Second-Chance Auction & Honor Roll

As many of you know, our first-ever WU auction was plagued last weekend due to a distributed denial-of-service attack, which took out our site, forced us to change hosts and IP addresses, and generally gave us a lot of gray hair and required the scheduling of massages. Because many of you were either —

a. not aware we were running an auction in the first place or
b. not able to access WU at all because of the static or messed up links
c. not able to access us even after repairs because of our new IP address, which required a cache-clear for many readers

— we want to offer interested parties a second chance at winning some of our offerings — at the final-bid price.

What’s up for bid?

1. Our four blog posts spot has sold out! Thanks to all who stepped forward. But we still have plenty of 2 and 3…
   
2. Space in a two-week rotating ad here at WU, at the winning high bid of $210.What’s a rotating ad? Look at the top-left sidebar of our homepage. See the rotating ads there—with Therese Walsh’s The Last Will of Moira Leahy, Donald Maass’s The Breakout Novelist, and Keith Cronin’s Me Again? A bid of $210 on this auction claims one of those spaces. Don’t know how to build an ad? We don’t expect you to. Instead, you provide us with the art (a high-quality jpg of your book cover or the logo for your business), some promo text (like a selling quote for your book, or a client’s recommendation), and a hyperlink to the web portal of your choice, and our ad guru will turn it into a shared ad space for you and two others.Your ad will run for two weeks in our sidebar, anytime within the next year. You tell us when. (Note: Dates fill on a first come, first served basis, and ad development will require ~5 weeks.)Down the road, we’ll host ad space here at WU for a higher price. Consider this your early-bird sale!Interested? Email us at writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com with the words ROTATING AD in your subject line.

   This opportunity closes in one week.

3. Standalone Skyscraper Ads, at the winning bid of $300 each.What’s a skyscraper ad?Look at the top-left sidebar of our homepage. See the ad under the header “Skyscraper Ad”? That space is what you’ll bid on in this auction. This ad is the cheese. It stands alone. No rotating with any other cover, no sharing. Provide us with the art (a high-quality jpg of your book cover or the logo for your business), some pertinent copy (like a selling quote for your book, or a client’s recommendation) and a hyperlink to the web portal of your choice, and we’ll do the rest. OR you can provide us with an already created web ad sized to our specs if you prefer.As with the rotating ad, we’ll offer Skyscraper Ad space here at WU in the future, but at a higher price. Meet the bid, and your ad will be featured at the top of the homepage for two weeks, anytime within the course of the next year. You tell us when. (Note: Dates fill on a first come, first served basis, and ad development will require ~5 weeks.)If you’d like to secure a skyscraper ad for yourself, email us at writerunboxed@writerunboxed.com with the words SKYSCRAPER  AD in your subject line.This opportunity ends in one week.

What if you want to donate funding to WU but don’t want to bid on an item?

We’ve recently established a donate button at the top of the site, to help with expenses here at WU. These include account and hosting fees, fees to establish the WU newsletter (premiering in March), and other ad hoc expenses like when bad juju finds us and we need to call in our web guru to fix things up again.

We’re extremely grateful to those who’ve already made donations. Because we wanted to show our appreciation in some small way, we’ve created an Honor Roll to pay tribute to those who’ve already helped us out. Please check out the page, click the links of those who’ve made donations, send them some love. And if you’d like to join them, the donate link will continue to sit right there at the top of WU. We’ll add new people to our Honor Roll as new donations come in.

Have questions about any item in the second-chance auction? Ask in comments, and we’ll answer.

Many, many thanks for your support! 

Writer Unboxed

Writer Unboxed began as a collaboration between Kathleen Bolton and Therese Walsh in 2006. Since then, the site has grown to include ~50 regular contributors and a variety of guests on rotation throughout a given year.

In 2016, the Writer Unboxed team published a book with Writer’s Digest / Random House. AUTHOR IN PROGRESS: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What It Really Takes to Get Published is a comprehensive guide focused on helping writers over/around/through hurdles faced at every stage of the novel-writing process. It’s received some ***** reviews; we hope you’ll check it out.

If you’d like to be among the first to know about the next Writer Unboxed UnConference, which will likely tie-in with WU’s 20th Anniversary celebration, please sign up for our mailing list!

Write on!