Beth Howard had a good life. After bailing out of the dot-com biz she worked in a Malibu pastry shop and became a pie baker to the stars, met the love of her life, traveled, settled down in Iowa and started what’s become a popular pie blog, The World Needs More Pie. Then, as she was starting to write a book about pie, her husband died unexpectedly. Flash forward 18 months and Howard not only got back to writing the pie book, she sold it to Harlequin Non-Fiction for publication in summer 2012. Read the first chapter of Making Piece: A Memoir about Love, Loss and Pie. Just like a good slice of apple cinnamon pie, I promise it’ll leave you wanting more.

More on Writing

Writing Advice and Blog Topics Sent Weekly (ChrisBrogan.com) – Master blogger – and self promoter – Chris Brogan now offers a weekly Blog Topics newsletter featuring writing prompts he says makes regular blogging easier. Subscribe for $9.97 a month. Not ready to shell out the big bucks? Here’s a freebie from Brogan: 20 Blog Topics to Get You Unstuck.

Data journalism discussion recap (WebJournalism.org) – From March 4 #wjchat.

More on the media business:

Google’s Journalism Prize and the 5 Groups That Should Win It (Fast Company) – The magazine looks at five examples of journalism innovation to inspire contestants after $2.7 million in prize money being offered by the search giant.

All of Facebook’s Like Buttons on Third-Party Sites Now Publish a Full News Feed Story (Facebook Insider) – I just tested this and can verify that it’s happening. If you read a story on a website and click on the Facebook “Like” button the publisher’s included, it will now publish the story’s headline, site and short story summary to your Facebook status.

More on inspiration:

The Worst Moments are Your Best Opportunity (Seth’s Blog)

But after a few weeks or months, you may wake up one morning, turn on the computer and realize, I got nothing.

Some bloggers never get past that point, which explains why so many blogs are abandoned each year.

But it’s not hard to come up with blog post subjects, even when the idea well appears to have run dry.

In fact, after blogging for a while, you may see inspiration for blog posts in almost anything you do, see or say.

When it comes to coming up with ideas for blog posts, here are some common tricks of the trade:

Read through comments your readers are leaving – Are they asking questions? Are there certain things they comment on more than others? If so, those questions or comments could be the kernels of other posts.

Read other blogs – Look for blogs on topics you write about to see if there are common themes or timely topics you could pick up on your own blog, and refer back to the original of course.

Read, watch or listen to the news – Use a news event, commentary or trend as a starting point.

Give advice – Blog readers love how-tos and lists, especially if it’s not something they’re already read 100 times before.

Read posts by popular bloggers – Old pros like Chris Brogan or ProBlogger have written extensively on how to consistently come up with ideas for blog posts. Here’s Christ Brogan’s Best of list of his most popular blog posts ever, and a good one from ProBlogger called A freelance writer is always full of ideas.

Re-read your older posts. Is there a thread or idea you could expand on? Is there something you overlooked the first time you that’s screaming to be said? Does something warrant an update?

Review comments you leave on other people’s blogs. Could your reply serve as the basis for your own post. I tend to do this a lot – hey, as long as I’m writing something, I might as well use it on my own blog, right? In fact, this post started out as reply to a message I read on a writer’s forum from a freelancer who was worried she’d run out of things to say on her almost month-old blog (maybe she should check out that ProBlogger post).

Ask for suggestions. It’s not admitting defeat to ask for help, especially from the people who already read you – they’re there because they’re interested in what you have to say, so ask them what they’d like to hear more of.

I never know when I’ll get an idea for a blog post, and if I don’t act quickly, it could fly away forever. So when inspiration strikes and I’m at my keyboard, I scroll over to my blog and write up a few quick notes. Then when I have time to sit down and compose a post I don’t have to start from scratch. If I pound out a rough draft in the heat of the moment I can capture the emotion of what inspired me to write in the first place. I can always go back later – the next day or even a week or month later – with my editor hat on, rework what I’ve written so it reads better and add links, images, etc.

When I started blogging I had a dozen or so blog posts started in my drafts queue. Nineteen months into it, I’ve got the beginnings of 60+ posts hanging out in my drafts queue – some are a few sentences, others just titles and still others I should probably delete because they’re outdated or I can’t remember what they were supposed to be about.

But I can’t imagine running out of things to say.

I’d put out a call to writers and editors on LinkedIn asking for names of industry folks I should include. But instead of news industry luminaries, I kept getting social media trailblazers. Wait a minute, I wanted to say, you don’t understand – social media isn’t the same as online news.

Then I started using Twitter. It didn’t take long to figure out that for the people who hang out on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other online networks the social media hotdogs and digital media trendsetters are one in the same. They’re the ones people friend, follow and read. They’re the ones broadcasting the news of a US Airways plane going down in the Hudson River and Barack Obama’s inauguration  – regardless of who they are, where they are, their day job, their background or experience.

That meant I had to rethink my definition of trendsetter.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s totally subjective and different from what I would have picked six month ago, and probably what I’d pick six months from now. When possible, I’ve linked their names to their Twitter IDs or websites.

The Old School

• Bill Keller - Executive editor of the New York Times, charged with bringing the Grey Lady into the 21st century. Appointed paper’s first social media editor earlier this week.
• Jonathan Miller – Former AOL chief recently hired by Rupert Murdoch to run News Corp.’s digital interests, including MySpace and Hulu (minus the Wall Street Journal).
• Russ Stanton – Los Angeles Times editor. Figuring out a way how to stay relevant – and solvent – in the Internet age.
• Dean Singleton – Head of MediaNews Group, which owns the Denver Post and 99 other media properties, and leader of the charge to help newspapers monetize the Web.

The New Wave

• Tina Brown – Proprietress of The Daily Beast, a cross between the Conde Nast glossies she used to edit and a daily politics and gossip column.
• Arianna Huffington – HuffPost founder; gadfly turned new media publisher.
• Hyperlocal news bloggers – NeighborsGo, NewzJunky, SealBeachDaily.com, WestSeattleBlog, Neighborhood Notes, the list goes on and on
• Josh Marshall – Creator of Talking Points Memo, political blog that won a George Polk Award in 2008 for reporting on the firings of US attorneys.
• Paul Steiger – Former WSJ managing editor and current editor in chief at ProPublica, another high-profile online-only news outfit doing original investigative journalism on a non-profit basis.

The Professors

• Jeff Jarvis – J-school prof at City University of New York, Buzz Machine blogger, author of What Would Google Do? and former magazine and newspaper reporter, columnist and editor.
• Jay Rosen – NYU journalism prof, PressThink blogger and director of NewAssignment.Net, “an experiment in open-source reporting.”
• Sree Sreenivasan – Tech evangelist and professor at Columbia Journalism School, know for his extensive new media workshops.

The Promoters

• Seth Godin – Author, viral marketer extraordinaire, quipster.
• Guy Kawasaki – Entrepreneur, author, social media guru, proprietor of AllTop “online magazine rack” and blogger at How to Change the World. On Twitter at @guykawasaki.
• Peter Shankman – PR guy and founder of Help a Reporter Out crowdsourcing service for reporters.

The Pundits

• Paul Gillin – Social media expert, author and chronicler of newspaper hard times at Newspaper Deathwatch.
• Mark Glaser – Columnist for PBS MediaShift, “Your guide to the digital media revolution.”
• Alan Mutter – Newsman turned venture capitalist and blogger at Reflections of a Newsosaur.
• Jeremiah Owyang – Forrester Research social media analyst.

The Tech Geeks

• Chris Brogan – Mr. Social Media. Read and learn.
• Matt Mullenweg – Founding developer of WordPress blogging software, used by newspapers such as the New York Times, and head of WordPress’ parent company, Automattic.
• Dipchand “Deep” Nishar – Former Google exec who became LinkedIn’s v.p. of products in early December and has since rolled out a bevy of service upgrades.
• Darren Rowse – The Aussie blogging mastermind behind ProBlogger.
• Robert Scoble – Uber tech geek. Former Microsoft tech evangelist and Fast Company videographer blogging at Scobleizer.com.
• Biz Stone and Evan Williams – Co-founder and CEO of Twitter respectively. Reportedly turned down a $500 million buy out offer from Facebook earlier this year.

Know other new media pioneers I should include? Leave a comment. If I get enough I’ll re-post an expanded list.

Which camp are you in?

Plenty of Twitter etiquette experts will say flogging your blog on Twitter is a no no. But really, if you use it to talk about your work or life and said work or life includes the blog you do for fun or profit, then it follows that the twain should meet, at least every once in a while.

But what constitutes every once in a while? Ah, there’s the rub.

My philosophy is simple. Ask yourself:

1. How often do I tweet?
2. What do I tweet about?
3. Does tweeting a link to my latest blog post fit into my overall tweeting strategy?
4. Does tweeting a link to my blog post constitute a (fill in the blank with an acceptable amount) percent of my total tweets?

Answer all those questions and you’ll have your answer.

I tweet about a variety of topics, including the subjects I report on, freelance writing and stuff happening in the city, state and region of the country where I live. I tweet somewhere between once and 10 times a day, some days more. I put up new blog posts three times a week, and tweet about each once, maybe twice when I first put them up.  During any given week I may refer to an old blog post a couple times to answer a question. And when I follow someone new I usually include a link, either to the main page of this blog or to a blog post I’ve written that’s relevant to that person. I also blog about stories I’ve written when they first come out.

That means in any given week, I’m tweeting 70 to 80 times and 10 or 12 of those are about my blog or something else I’ve written. That’s within my personally acceptable blog flogging limit.

Social media guru Chris Brogan claims to maintain a slightly higher 75/25 ratio of helpful v. promotional tweets. If it that works for Brogan – who has 55,000+ Twitter followers – it should work for you.