Friday, September 2, 2016

Seven Writing Links -- Volume 138

For those of you who are wondering, last week's laser eye surgery appears to have been a success. For a while, the affected eye didn't seem quite right, like someone had smeared a thin coating of grease over my left lens. Not enough to keep me from seeing, but enough to cause me to clean my glasses every five minutes. Most of that has gone away, but I still have LOTS of tiny floaters in that eye (noticeable only when I stare at the bright sky).

In spite of this, I went on vacation this week and not only did I have a good time, but I managed to make progress on my story. It's a rarity when those two things happen simultaneously.

I recently set my phone to deliver more notifications when writing related tweets appear in my feed. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to notice a disturbing trend among those people or sites that are announcing or marketing their books. Not that they're tweeting too much or because the same tweets keep appearing again and again with annoying regularity, but because most of the notifications I receive don't tell me anything. These tweets are nothing more than a picture of the book's cover followed by a link and a whole bunch of hashtags. Unfortunately, notifications don't show us the pictures--just the text-- so I'm usually left with a bunch of cryptic messages that do nothing to entice me to tap on them and go read the full tweet. And since the hailstorm of tweets will only grow with time, expect more and more people to depend upon notifications to keep them updated.

So for the love of all things bookish, at least put the damn title of your book in the tweet, okay?

Anyway, that's my rant for the week. Enjoy the links and have a great weekend.

ChemistKen

  Indie Publishing Paths: What’s Your Newsletter Plan? Part Two

When Everyone Is Special, No One Is

How to Actually Use the Writing Advice You Find on the Internet

Book Promotion is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Strategy

Authors, Can You Afford to Produce an Audiobook?

Layering 20 Scenes to Create a Strong Romance Novel

The Writing Personalities As Crit Partners



10 comments:

  1. Glad the surgery worked!
    Time to write while on vacation is priceless.
    I don't use hashtags much, but my pinned Tweet is an image and the text just links to my book. Sorry...

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    1. Well, you're well enough known that everyone will know about your books anyway, so all is good. :)

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  2. I tend to use twitter to promote upcoming books, reviews, etc. I figure, it will come back tenfold. :-)

    Anna from elements of emaginette

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    1. I think Twitter is important, I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that depending on a picture inside a tweet to do all the work isn't a good idea.

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  3. Huzzah for good recovery from eye surgery and a good vacation!!!
    I think I include my title with my tweets, but I admit I am a multiple-tweet a day person. I actually doubled my sales (which are admittedly pretty few) when I doubled my tweets - which is sad on one hand because it encourages me to be obnoxious. It's tough finding the right balance.

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    1. Hey there's no problem with lots of tweeting. Just make sure that everyone knows what the tweets are about.

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  4. Glad you had a good recovery. I'm still learning about tweeting.
    Juneta @ Writer's Gambit

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  5. Glad you're recovering! Great links this week!

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  6. Good news about the eye surgery and the vacation! Keep at that story.

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  7. Good to hear you're doing better. Thanks for the links and have a great week. :)

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