July 2020 Newsletter (Three Big Announcements!)

~ furrywritersguild

Hello there FWG members, it’s time for another monthly newsletter! Is it surprising that we have a lot to talk about once again? Let’s just get right down to business.

We want to be able to do more to promote our members in the guild. To make this happen, we have three new projects we intend to tackle with your help.

First, we intend to update our suggested reading page. There were links to a lot of older articles and the like on there, but a lot of those things while solid resources aren’t regularly updated. So we will be taking works submitted by our membership to feature on our list!

If you would like your work featured you will need to fill out this form. We intend to attempt to populate the list by looking at furry publisher’s websites but if you don’t fill out the form, we can’t guarantee we’ll catch your work. Help us help promote you! We’ll only be listing works including current FWG members as a perk for your continued membership and support.

Second, we wish to use our social media platforms to help promote people further. It is impossible to catch every new release, book giveaway, and other promotional things to help our members get spotlights. Our staff simply doesn’t have that much time to dig through Twitter (our social media manager is already doing the work for two other officer positions).

So we will be introducing the FWG Promotion Tip Line as a new service offered to members of the guild! All you have to do is fill out this two question form to get featured on our social media. This is the place to tell us if you have new books released (self published or not), give us links to posts to stories on places like SoFurry or FurAffinity, or generally anything else furry lit related the guild can promote. We’ll be keeping this link up on our front page so it’s easy to find. This is another service only open to current FWG members as a perk for your continued support and membership.

We also want to make it clear that NSFW material is okay to submit to us for promotion. We always tag any links to NSFW works on our social media so that users can avoid them if they wish. NSFW furry lit is STILL furry lit. We will not exclude adult focused writers.

Third, we’ve been discussing this idea and there seems to be interest from some of our membership as well as furry publishers. We want to host an online convention with a focus on furry literature. We know how hard it has been hurting authors to lose convention sales so we want to help make that slightly better. We don’t have a lot of details to offer yet as this is a larger project to figure out, but we intend to try and host this during Furry Book Month in October. We hope to feature panels, readings from authors, an online dealers den, and potentially a writing contest among other fun things.

If you have interest in volunteering to help with this please contact a guild officer so we can speak with you. We will most certainly need help with potentially streaming panels, so if you have a solid PC setup and time to help we really would like to hear from you. We’ll likely have calls for panels, the dealer’s den, and other things as we get closer to the date. Publishers, expect us to reach out to you soon.

Our final piece of guild business is to mention we still have two potential officer positions to fill: Social Media Manager and Cóyotl Awards Chair. If you would be interested in volunteering please message our guild president Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps.

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With guild business out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff! We featured two interviews with FWG members this month. We discussed multimedia fiction with Thurston Howl and discussed writing adult furry works with recent Cóyotl Award winner Gre7g Luterman. Be sure to check these out as they offer fantastic insights to help with your own writing!


We’d love to take this opportunity to mention we would love to feature more interviews like his, as well as potential guest posts on writing tops for our blog. Please contact a guild officer if you would be interested.

We saw a few new releases cross our path this month you might want to check out including:

We also hunted down two books currently up for pre-order from furry publishers! 

Remember, we now have our Promotion Tip Line to submit to if you have new releases coming out, so don’t hesitate to fill that out so we can feature your book in our next newsletter!

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Part of our website update was making our Furry Writers’ Market better than ever before! You can find all of open markets for furry writing we can track down here: https://furrywritersguild.com/furry-writers-market/

Currently, these markets are open:

Consider checking out our page for details and writing up a story for one of these awesome anthologies!

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We have a few more things to mention, we’d like to welcome our newest members G.C. Stargazer, Ezen Baklattan, and Roci Stone! We also wanted to say we had a massive several person tie for who beta read the most stories this month on Discord. Keep the competition, and those stories to look at coming.

We’d also like to congratulate Sparf, T. Kingfisher, Gre7g Luterman, and Tim Susman on their recent Cóyotl Awards win! If you’re reading this, we’re working on figuring out a safe way to get awards shipped out to you. We’ll get a hold of you soon to get those shipping details.

I know life has been hitting us hard lately, so I want to remind you all just how much of an achievement it is to have kept going. Whether you’ve been writing thousands of words or only a few, any progress is still progress. It’s not easy keeping creative right now, so allow yourself whatever time you can to relax, especially with a good book if you can. Keep safe and well everyone, let’s do our best to get through August too.

– FWG President Linnea “LiteralGrill” Capps

 

Published by furrywritersguild