Alright I'm curious. I'm also brainstorming. I'm doing two things at once! Wooohio multitasking!

What are you doing to get published? Ie. What active things are you actually doing?

-I am writing
-I am editing other works
-I am submitting to literary journals, far and wide!

But I feel like there is something else I should be doing? Help me help myself.

Hi flannerycam - this is a huge question and the publishing world has changed so much in tese last 2 or 3 years that I think we are actually still in the middle of that change.

Bearing that in mind I think a writer needs to make use of what tehnology offers to tread the increasingly stronger path between "being published" and "self-publishing"

Have a website - preferably for each novel/collection of stories/articles/screenplays - get each a facebook page and twitter account - post enticing snippets, serialise your longer works (novels, screenplays etc) on your site, try to get members to comment, use aforementioned social networking sites to promote each episode. Look into Hula or Smashwords or some other online self-publishing account for ease of distributing your episodes ... or just have them as epub or pdfs from your own site.

If you've got a particularly strong character or theme - have an asscoiated website (plus related social networking accounts) for that character, theme etc. EG: if your theme is bereavement, or teenage angst, then have a site about those topics with tlinks to your writing.

The trick is to get regular publishers to "friend" your FB and twitter profiles ....

For my screenplays I'm going to look into Amazon Studios.

It's all WRONG though - writers should be free to write and we should all have assistants to do everything I've written above for us, who wants to fart about on twitter when the inner world comes a calling ????

Yep you need a platform:

http://www.creativeburrow.org/?action=resources;sa=view;lid=4 <Look for her Author Platform eBook
http://www.creativeburrow.org/?action=resources;sa=details;lid=107
http://www.creativeburrow.org/?action=resources;sa=details;lid=144

I've chosen the last option, but I must say I should have selected the third one as well, because most published authors still struggle to get published again, as in my case. Having one or more books out there is humbling because it makes you realize that you're not set for life, and rejection is always a possibility (well, a reality). I still get ignored by publishers, so I need to fight the fight everyday like any rookie.

Only the big names don't have to worry about this because their names sell before they have sat down to write. The rest of us need effort, promotion, emails, phone calls and sleepless nights.

I am writing and submitting to platforms, but I realize this is not enough. Time is my greatest problem. I am clearing my schedule for more time to get better organised. I do like the self publishing effort. I have published this way before. Thanks for sharing your ideas.