There’s one kind of blog post I dread seeing in my feed reader. They’re the blog posts that sport headlines like “The ONE Thing You Need to do to Become a Successful Writer” or “The Best Writing Advice You’ll Ever Get.” Why do I dread these kinds of posts? Well, other than the obnoxiously gimmicky clickbait titles they tend to use, I usually know what
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you might have seen some of my free Scrivener templates. Unfortunately those are a bit scattered throughout the blog, and I’ve had a couple of folks this week email me trying to find one of my blogging templates and another reader asked for recommendations about mystery templates without realizing I’d released one here. So I thought
WordPress 4.3 was recently released, and if you haven’t upgraded yet you should. It has a great new feature for writers, helping you write blog posts faster while spending less time formatting your content. When we talked about using Scrivener for blogging, I shared a free Markdown cheat sheet with you. Markdown lets you use simple formatting shortcuts as you type so you don’t have
If you’ve ever distributed a press release to promote one of your books, chances are you did it wrong. It’s not your fault if you did. I’ve seen all the nonsense authors are exposed to online. This ranges from claims that press releases never work unless you’re already famous (utter BS) to “advice” that equates to spamming your press release to every free distribution website you
If you run a blog as an income stream, chances are that you’ve at least tried to earn some advertising revenue. But managing ads on your blog can involve a big time investment. Fortunately you don’t have to manually insert ad code in every blog post. Occasionally this makes sense, like when you want to insert an affiliate ad that’s relevant only to a specific post. But
I’m just curious. Has anyone else noticed the trend where “big” bloggers seem to be blogging less and less while relying on guest posts more and more? Does that bother anyone else? In some cases it feels like the original blogger isn’t a blogger at all anymore, even though that’s the persona they maintain. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with deciding that you’d
It’s August. Seriously. When did that happen? Normally by now I’ve completed a detailed mid-year evaluation and posted my quarterly check-in on the blog. Whoops! Actually, it was less a simple oversight and more an issue of reorganization. By mid-July, I knew a few things weren’t working out as planned, so I decided to make some changes. The usual mid-year check-in was scrapped. It was a dud
Do you ever start work on Monday mornings feeling suffocated by your email inbox? That’s how I felt yesterday morning. I receive a lot of email every day, including on the weekends. But this weekend I received a couple thousand extras beyond my norm, and I never poked my head in to stay on top of it (not that I should on my days off). While