump every day and like finds little words for Charlotte to then weave into her web. It's not clear in the book where Charlotte's web takes place, but it turns out that Charlotte's web actually took place at E.B. White's farm. Like the genesis for it was E.B. White's farm. It's way up in Brooklyn, Maine, which is about five hours north of where I live outside of Boston. So, E.B. White has long been a hero of mine. Ever since I was in college and I read The Elements of Style, you know, so he's the E.B. White who also wrote Charlotte's Web, also wrote Stuart Little, also co-authored The Elements of Style. So I had long been a fan of his, but I had never really, like, I'd never really... We sort of got to the next level, E.B. White and me, when I learned from a Facebook friend through a message that his farmhouse was for sale.

How can writers become better marketers? How can they supercharge their writing careers? Here is Ann Handley speaking at the AWAI 2016 FastTrack to Copywriting Success Bootcamp sponsored by American Writers and Artists, Inc.  Excerpted with permission. For more details, see http://www.awaionline.com.