creating an online presence

Writers get told they must blog, but not a lot of advice about it. I’ve talked about this more than once, most notably in Do Writers Need to Blog? No. and How to Blog Without Really Trying But Still Managing Not to Be Half-Assed About It. But another thing to consider beyond the content you’re producing is whether or not your readers are finding it.

If you have a blog, take a moment and type your name into a search engine. If your blog doesn’t appear on the first page of results, you have a problem. The further down the page it is, the harder it is for a reader to find it. Type ‘Cat Rambo’ in and you should see this blog on the top of the list, along with other links that go to me rather than that taxi driver with a cat named Rambo who drives around with his cat in the backseat or the Cat Rambo featured in an article about underwater pumpkin carving.

So — if you’re not on that first page –how do you remedy that? Here’s five ways to make your blog more effective by making it more discoverable when people come looking for you.

Check your front page. Does it include the name you write under? Not just your first name, not a cute pseudonym. And not contained in an image rather than text. If not, please add it.

Make titles meaningful. A title should give a reader a reason to read, often to answer a question that the title has raised. For example: what are the five quick ways I could make my blog more discoverable? rather than “Check this out” or “Here’s something startling.”

Use images. Visual content makes a post more engaging and it provides something when people are sharing it on social media. Visual content gets shared more often than text-only. And a post lacking an image may not be pinnable on Pinterest, which is a valid social media site for authors.

Look at your site on your phone. Google Analytics tells me over half my traffic is readers using their phone to read it; it would be foolish for me not to make it as readable as possible for them. What’s not appearing? What looks weird? Menus that look great on a computer screen and are easy to select and click with a mouse are often much more difficult to navigate on a phone’s smaller touch screen.

Use what’s available. Tags and categories are both tools that search engines incorporate when creating rankings and they make things more discoverable for your readers. The Related Posts plug-in that I use on this blog depends on tags in order to find and display similar content that may intrigue readers of a particular post.

Bonus tip: Link to other posts. Internal links can help your reader find relevant content without leading them away from your site, and they also favorably influence search engines. You might even create pages that consolidate information, like this page of Resources for F&SF Writers. Look at this page — I can count five different ways I’ve done this. Can you find them all?

I’ve updated my book, Creating an Online Presence, and it’s part of this terrific Storybundle of writing books. Since the Internet moves at the speed of an animated gif with Yakety Sax as the background music, I had a lot of work to do with the update (like checking every link to make sure it was up to date), and it included adding a few essays. Here’s one of those additions, talking about how you present yourself online.

I have several maxims that I have developed over the course of my writing career. One of them is, “If Kris Rusch invites you into a project, you say yes.” Because Kris is one of the people who understands independent publishing and its possibilities, and she is a savvy, savvy marketer.

When Kris came and asked about including my book Creating an Online Presence in a Storybundle, I was thrilled and also a little panicked, because I knew it had to be updated before it went in there. Too much had happened on the Internet in the two and a half years since I’d first put it up. I was also flattered that she thought the book was worth including, because I value her opinion.

And the truth is, if you’re a writer, you do need to at least think about this stuff enough to make an informed decision. If you’re being traditionally published, your publisher will probably expect you to be helping out with the marketing in the form of social media or other Internet efforts. Every book launch, for example, seems to involve a slew of guest blog posts and similar promotions.

If you’re small press published, again the publisher will probably expect you to be helping out with the marketing and I would regard a lack of such expectations as a possible danger sign.

And if you’re going indie, there’s no way around it. You’re going to have to think about this stuff, and the more you do, the more it will pay off — IF you are writing good stuff and making that the focus, not the marketing.

The world is changing rapidly in many aspects; publishing is definitely part of that change. Writers must stay informed of that if they want to make a living at it. Look at this Storybundle. E-bundles are easy to do and even easier to download. Storybundle and Humblebundle have both been making big strides in this area. Kobo lets you bundle your books, I found out in talking to Mark Lefebvre from Kobo last weekend at the Nebulas.

Here’s what you get beside the brand new version of Creating an Online Presence:

• The Rational Writer, Nuts and Bolts by Mindy Klasky
• Weinberg on Writing – The Fieldstone Method by Gerald M. Weinberg
• How to Make a Living With Your Writing by Joanna Penn
• Heinlein’s Rules – Five Simple Business Rules For Writing by Dean Wesley Smith
• How to Negotiate Anything – Freelancer’s Survivor Guide by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• Stages of a Fiction Writer by Dean Wesley Smith
• Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel by Lawrence Block
• Business For Breakfast Vol 2.: The Beginning Professional Publisher by Leah Cutter
• The Writer’s Business Plan: A Plain English Guidebook by Tonya D. Price, MBA

Part of the success of such bundles is using online marketing like this very blog post. So please — help me out by spreading the word of this excellent bundle (which might make a great graduation gift for a new writer) and its contents.

#sfwapro

Most of the last couple of months has been focused on one of several things: finishing the beta draft of Hearts of Tabat, finishing up the second edition of Creating an Online Presence for Writers, sorting through details for the release of Altered America: Steampunk Stories, or SFWA’s Nebulas Conference, which took place midmonth in Chicago, and which I blogged about last week.

So here’s some highlights of my summer schedulee.

Tomorrow I’ll post the list of classes for June and July, which includes a round of the Writing F&SF Stories workshop (Wednesday evenings) as well as the Advanced Workshop (Tuesday evenings). I’m not 100% sure, but I think that’s the last round of classes for 2016, aside from a workshop I am doing for Clarion West this fall and maybe a co-taught one every once in a while. I’ve got a lot of travel coming up in the latter half of the year and I’d like to be able to focus on writing and SFWA as well. Whether or not I decide to run for office again next year depends in part on how much I can manage to get done this year.

In answer to several people asking about the difference between the two multi-session workshops — I created the Advanced one for people who took the first F&SF one and wanted more. If you haven’t taken the first, you should do that rather than the Advanced Workshop, regardless of skill level, because it lays out my theories of storytelling in a coherent way while the second ranges wildly all over the place.

June 10 is the release of Altered America, which is a compilation of all my steampunk stories. Patreon supporters at the $5 level and above will get a free electronic copy ten days in advance. This has ten stories in it altogether, a number of which were published on Patreon. I hope to do a similar mini-collection of near-future SF by the end of the year, which will also go to Patreon supporters beforehand.

June also sees the release of a Storybundle of writing books organized by Kris Rusch that includes the 2nd edition of Creating an Online Presence, which is why I spent part of last month frantically getting that updated in time.

Bud Sparhawk and I wrote a novelette together, “Haunted,” that should appear in July’s Abyss and Apex. It’s space fantasy. I think. We had a lot of fun with it,but it’s definitely not a comedy.

July 5th will feature the release of both the class and book version of Moving from Idea to Draft. You’ll see several other classes appearing in the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, including classes from Rachel Swirsky, Juliette Wade, and a couple of other folks.

Summer conventions include the Locus Awards weekend, Westercon, GenCon, Worldcon, and Dragoncon. After that I am off to Beijing for the Chinese Nebulas and will spend several weeks in China. Following that, Griffcon in Indiana, the Surrey Writers Conference, Orycon, and maybe WFC. (I’m not sure about that last. It’s been a travel-heavy year, and WFC isn’t my favorite convention. It always feels very anxious and unwelcoming, no matter what city I experience it in.)

Writing wise, I am completing the currently half-drafted YA novel based on “Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain,” which is currently laboring under the working titleConflagration and starting to flesh out the outline for the next Tabat book, Exiles of Tabat, which is the third of the quartet.

As always, plenty of stories are flowing and currently floating around in forms ranging from inchoate to semi-final draft. Right now I’m completing the Wizards of West Seattle story and realizing the concept’s going to end up becoming an ongoing series that probably will go out once a month or so on Patreon. I’m also thinking about a RPG supplement based on the copious notes I’ve been accumulating.

In SFWA areas, I’m focusing on a new committee that I’ll be working with, the Membership Retention Committee, whose job will be to look at the new member experience for SFWA members as well as how to keep the organization useful for members. (If you’re interested in volunteering with that, feel free to drop me a line.) Other efforts include a) working with SFWA fundraising, b) a small musical endeavor that I just prodded someone about and which involves Tom Lehrer (yes, that Tom Lehrer), and c) helping out where I can with some of M.C.A. Hogarth’s amazing efforts, such as this mysterious thing here lurking under a tarp that I am not at liberty to discuss. *mouths the words “SFWA University” then is dragged away by the SFWA honey badgers while shouting something about a guidebook*

Three other important SFWA things:

1. I’ll be watching the results of our decision to admit game writers with keen interest. I can tell you that the initial set is criteria is being voted on right now and I expect to see it announced soon.
2. An effort is in the works that I think will prove a lovely tribute to longtime SFWA volunteer Bud Webster and which will, in the longtime SFWA tradition, provide a benefit for professional writers at every level of their careers.
3. And we’ll (finally) be announcing some of the partnerships we’ve been making — you saw reps from Amazon, Audible, BookBub, Draft2Digital, Kickstarter, Kobo and Patreon at the Nebulas and those relationships are going to extend beyond the weekend and give our members special resources and relationships at all of those companies — and others, including one that I am super-stoked to have facilitated.

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Enjoy this sample of Cat’s writing and want more of it on a weekly basis, along with insights into process, recipes, photos of Taco Cat, chances to ask Cat (or Taco) questions, discounts on and news of new classes, and more? Support her on Patreon.

Still working frantically on the update for the Creating an Online Presence for Writers book, plus prepping for this weekend’s online class. One big change since the last version is Instagram‘s rocket upward in popularity. Here in 2016, it is the number two social media network in number of users, second only after Facebook.

It lets you post pictures, often with some sort of caption, and see what other people are posting. Unlike Facebook, it doesn’t play fast and loose with what you see, but gives you a stream composed of everyone you’re following.

Instagram features a number of filters as well as some basic editing tools that can be applied to uploaded photos. You can add extra filters with the 100 Cameras in 1 app or if you would like to edit the image extensively, try Pixlr-o-matic (http://pixlr.com/).

For me, the two major advantages to Instagram are that a) it’s accessible via my cell phone, which I have with me far more often than my computer, plus b ) it connects with several other social networks, so I can grab a picture at an event, post it to Instagram, and have it autopost in turn to Facebook and Twitter. Similarly, I use it in the kitchen or at restaurant to snap pictures of food.

What do I post overall? Here’s a breakdown of the last 100 Instagram photos on my stream. Only five categories (event, books, and writing process photos) might be considered promotional; you’ll note those pictures occur roughly one in five times; even there, none of them directly sell a book, just mention it, and many are focused on other people and/or their work.

• things that amused or delighted me: 17
• food I’ve cooked: 12
• the cats: 10
• miscellaneous travel photos: 7
• miscellaneous household photos: 7
• miscellaneous event photos: 6
• books: 5
• my writing process: 5
• birds: 4
• flowers: 3
• photos from the cat calendar Aunt Nona gave us for Christmas with sundry amusing handwritten additions: 3
• refrigerator poems: 3
• restaurant food: 3
• sunsets: 3
• clouds: 2
• dioramas constructed of household objects: 2
• my shoes: 2
• rainbows: 2
• the foam on top of my latte, hashtagged #seattle: 2
• photos of friends/family: 2
• other people at events: 1
• selfies with people at events: 1
• selfies: 1
• things that creeped me out: 1
• holiday collage: 1