Where Normal Need Not Apply
Blogging, social media, and online reputations. Sample topics: the writing community, developing our website, blogging issues, protecting our online reputation, interacting on social media, etc.
I have a strange confession for you all: It freaks me out when strangers read my work. I’m not talking about how I’m surprised that any of you read my blog. I mean, I am still surprised by that, but we talk on Twitter, we comment on each other’s blogs, we […]
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Last week, Cheryl Reif asked the question on her blog: Short or Long? Which Way to Post… She wondered if people preferred reading blog posts that weighed in at the “recommended” 300 words, or if people enjoyed longer posts. Anyone who reads my blog knows I don’t follow the 300 […]
My to-be-read pile is scary. Seriously scary. Like I-might-need-to-check-into-a-program-soon scary. In the past year, I’ve accumulated over 100 print books. And just since Christmas, when I received my Kindle, I’ve downloaded about 20…er, maybe 30…hmm, possibly more…Kindle books. Honestly, most of those books I got for free, either from giveaways […]
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Some people post their work online all the time. Photographers have Shutterstock. Artists have deviantART. Non-fiction authors often base their books on their blog posts. What about fiction authors? That’s a little trickier. We’re not talking about flash fiction, blog hop entries, and the like here. If we limit the […]
In case you missed it, Kristen Lamb started a debate with her post yesterday—Sacred Cow-Tipping–Why Writers Blogging About Writing is Bad. A collective whine went up from the writing community. “No blogging about writing? Then what are we supposed to blog about?” *raises hand* I was right there with the crowd, […]
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If someone does a Google search on our author name, will they find us? This issue comes up more frequently now as writers want to know if they should have a website and/or blog before they’re published. That’s a complicated question that doesn’t have an easy answer.
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Brand. Platform. Social media presence. How many of us cringe at those words? Whatever happened to the days when writers could simply write? But the truth is that as soon as we’re sociable as a writer, whether online with Twitter or in real life at a conference, we’re forming our […]
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Sometimes it still comes as a shock to me that anyone visits my blog and cares about what I have to say. So when I received my first blog award, I was completely unprepared. My first thought was of being tremendously flattered. I think my exact reaction was, Me? Seriously? […]
Yesterday, author Jody Hedlund had a blog post about why most writers are blind to their own faults. The first reason she mentioned really resonated with me: We naturally view our work through our maturity level. When we first start any new project, writing or otherwise, we don’t know what […]
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Disclaimer: I love Maureen Johnson’s “I am not a brand” manifesto down to the last punctuation mark. That’s not the approach to branding I’m talking about. An author’s brand isn’t about selling. It’s about recognizing that what we say and how we act affects what others think of us. It’s about then […]
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