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Letters From Alex
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You Never Know

Through the heat of summer and the cool of fall, I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s massive Western novel Lonesome Dove. A lot of pages and land and characters and worth the long ride. 

The journey for the author began when he pecked out this sentence:

When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. 

He had no idea where that notion was leading, but it became the first sentence of his story and a sort of guide of what was to follow. He got further inspiration when he saw these words painted on the side an old bus: Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.

You never know where things will lead, in life and storytelling. 

Speaking of which…

Slightly clumsy segue into marketing.

Gotham has a bunch of courses you might not have any idea we offer. Some suggestions, all starting soon or soonish: 

Blog & Newsletter Writing – Perfect if you want to start your own publication.

Feature Article Writing – Here’s where you give journalism a human face. 

Hit Send: Publishing Short Nonfiction – How and where to publish articles and essays. 

Video Game Writing (parts 1 and 2) – Yes, actual people create the stories in video games.

Comics & Graphic Novels – And it’s fine if you’re not good at art.

Songwriting I – Lyrics + music and how they work together.

Humor Writing – Put some funny into your prose.

Business Writing – Requires more creativity and psychology than you’d imagine.


Grammar (parts 1 and 2) – We teach it in a way that’s intuitive and entertaining. 

Reading Fiction – Analyzing fiction from a writer’s POV.

Just Write – You write in a room in NYC, with company and inspiration. 

The Writer’s Mind – This one is a bit mysterious.

And—wait—we’ve got the Gotham Fiction Conference this weekend. The Pitching Roundtables on Sunday October 5 are all booked up, but we have a great lineup of Panels & Presentations happening this Saturday October 4, all on Zoom, still available. If you’re hoping to publish a novel, you’ll get lots of insight there.

We hope to see you somewhere along the trail. You never know what’ll happen. 

Alex Steele

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly
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Making Search Engines Work for You

Recently, Donna Talarico, the founder and editor-in-chief of Hippocampus, spoke at the magazine’s summer mini-conference about what writers need to know about search engine optimization. 

In addition to being an editor and publisher and writer, Donna is also a marketing and content strategist. And I’m going to share her top takeaways with you here, but first, do this (also stolen from Donna):

Jot down three words or phrases that describe what you write about. What are your most common themes? What are the ideas you return to in your work, or the expertise you bring to it?

Got it? OK, onto the tips! 

1. You need your own website. 

Already have one? Good—skip to Tip No. 2! 

Yes, you need an author website even if you’ve got a thriving Substack, or thousands of social media followers, or you’ve got a big online presence in your other life in competitive sport fishing or stop-loss reinsurance. 

“The author website is really, truly crucial to discoverability,” Donna said. “[It] makes you more credible to Google and more findable to an end user, and that’s because you own it, you control the content, and you can update it.”

Don’t panic—you don’t have to spend a lot of money to own an author website. There are platforms out there that will let you set up a basic one for free. 

The main thing is to have it. It’s the one place online where you decide what the internet says about you. 

“You can’t control what Google shows, but you can help influence it,” Donna said. 

2. Keep it current. 

This means not only adding your stories, awards, and events as they occur, but also keeping up with what people search for, and how they’re looking for it. You want to update the “evergreen” pages of your site—the ones about who you are and what you write—to include up-to-date keywords, or methods.

For example, because people are using voice search so frequently now, search engines favor  websites with a Q&A element to them. So you might tweak your About page to add a few questions and answers. Knowing that Google now likes to present results in a bullet-pointed list, you might rearrange your work history as, you guessed it, a bullet-pointed list. 

“We care a lot about word choice in our creative work,” Donna said, “and we should also care about it in our web content.” 

3. Be specific about who your audience really is.

Just as a memoirist pitching an agent should never say “My book will appeal to all readers because it’s about Life,” you can’t assume someone searching for their next read will just find you. You have to give them something to find. 

Think of the way you search for something to read. You don’t just type “novel” and throw a dart at what comes up. You search for things you’re already interested in. 

Now look at that list you made a few minutes ago. Plug those terms into a couple of search engines as well as AI programs like ChatGPT.  Are you seeing your own page(s)? Your own stories? Could your stories fit into the results? Or do the results show you stuff about stop-loss reinsurance, when you wanted swordfish?

Then look up what people are searching for. (There are lots of websites and services that track this.) Which ones might help lead readers to you?

If this all feels overwhelming, just breathe. It’s not that different from the way you already create your stories—your subconscious mind decides what it wants to write about, and you know you have to let it have its own way, or you’ll never get anywhere. But then you take charge, shape your story, edit it, decide whether to publish it at all. You decide. As writer and brand strategist Michelle Tamara Cutler has said, “If we don’t define our online presence for ourselves, the internet will do it for us.” 

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Letters From Alex
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In Praise of People

The thing that makes Gotham Gotham is you—the endlessly fascinating people who populate our community.

That’s why we don’t allow AI-generated writing in our classes: for projects, assignments, or critiques. There are many great uses for AI, but in a creative writing class it’ll prevent you from writing stuff that only you can produce, not to mention prevent you from learning how to write better.

Yes, we can detect if something was written by AI, and we’ll remove it, with a polite request to submit something else.

AI doesn’t think or feel. It merely processes information. If you ask AI to create a piece of writing for you, it will quickly comb through all the writing it can find (infringing on the copyright of writers) and toss together bits and bytes that are facsimiles of what you might want.

AI is, literally, bloodless.

You, on the other hand, are the proud owner of blood, brain, body, and (most mysteriously) soul. The power of your writing—however imperfect, flawed, messy—will be found there and nowhere else.  

You’re free to use AI on your own all you like. And you can use it to aid your work for classes, through such things as fact-finding, outlining, and grammar. But there’s just very little point to submitting AI-generated work with your name on it in a Gotham class.

I believe Ada Lovelace would agree. (That’s her in the painting.) She was a 19th century mathematician, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who helped conceptualize the world’s first computer—the Analytical Engine— realizing that such machines would eventually have capabilities beyond calculations with numbers. She found poetry in science, saying:

      The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-

      loom weaves flowers and leaves.

While also realizing the limitations of computers, saying:

      The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.

      It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

Ada was a fascinating person: alienated from her parents, obsessed with the mechanics of flying, addicted to gambling on horses, as well as a countess by marriage and mother of three children who was caught up in various sexual scandals.

She was fully human. As are you. Let’s embrace our humanity, not letting anything take that away from us.

Some Gotham courses especially apt for this purpose:

Character1: Creation

Character 2: Action (new)

The Writer’s Mind (newish)

Alex Steele

Gotham President