Frozen posts

 Just when I want to know how my ads are doing, KDP refuses to co-operate. It is probably my fault. I must have pressed something in my attempt to archive old ads and suddenly the page is virtually blank. I wish there was a re-set button where everything would miraculously go back to my original settings.

The other thing that  bugs me is that my ipad appears frozen on  one particular post. Nothing I do shifts it. It is a photo of three heads (of tennis players) supposedly carved into mount Rushmore, asking who the 4th great player should be. Things like Instagram and everything else work as normal but not Facebook. Has another data centre been knocked out or something?

I struggle with it and really I should be outside weeding my garden...

Statistical surprise!

I am often surprised when I look at the stats on Blogger.

Who would have thought that 101 page views would come from Japan, or 119 from Russia? A similar number from the US but only 18 from the UK!

The other thing  about the stats is how erratic they are - 2 days at 23 page views, then the next day up in the hundreds. Single spikes from one particular server, presumably from one person, happen every now and then, which makes me a bit paranoid, as in why should someone in Russia
be checking my blog? One can be charitable and say that  some innocent person has found something of interest and is happily reading all the pages (since 2007?  H'mmm)

But the world is such a "scammy" place today that it is so easy to think the worst.

Any day now Blogger is going to force me to switch to its new format. It did this earlier in the month, but the page was totally unresponsive so I reverted. Hopefully they will have sorted the problems before they do the change-over again. I see people complaining that Facebook has forced them to change format and they don't like it. I don't know if I'm on Classic Facebook or the new one, but I'm praying that they both just keep working as they are!

Social Media: is it any good?

Sometimes I think I waste my time on pointless social media activity when I could be writing more of the next story. But then I think I need Facebook and Twitter 'cos my readers are there. How else will they ever get to know about me? Without paying out good money I don’t know any other way to grow a readership for my blog and books, and paying out goes against the grain. If I were 25 and had a whole career ahead of me, then spending hard-earned money on promotion would be a good idea. But I’m not 25, so it isn’t.

(Note to self: read Chris Syme’s post: “Taming the Social Media Beast.”)

Social media is often useful. How else would I know the single dads and lonely widowers that proliferate on Facebook are scammers doing what is known as “catfishing?”

OTOH, the constant stream of words can get irritating, and that is a good time to take a break from both Fb and Twitter. I know I’ll drift back, but the rest does me good, and I get more writing done. And see more of my other half!

If readers want to friend me, I welcome them, but I don’t beg for “likes.” Authors often send out requests for me to like their page or book or whatever, but if the person and their work is unknown to me, then I don’t respond. If I have read the author and truly like their books, then I do.

“50 people who love your books and tell their friends about them are worth a whole lot more than 500,000 fake followers somebody bought from a click farm in Bangladesh.” (Until I read Anne Allan’s blog, which I dip into every now and then, I never knew about click farms anywhere.)

I often doubt that social media is any good for selling books. Endless “buy my book” Tweets, or repeated quotes from your books do not sell books anymore. I’ve often read that my social media should be 20% marketing and 80% interesting, friendly stuff that’s useful to my readers. So I try sharing funny memes, inspirational author quotes, and pics of my dog Tim; I’ve shared grammar jokes, tales of my hols in rural France, and pics of Aidan Turner and Rafa, but I’ve no way of knowing how much good it does me.

I’m told that if you Tweet that a book is free or on sale, people notice. I once had 19,000 plus downloads on a free book, but that was back in 2012, and I don’t think that sort of rush happens anymore. But maybe I shall try it and see what happens. I must admit it is a while since I tried a "free" week.

Good for him, good for me

It must be all the good weather that is making Facebook and Twitter so quiet. So many things to distract! I am watching the clay court tennis season and working hard on a new book - another Viking story set in Stornoway. So I am not putting anything much on Fb apart from a few pics I have taken recently.

The new book is layering up nicely. My plan for it was sketchy at the start but a fortnight and 13k words in and it is taking shape. If only I knew how it would end!

The weather has turned hot again, so I am walking Tim early in the morning when it is still cool. Good for him, and good for me. Makes for a longer day, and a chance to get much more done. Our garden is colouring up  with everything coming into flower. I haven't planned it, but we seem to have an early summer garden; probably comes of darting off to France in the middle of summer. After the end of July it is a case of restoring order and cutting things back after the riot of growth.

I'd like to get as much done as I can before we do go away. I'd also like to do another Mailchimp mail shot, but am wary because I have forgotten how to do it. I'm not sure it did any good anyway, but then, how would I know?

These are the opening lines of the new book:

Fritha learned to sew, cook and look after livestock before she was ten years old not because she wanted to but because she had to when her mother died birthing the youngest child. 

Maybe I shall add more in later posts. What is it famous authors do? Add lines of the day? Yes, maybe I shall do it too. If I remember, that is.

Changes

Autumn is here. One of my favourite seasons, possibly the favourite. I took  some photos yesterday and then lost them in transferring them to my PC. Ages since I've done that, and so annoying but I don't suppoe the fields and hedgerows will change much in a day or two, when I can take them all again. Since I came back from France I've had the fields mostly to myself, which is good, but it also surprises me. The weather has been so brilliant this year, and yet people don't seem to have been out and about exploring. Or if they have, the have not been where I've been!

The internet is desperately quiet, too. People say it is because  of all the changees to Facebook and it does seem less hectic than a year ago. Time was when new posts would go flying by with barely time to see what they were; now the same post stays for ages. It is becoming boring. I assume that this means posts promoting books will be so much less effective and wonder if it is a ploy to get authors to use Facebook Ads. Paid, of course. I heard today that Amazon, which now owns Goodreads, is using the GR friends page to find and delete "friend" reviews on Amazon. Way sneaky, I think.

Reviews are hard enough to get without this sort of nuisance fiddling, and since Goodreads and Fb both count mere contacts as "friends" this is likely to mean reviews will disappear. One way round it, I've read, is to mark your friend pages as open only to yourself. That way Amazon cannot read them. I don't know if it is true, but I pass it on for what it is worth.

Boring Facebook

Disheartening to see how boring Facebook is these days. Old posts are being recycled so most of what comes up I've seen before and have no wish to see again. The link between Twitter and Facebook seems to have gone awry - or possibly it is me that gone awry!

 Most of twitter is adverts for books unless the hashtag topics are investigated and then interesting conversations can be found among the garbage. I wonder what is going to happen in the next few weeks. Will Fb/Twitter recover their
verve, or simpy dwindle into nothingness?

Just read the first Peter May Enzo files book, got right to the end and remembered I'd read it before. I think the only one I have not read is the third one, but if I read them in order, the whole plot might become clearer in my mind. So it is on to nmber 2.

Musings

Like the lady on Facebook this morning who sent out a plea for chocolate because she is editing, I feel the same way. Fascinating as it is to see one's own goofs and gaffes, editing soon becomes a chore. I'm up to Chapter 8, so there's a fair way to go. 

My routine goes like this  ~  Print out 10 pages, check, make the corrections, print another 10. I may be doing this for quite a while.It will be interesting to see how much the word count drops in this first edit. I have no plans to cut specific chunks; if the 128K length reduces, it will be a natural editing process.

Meanwhile I am keeping an ear to the ground on the sexual harrassment argument which has now ventured into odd waters. Some female on the Andrew Marr show yesterday, whose name I had never heard of and instantly forgot, said that women should not be decorative items for male enjoyment. This has all arisen from the Presidents Club evening that aroused such a storm of protest, claiming that women were groped and made to wear provocative dresses. Now, I wasn't there, and I don't know anyone who was. My knowledge of that event is all hearsay. At first glance the claim seems valid - women should not be groped and certainly not harassed or assaulted. 

But then one begins to wonder how far this goes. What frightens and upsets one woman may be flirtation or livelihood to another. I began to think of all the females who pose semi-nude in glossy magazines, who adorn huge posters on hoardings and on buses, in their underwear. They make a lot of money by doing so and become celebrities. They turn up at sporting events such as the Tour de France, Formula 1 and darts, to name but a few. What about cheer leaders? What about ball girls in tennis wearing skirts so short we can see the curve of their cheeks while ball boys wear sensible knee length shorts? Book covers frequently sport sexily clad females. The pop world so beloved of many has been semi-pornographic for years and I’m only surprised that no tales of sexual harassment has come out of that world as yet. The school girls these days wear pelmets instead of skirts and no one is making them do it. Some females enjoy "showing off their assets" and demand attention in this way. Watch anything on the box and there will be the female showing lots of bare skin and huge amounts of thigh. Advertising would collapse without sexily-dressed women to promote the goods. The thing is the attention comes sometimes in a way that some women don’t like and it is not always directed at the one who wants it.

I don’t know how this problem is going to be sorted, if it ever is.

Holidays

Still no proof copy from Amazon, which is a little worrying. Soon I'll have forgotten what I was doing and have to start all over again. I don't understand why it is taking so long, because Postal services are pretty good these days.

In one of our odd weather quirks we had a miserable grey day yesterday. The air was full of moisture, yet I came home dry; but the grass in the fields was covered in water droplets and I had wet feet. Tim and I did not see another soul in all our 7,879 steps.  (Yes, I've got a new pedometer. Since I got it on the 16th, I've done 78,132 steps - and one day I forgot to record the total. It tells me that 5,000 steps equals 2.2 miles, so that must work out at roughly 15.5 miles. Wow. No wonder I'm hungry all the time!) Now today we are back to brilliant blue sky and sunshine. Tim and I have done our walk - 4677 steps or 2.1 miles and we didn't see anyone again. School holidays certainly make a difference to how people organise their lives. In term time the ladies tell me they get the kids off to school and then walk the dogs.

I'm picking up the pace with PR once more, so I apologise to all my friends who seem to see nothing but my book promotions. While I was in France I did none and it certainly had an effect on my sales and KENP. I also missed responding to people who wanted friendship on Facebook, for I found a whole batch of people who had contacted me while I was away. I guess six weeks is a long time. I befriended them all this morning!

Learning new tricks

Changes for a new, summery feel, done on a day where the temperature in our garden has reached 26 degrees. (I'll see how I feel about it on a cold, rainy day.) Even Tim the dog has laid around, curled up or sprawled out behind me, his back touching mine as I pulled some weeds, which is why I've posted a nice cool picture of the stream that was roaring down the valley in flood not so long ago.

I'm making a determined effort on using social media after attending out training day at Shepherd's Dene on Friday, focussing on on Facebook and Twitter. I've never been very sure of what I was doing with Twitter, but I have a better understanding  of it now. I'm busy searching out hashtags - it took me a long time to realise they existed so that like minded posts could be grouped together - and collecting @addresses. Heaven knows if it will make any difference, but I'll feel as if I've done my bit and made it worth Caroline's time teaching us all.

I'm also editing for the umpteenth time, and still making changes. It is amazing how much I can still sharpen the dialogue and tighten up the plot when I thought I'd "finished it" ages ago. I thought I was editing for typos and silly mistakes only. Of course, I still find quotation marks missing at one end of a sentence, and sometimes there's a full stop instead of a comma. Occasionally predictive text has gone and done something silly, so I've learned to look for that now. But the Dowager Queen is slowly emerging from this edit as a much more active character determined to save the Scots throne for her daughter Mary.

If anyone has comments on the new look of my blog I'd like to hear them. I think some people found the black background difficult. I hung onto it for so long because I always thought it showed off the photographs as nothing else could. I still think that, but recognise it is time for a change.

Book marketing for SPA

Here's a new name - Squarespace 7 - which I will forget the moment I closed the page on screen....

The self-publishing landscape is shifting and, as ever, authors struggle with marketing.

You'e probably noticed, like me, that Facebook has been overtaken by marketing people, which explains why Fb is using more and more sophisticated algorithms to filter out what they call “less-relevant content.”

FB’s advertising options now are easier, cheaper, and often more effective for authors. An author can “boost” a post for a few dollars which helps, though does not guarantee a popular post will go viral.

Social media is a much more visual medium now. Authors may find Pinterest, Instagram, and even Snapchat can help them. Instagram is great for author visibility, but does not lead to sales the same way Pinterest does.

There are many New Marketing Tools. Email newsletters, paid advertising, a compelling author website are all very well, but an author can build on this foundation.

There are opportunities for cross-pollination between marketing platforms and tools. “For example, Squarespace 7, launched last fall, offers enhanced social media integration for cross-posting blog posts and book news, as well as an Amazon Block for authors to more easily add a link from Amazon to their site. It also offers authors new Cover Pages that allow for a splash page to promote a particular new book or offer.”

There is a move toward a “less is more” approach: basic pages on social media, viewed on a mobile device, promoting the book and its key offerings—but little else.

NewMedia keeps the message basic in order to stick out in a crowded market. It is just a “four-screen site” for the book, with a home page to capture attention, the next screen with more info about the book, a third screen about the author, and a final screen with reviews and testimonials.

Integrate SumoMe into a WordPress site and it offers plug-ins like List Builder (which promises to increase daily email list signups) and Heat Maps (which help an author see where their site visitors are clicking. BookGrabbr offers an easy way for authors to share selections from their books through social media accounts, making it easier for followers on LinkedIn and Facebook to learn more about the title. The tool also offers in-depth analytics, such as how many impressions (friends of friends or followers of followers) the book received, how many people clicked the “Buy Now” button, and the demographic and geographic information of the readers.

Email marketing gives you a direct conduit into your readers. Entice readers to your list by offering a free novella or novel, and then get as much traffic onto the page where you’re making the offer as possible.

Read the longer piece:
Marketing self-published books requires leveraging both new tools and tried-and-true strategies
By Alex Palmer |
Sep 25, 2015

Facebook changes

I never noticed that some people “Like” their own posts on Facebook as soon as they post them. If I had noticed I would probably have thought Why Bother? But it seems that it does matter, after all. Facebook’s interface has changed a lot lately and the most disliked changes were to the news feed and the introduction of the Ticker.

Now I must confess I hadn’t noticed a Ticker. (Sometimes a six-year-old could do better than me with Facebook.) Now I read that Facebook selects which of your friends’ posts you see showing up in your news feed. Under the new “Edge Rank” system, friends that don’t “Like” and comment on your posts usually stop seeing them altogether before too long. I had noticed people "disappearing" from my news feed, but thought they had given up on Fb and gone on to better things. In order to compensate for not showing your posts in some of your friends’ news feeds, Facebook added the Ticker – the box in the right-hand column that lists the activities of your friends as they happen. Ah, I had noticed that in a passing glance sort of way. I didn’t read it.)

Now if you “Like” a post, that action is noted in your friends’ ticker boxes, making them aware that you have posted something even if it doesn’t show up in their news feeds. So the next time you see one of your friends “Like” their own post, they probably aren’t giving themselves a pat on the back. Instead, they’re giving you an opportunity to check out a post that might never make it into your news feed. The article I read recommended that we all “Like” our own posts all the time – which probably defeats whatever intention the Fb wizards had in the first place!

PR and voting

Been out with dog, inhaled lots of fresh air, tramped about 5,000 steps while he ran maybe three or four times that number, and came home before the rain started. Neat, as they say in slang speak. Also turned the thermostat up while dh wasn't looking. Rain and cold is so depressing, and we don't have a bottle of wine tonight as we're trying to cut down.

Done my PR for the day. I'm about to begin a read through of the Daisy story via print out. I fear there will be lots of little glitches, like heroes ageing two years in one day and heroines forgetting they have brown eyes. Probably lots more as well, but fear not, they will all be smoothed, removed, and brought into line before I attempt publication. I think I also need to up the mystery element of the plot. I've been having such fun with the romance I forgot the thievery.

Someone told me I was an established author the other day. I  can't tell you how that made me feel. Actually, yes I can. Quietly pleased, if still disbelieving; but a nice boost to the ego. Yes!

Writing is only half the story. The other half is promotion. It takes a lot of time and effort and there is often the feeling that it brings little actual reward in terms of sales. I have added to my collection of yahoo groups in the hope of furthering the word out there. I'd like to do more on Goodreads, but just don't seem to get the hang of how the site operates. Facebook is turning more and more to authors plugging their books, and ditto for Twitter.

But the world is strange. I notice people on FB calling on others to vote for Outlander in some competition that's running. Vote again, they cry. Vote anyway, even if you haven't seen it! which seems crazy to me. Imagine it - if one person wished to, they could vote again and again. How many votes could be registered in a day? 1,000? 2,000?  I hope online sites prohibit users from voting more than once, but I have the nasty suspicion they don't, or at least not always. But really - 2,000 votes from one person is/are meaningless, don't you think?

Since I'm on a small rant, I ought to add that I'm so tired of seeing pictures of Jamie Dornan, bearded or not.

Marketing blues

I wrote a great blog post, pressed the publish button and the darned thing disappeared. I hope this is not a sign of how my day is going to go. So I'll start again. Now my book is out in the big wide world, I'm contemplating how to get people to buy it. Marketing is the tool, say the Createspace experts.

Marketing, they tell me, is the process of communicating with the rest of the world and telling them about your book, making them want to buy it without doing any direct selling. Who is your target audience, they ask. Anyone who reads historical fiction, I say. Not good enough. Who are they? Where do they live? What age group, social class? What are their hobbies? Which newspapers do they read?

I shrug my shoulders. Haven't a clue. Anyone between the ages of 14 and 94 might read historical novels, and the only link between them is probably just that - they like historical fiction! (I had to pick numbers, but I'm sure there are people over 95 and under 14 who read historical fiction!)

There are lots of sites on the internet these days who do nothing but promote books. Some charge, and there are lots of warnings from authors who've paid hard-earned cash and been disappointed with the results. So I think I shall steer clear of such places. I'm not enamoured of the way Twitter is flooded overnight with promotional post which I assume originate in the USA. I whizz by them - as they come batches this is very easy to do. The general opinion seems to be that 1 tweet in 10 may mention your book as long as you are offering other contents on the other 9. That seems reasonable to me, and the same seems to operate on Facebook.

This time I've let everyone know (or I will have done shortly) that my book is available, and this is a first for me. I'm slowly investigating lists of promotional sites, and may yet come up with some goodies. I'll stick with my promotional yahoo groups and see what the results are like.

It's quite a game, this writing lark. I thought the writing was the hard part!

Books and the Internet

Still hammering away on edits and struggling to find a title that hasn't been used before. The trouble is almost everything has been used already! Especially if you want to use the word Queen. Too many books flooding the market these days - that's something  Amazon has done. Not single-handedly, I admit, but it certainly helped. (Just as it helped me - Yes, I know! Pot calling kettle and all that)

Viking Magic went free for two days just to see what the response was. I remember the first book I put up for free was Fair Border Bride and it rocketed up to something like 15,000 takers, mostly in the USA. That was five or six years ago,  So how did Viking Magic do over two days?

A total of 124 downloads and still the biggest freebie takers are in the US - 86. The UK = 26, Germany 7, France 1, Australia 1 and Canada 3. (It would be nice if a couple of those people wrote a nice review for me! The only one I've received for VM was written by someone who was definitely having a bad day.)

So, as a way of gathering readers, going free doesn't seem like the tool it was. Times change, and they change exceedingly fast in Internet world. Twitter and Facebook seem the most obvious alternatives, but even there, marketing persons seem to be taking over and plugging the same titles over and over again.

And this too shall pass away...

Where have all those interesting snippets gone from Facebook? There was a time when I saw something every day - at least one thing I didn't know or had never thought about. These days it seems to be all about videos of animals or people sounding off about American politics or politicians or silly "can you think of a city beginning with E and ending with A?" games. Perhaps I have picked up a lot of unintentional  "friends" by accepting "friends" who have 795 "friends." Maybe I should be doing a little judicious weeding, and then I may get some interesting posts again. .

I hope Twitter hasn't gone the same way while I've been on holiday. I haven't been Twittering - its gets too complicated about passwords sometimes to bother with everything. Plus which I haven't been on the internet  all that much - far too much to do out in the fresh air and sunshine. Everything is so small on a laptop! I can't wait to get back to my big screen.

The feeling is growing on me that Blogging is not as ... how shall I say? as interesting as it used to be. More and more people have stopped blogging and readers seem to be fading away too. They've probably all migrated to something else that I've never heard of so far. There is a feeling of change in the air, but is it mega or only the usual drift away for the holiday season? Who knows?

Facebook, Twitter and blogging

Crinan

Is it me, or does anyone else think that interest in blogs, Facebook and Twitter is dwindling? Facebook is less and less interesting but that is possibly because Facebook is narrowing down the posts that I see. Certainly the variety of posts is not there any more. If I click on something, I get more posts of a similar nature, and I'm now up to my nostrils in videos of cute animals doing cute things. Nothing wrong with them in and of themselves, but too many is just ... too many. Likewise the pics of cruelty to animals. I can do without those images haunting my dreams. If those pics help the animals by stirring the conscience of someone in America to help the poor creatures, then that's good, but there's nothing I can do from the UK.

Twitter seems to have been taken over by American authors advertising their books. Perhaps my choice of followers has something  so with it. I haven't exactly been active in seeking a wide variety of Twitterers. When someone follows me, I usually follow back, so I suppose I can only blame myself there. Must widen my circle of interest.

Blogs I used to follow seem to have tipped over into oblivion, with no posts going up for the last few months. There are less followers coming to my blog, but that might be because the blog posts are linked to both Facebook and Twitter. If people read the blogs on either of them, I don't see any record of it back on my blog. So I could be read by more and more people and not know it. Or I could be read by fewer and fewer people, and be aware of it. How can I be sure which is really going on? Anyone know?

Eating Green Strawberries

We are having a running battle with our six month old puppy who, crafty and cunning as he is, persists in eating green strawberries. Apart from the fact that they will probably give him an upset tum, we want the strawberries to ripen so we can eat them with our breakfast cereal every day. As fast as we tell him No! he gobbles another one.

The funny thing is I don't remember anything like this with the Dalmatian bitch I owned many years ago. Perhaps males are just more trouble? He is due at the vet's for the big C op tomorrow, which may calm him down but I'm not banking on it. I'll feel guilty as hell afterwards when he looks at me as if to say What did I do that was so wrong?

I have reading stacking up on me at the moment. I completed Goddard's excellent Out of the Sun late last night, and have Write a Blockbuster and Book Proposals awaiting my attention. I don't suppose they'll say anything startling and new, but I live in hope, and refreshing the memory on all the salient points can never be a bad thing. I have the sneaky feeling that Facebook and Twitter are losing out to something else now, but I don't know what/where that something else is. I don't find the snippets as interesting as I used to, and the links to interesting articles seem to have dwindled to nothing. Indie Book Promoter has single-handedly taken over Twitter - maybe I'll have to look for some new people to follow.

Wasting Time

What's your favourite way of wasting time?
This leads me to a list of things, such as walking on crisp autumn leaves in the green spring woods with bluebells on one side and starry white garlic flowers on the other, or lying on the sofa watching the clouds drift by my window. Soft fluffy white clouds, and big dark grey thunder clouds, all billowing into weird shapes or wisping into nothingness as the suns heats the water vapour.

Others will say playing with Facebook and Twitter, watching tv, reading a book. Heavens! When did reading a book become a time-wasting exercise? In fact, none of these things are really time-wasting. Walking outdoors activates the blood, muscles and wakes the aesthetic sense of pleasure at the beauty of nature. Watching clouds relaxes the tired mind, and then begins to wake the creative part of the brain as the clouds morph into white rabbits or sailing ships. Facebook - it's rare I use Facebook and fail to discover at least one item of interest among all the dross. (Personally I wish people wouldn't put up pictures of food because so often they look like something the dog's brought up. Yes, I know, I put two pictures of food up last summer - but the food did not look like the dog's dinner! A French chef cannot possibly - no, scratch that, I have seen French chefs produce something  that reminded me of the proverbial.....)

Twitter is the same as FB. There's always at least one snippet that catches my interest and leads me onto to whole articles I enjoy. What frustrates me about Twitter is the snippets of interesting conversation between people I don't know - so I never discover the beginning, or sometimes the end, of the conversation. I'm left full of curiosity!

As a writer, (OK, an aspiring writer) I don't think time is ever wasted. Standing around watching other people can be rewarding even if you do get seriously cold feet, as I did yesterday watching more confident people harness Sparky and Bumper. To be truthful, my feet were the only warm part of me, thanks to my trusty Scarpa hiking boots and thick socks. The rest of me was freezing, but the interplay of action was interesting and will no doubt be transferred into a book somewhere down the line. That's the thing with authors - everything, absolutely everything, can be used at some point in a novel. so there's no such thing as wasting time.

Social media and writers

I’ve noticed lately that interaction via my blog seems less than it used to be. I get the nasty feeling that my posts are boring the pants off everyone. Feedback via Comments grows less and less, possibly because the word verification thingy is annoying and frustrating – I know I find it so on other blogs and often give up without getting my comment to “go” through. And I'm aware that going to Australia for six weeks meant my blog deviated from the usual writing based topics - perhaps that turned people away.

There’s another suspicion I have though; that other media are attracting people away from blogs in general. Not only Facebook and Twitter, but mysterious things called Pinterest and Tumblr. I have no idea what they are and I’m not about to find out. It is easy enough to waste time on FB and T without joining more things! If this is the reason, it is something I cannot change.

 Writing has always been my main interest blogwise, though sometimes I feel like blowing off steam about one thing or another. Or I’ll record something that I may want to come back to at a later date – blogs are handy vehicles for that. But there’s only so much you can say about writing without repeating yourself.

That’s when I go to Twitter in the hope of picking up some item of interest.
I can scroll through a lot of posts and pick out what I’m interested in and ignore the rest. That may sound rude, but as people follow me, I feel obliged to follow back – it seems only courteous – which means I get loads of tweets from people I don’t know about things I’m not interested in.
But turn it the other way about and it also means there are a lot of people seeing whatever I choose to put out. But there’s the difficulty - as far as Tweeting goes, I’ve never really got the hang of it. How to say something engaging and witty in 140 characters defeats me, but others seem to find it no problem at all. I sit and stare at the screen but nothing comes to mind. I'd never make an advertising person!

 Facebook seems easier. I actually have an occasional conversation there with people I know or have come to know. The only person I know who doesn’t have a FB page is my other half, but he may yet be persuaded. They say it is the most likely place readers will look for new reading material, so that seems a good enough reason to stay there. If forced to choose, I’d opt for my blog and Facebook.

 

Twitter type woes

Have you ever wondered how successful your blog is? If anyone every reads it? There's a link that grades your website or blog here: http://websitegrader.com/

Naworth, sw corner of the present day garden

PR is a huge part of an aspiring author's life these days, and can easily take up more time than actually writing if you subscrbe to Twitter and Facebook and the many other things that I've heard of in a vague sort of way but haven't investigated because if I did I'd never get any writing done. And I don't have a full-time (nor even a part time) job to absorb most of my waking hours! Pity the poor writer who does.
Is it really necessary? Must I understand RSS Graffiti, Bebo and Good Reads to be a success? I gave up on MySpace a long time ago, but it seems there a many others springing up to take its place. Sometimes Facebook is fun, and its a good way of keeping in touch with other writers. I enjoy doing my blog. But that's it for me. If my stories aren't good enough to stand on their own two flat little feet, then so be it.