Wonderful idea, Sally! Looking forward to it.
Reblogging is like giving a Christmas gift to the original author. Yay! Thanks, I say.
There’s even MORE shit I have to do?
While you are building (or expanding) your platform, it’s a great time to polish, edit and add or delete whatever you want added to or deleted from your book. Plus, a lot of the time we have to make choices about what the blurb will say and what the cover needs to look like. Bouncing that stuff off a bunch of Facebook author page friends or Twitter followers or Blog subscribers is a great way to see what the feedback is – and spend no money to find out.
Part of the way you increase your base is by adding people as followers on Twitter, Facebook, and your blog, or whatever other social media you like doing. Most of you have blogs, so let’s focus there.
That’s how it feels, yeah.
Look what happened when I posted and tweeted about my…
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Blogging tips in a nutshell. Not saying that the writer is a nut. Well, we all are sometimes, are we not?
Sometimes you start to blog, not having blog tips as warnings, you are all excited and you do things to your blog or that involves blogging that ultimately end up being traps that are like quicksand. They drag you down and deplete you of energy as you work to pull yourself out of what has happened.
What you do with your blog is ultimately up to you, because you want your blog to BE you. It represents part of you that you want to put out there.
Today I want to cover 10 things, traps if you will, that will cost you time, cause you weariness, and create misery. Knowing these things ahead of time might be able to save you. As a blogger now, you can maybe head these things off before they get out of hand. Or if you’re neck deep already, perhaps these 10 tips will give…
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Great list for what to put on your author website.
So, you’ve set up your author website. Now what in the world do you put on it? First and foremost, know that it is your website. Your brand is unique to you, and there is no cookie-cutter model that will fit it perfectly. Only you can determine what features and content should fill your author website.
That being said, there are a few elements that I strongly suggest every author include. I will keep this post relatively simple and expand on some of these features in later posts. This is simply a “what” and brief “why” post — not a “how” tutorial.
1. Author Head Shot
Your readers want to connect with you, and nothing does that quite like seeing your face. Don’t worry — this doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Simply find or take a photograph of yourself that focuses on your face. It should be clear (high resolution)…
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Inspiration from a classic.
I totally agree! In our state it’s against the law to text and drive, but at least half of the drivers I see are texting…My husband works for a funeral company and just last week an escort driver for the procession was stopped and getting out and a person who was texting didn’t see him and came mere inches from causing another funeral!
People. We have got to put away our phones when we drive. The messages will still be there when we park the car.
I originally posted this a year ago, but it recently came up again in my classroom and thought it might be timely to post again. I asked my students how many of them have been in a moving car while someone was texting? 39/52 said they were. Wow! How incredible it is that parents value their children so little. You think that comment is too harsh, well it isn’t. Texting and driving is 17 times more dangerous than driving drunk at the legal limit. 17 times!!!! That’s crazy. The post below will give you the particulars. I told my students that they should grab the phone and throw it out the window. After all, a broken phone is much better than a dead child. Here we go:
This feels like a public service announcement. Here goes …
I had a long interesting discussion with some of my students today. First…
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I feel like I may have reblogged this before, but just in case…I want this list of ideas!
Exhausted, that’s how I felt when my Facebook launch party ended. Three hours of chatting online, asking trivia questions, keeping track of winners, and answering questions.
This is the story of how I created and hosted my first launch party.
Preparation for the event.
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Just keep writing, just keep writing . . . I think I recognize most of those thoughts.
There isn’t a writer alive that hasn’t stopped writing, whether as a planned break or simply because they got out of the habit. It’s happened to me in the past and I’m sure it will happen again in the future. When it does, we often come up with excuses as to justify why we’ve stopped writing, but the majority of the time that’s all they are, excuses. The trick is recognising them for the lies they are and dealing with them. Here are the ten most common reasons people stop writing and why you should ignore them.
You’ve just read back what you’ve been slaving over for the past few weeks/months and are horrified at how poor it is, so much so you’re questioning whether you’re a writer at all. I’ll let you into a little secret, every writer does this. OK, there may be a couple…
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I really need to focus on getting a more professional looking headshot! Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I love photos 4 and 1.
As I get closer to releasing Magic’s Stealing, I’ve been thinking about the little details that still need to be decided before publishing. What do I want to put on the copyright page? Where should I put the acknowledgements? Do I want the blurb after the title page inside the ebook edition? Should I have an author photo?
Let’s focus on the author photo, because that’s the one that’s been puzzling me.
Really Old Artsy Author Photo
My first author photo (artist photo, really, since I started by using it on DeviantArt) is quirky. I’m in costume and I’m holding a shiny, reflective ball that I bought at a renaissance faire. This particular photo is really small, I’m not sure where the original picture is, and it was probably taken during my early college years or during my late high school years.
Then there is my current author photo, which I use on Twitter and…
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Excellent ideas. Thanks!
3 Steps to Connecting with Potential Readersby Carmen Amato, via Book Marketing Tools
Serious readers live on Goodreads.com, the giant social reading site, and so should serious authors. Goodreads, which was acquired by Amazon in 2013, likely will integrate more with the big retailer this year. That means a new opportunity for authors.
The key to Goodreads for authors, which has had some unfortunate incidents of fake review bots and author bullying, is to establish and maintain a professional and polished author presence. Goodreads gives authors numerous opportunities to build that presence but the site is neither intuitive nor full of handy guides or tutorials. In addition, building your Goodreads author presence is best done on a computer. The site has a suite of apps for tablets and mobile devices but these don’t have the same range of options.
Here are my latest hot tips for finding your…
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Love, Laughter, and Life 