As many of you know, in an attempt to promote some of my shorter fantasy titles, I recently (June 22-26) held a six-day sale of three of my short stories: Sword of Kings, Assassin, and Seven Into the Bleak. I thought I’d give an analysis of what I was aiming for, what I achieved, and some of the lessons learned.
The following post began life as a how-to email I sent to a writers’ group I belong to, the Northern Virginia Writers Club, after several non-techy members expressed frustration over trying to get onto the web. It seems a bit redundant to post this bit about WordPress on a WordPress site…but of course any number of people could stumble across this blog via a simple browser search, with no knowledge of why my site is hosted on WP.
This is a very light, quick introduction into why I chose WP for my site and blogging needs. Feel free to ask questions in the Comments section to clarify anything I glossed over.
When you’re ready to publish and are thinking about the free and easy-to-access methods of promoting yourself, a few options spring to mind: social media sites, your blog, and, of course, email.
In a strange way, however, email is the most cumbersome of the three. Out-of-the-box, the medium can be plain and un-compelling. Most standard email programs lack anything but basic print formatting and almost nothing in the way of graphic control or enhanced technologies. And without that, you’re sending your recipients the equivalent of a very forgettable piece of junk mail.
The solution is HTML email, a hybrid of web-based technologies and standard email services that allows you to format print and graphics to make compelling emails that encourage (and enable) people to act.
Click to buy on Amazon! Just 99 cents!
I’m thrilled to announce the publication of a side-project of mine, Telling Your Tale: A Beginner’s Guide to Novel Writing, available on this site through Oronjo.com (all formats supported, see below) and Amazon.com for the Kindle.
I was inspired to write my first e-article after reading a great post on fantasy author Lindsay Burocker’s blog. Subsequently, I read e-article guru Kate Harper’s amazing guest blog, bought her $.99 e-article on writing e-articles (how post-modern is that?), and then went for it on the thing I know the best: writing!
You wouldn’t think there’d be a new twist in the work-flow/word processing/information-management software arena, but I’m happy to report that Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a new, useful, and fun departure from all of the tired applications you’ve seen over the years…and best of all, it’s free.