Writers Up North achieves 300 members!! Yee-haw!

Michael Botur here, founder, caretaker, bankroller and janitor of WriteUpNorth.co.nz and its Facebook community, Writers Up North.

Just a quick note to announce I am VERY proud to see 300 people are now members of Writers Up North. And it’s not bullshit membership either, with people who live in the US and Nigeria and Sri Lanka trying to participate. These are real Northlanders and I like to think I’ve kept out anyone who isn’t a genuine Tai Tokerau-connected author to try and keep the community ‘pure.’

Anyway, before this post gets too Nazi-sounding, let me briefly go over what we are achieving and leave you to keep writing.

What we’ve achieved so far on Writeupnorth.co.nz/Writers Up North – the Northland Writers Network:

• Since founding this digital community in 2015 because there was no other discussion board for Northland writers – and because the Northland branch of the NZ Society of Authors wasn’t publishing local writers or facilitating them to interact online – we’ve grown from zero members to 300
• People are meeting and forming creative writing groups, book clubs, flash fiction groups and more
• People are promoting their personal work and the work of Northland Authors, Whangarei Libraries, National Flash Fiction Day, Dirty Word Poetry, Poets @ OneOneSix and many other brands
• We have massively raised awareness of who in Northland makes creative writing, who promotes it and who the experts and beginners are
• We have developed a microscopic literary economy, which is cool, with money going to and from professionals based on book sales, marketing, printing, short story competition money and more.
• Writers Up North has become a go-to noticeboard for a lot of the country’s main literary organisations to promote their events, workshops, competitions and announcements. Basically, they realise there’s a lot of literary talent up here to talk to.

What I hope we’ll see next:

• More creative writing submissions
• A volunteer to step up and take care of the digital admin now that Mike has done his seven years.

Don’t forget:

WriteUpNorth.co.nz has always been and will always be a publication platform for your creative writing. It’s designed to be one of the first places on which you can publish work which doesn’t have another digital home – and you’re assured that, with nearly 20,000 page hits and an active social media community, far more people will read your work on WUN than any other platform.

Thanks again everyone. Keep writing.

Mike Botur

Whangarei