Who and Where are you?

Enough about me. I’d like to make sure that I have the links to where I can find my readers. Because, you know, you’re awesome, every one of you.

So, here’s the deal – if you’re reading this, and you are building a web presence, let me know. There aren’t limits to comment size, however be reasonable.
1) Who are you and why should we come visit your blog? What do you write about? Do you review books? Tell us about it. Provide complete url’s so that we can click and visit.
2) Tell us your twitter page. Use the format http://www.twitter.com/username so that we can click right on it.
3)What social sites are you on, and what are the links to these sites? Find your profile pages and then give us the url to them.
4) What else are you doing to establish your web presence? If you are on a social site that hasn’t been mentioned, tell me about it. (Or write about it in your blog and provide a link.)

Now, here’s the other important step – make sure to come back and read the other entries, and subscribe/friend each other. Send notes to say “Found you on http://ofbooksandwriting.wordpress.com”

I’m going to Tweet this, and I invite you all to Tweet it and ask your friends to Tweet it. Let’s see how many great new friends we can make.

Web Presence for Writers Revisited

Wow, I’ve been learning so much about how to establish a web presence on the internet. A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know what the phrase meant. Now, I has one. (It’s small, but it’s growing)

This post is to show you what I’ve learned and to provide me with a bit of a reminder about what I should be doing.

I’d suggest that before you get started in building your web presence, you think about a few things:

1. What name do you want to be known by? I’m Marie Cachet Beausoleil, although I often don’t use my middle name. If you do a search for Marie Beausoleil, it’s likely that it’s me. If you find Marie Cachet Beausoleil, it’s almost definitely me. Don’t dilute your name recognition by using a bunch of different aliases. Use the name you want to be known by.
2. What are your goals? Mine are simple – to build name recognition and to expose people to my writing ability. If you saw my name elsewhere, will you remember that it’s me? I hope so.
3. How much time do you have? Sadly, this stuff takes time. Budget your time.

So here are the things that I think are most important.

Twitter
If you’re a writer and you’re looking to establish a web presence, the first thing you should do is sign up to Twitter and then add me. I’m @mariebeausoleil and I’d love to have you follow me. I almost always follow back. That’s a good habit to get into. People do not want to follow you if you’re not following back. There are a lot of ways to use Twitter, from your phone to the web to an application. I use Tweetdeck because it lets me group people, and it keeps “all tweets”, “@mariebeausoleil” and “direct messages” separate. That can be handy when you’re chatting regularly with dozens of people.

Social Media Sites
Oh, there are so many of these. I’m trying to develop myself at Facebook and Myspace. Some of my Twitter friends tell me that people are working on making all of these sites work together. That’ll be nice when it happens. Until then, I’m going to keep slugging away at trying to figure out those two sites.

It is apparently possible (and a good thing) to have a Myspace and Facebook page for your book(s). I’m still working on figuring that out, although I can tell that it’s something different than your personal page. As soon as I understand this, I’ll let you know. I promise.

It stands to reason that you should work on developing your list of friends and contacts on both of those sites. Since it’s much easier to do that on Twitter, build up your contacts on Twitter and then let them know you’re on Facebook and Myspace. Of course if you already know a million people who are on Facebook and Myspace, reverse my suggestion. And please — add me as your friend and tell me where you found me.

Website
I know we’re supposed to have a website, although I have to admit I’m not sure what I’d put there. I told you – I’m still learning. I know that, personally, I’m going to much fewer websites and much more blogs, because I can subscribe to blogs in Google Reader. A website will be much more important later, I think. For now, I’m working on developing my website, but it’s not public.

Blogs!
If you’re writing today, and you don’t have a blog, you’re missing out. In fact, many people have several blogs. After all, someone who is interested in me as a writer may be less interested in me as a homeschooling mom. I’ll admit that I’m using free WordPress blogs but I’m not sure that there’s as much stigma against that as there used to be. Eventually, when money is flowing a little more freely, it will be an easy matter to switch my blog over to being hosted on a paid server.

Of course, it stands to reason that you should be updating your blog regularly. Try to make interesting posts. Include ways for people to refer your blog to sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, etc. and make sure to burn a feed at Feedburner. That way, people should be able to subscribe to, or follow, your blog. The goal here is to develop a following of people who enjoy your writing and recognize your name. I’m working on this one.

And the correlation to that is – subscribe to the blogs of editors, agents, publishers, and other writers. Make a daily habit of scanning your blog reader (I use Google Reader because it’s easy) and leave comments as often as possible.

I hear that it’s a good idea to create a Second Life avatar. My laptop, unfortunately, does not have a graphics card that can handle Second Life.

The idea, I think, is quite simple. Get your name out there. Develop yourself as a brand, and make sure that people know your name. Of course, you want them to associate you with happy good feelings, so be polite, helpful and interesting. Don’t spam. Don’t be crude and vulgar, unless you know very well that that’s your target audience.

Any other ideas?

Minimise Distractions When Writing

With apologies to the team over at Daily Writing Tips, I must be in a slightly silly mood. I’ve just read their four suggestions for minimizing distractions when writing, and I just had to write my own:

1 – Work somewhere quiet. The bathroom is good, with the door locked. Although that requires the ability to tune out the insistent banging upon the door. The basement also works. I know, they suggest that we persuade our parents and our young children to give us peace and quiet, but that must have been written with their collective tongues firmly in their collective cheeks. No one who actually lives with their parents or with young children seriously expects that to happen.

2 – Get comfortable. We’re in the bathroom or basement, right? Well, I know where I get comfortable in the first place, but I’m not sure about where to get comfortable in the basement.

3 – Turn off electronic distractions. Like the computer. Wait …

4 – Set a stop time for your writing. Set an alarm that you can count on. A small child screaming “MOMMY!” works well. Or, if you do most of your writing after the children are asleep, you can always rely on the “eyes twitching and watering because they want to close’ signal. That’s my favorite.

Like many parents who work at home while raising small children, I write in the living room, with one eye on my toddler, while Treehouse plays. Every ten minutes or so, I have to stop writing so that I can re-fill the sippy cup, change a diaper, cuddle Baby Boy to sleep, pick up toys that have scattered across the entire house, or simply tend to someone who doesn’t wish to share Mommy’s attention with the computer. I do my best writing between 9pm and midnight, which corresponds to “everyone’s asleep except Mommy”.

Sometimes I’m not sure how we do it. Honestly, I’m not. But we do.

WordPress vs Blogger

Well, there are definitely pros and cons for both of these. I do like that WordPress has category/tag clouds – they take up a lot less space than a vertical list. And WordPress has built in traffic tracking. That’s nice. I had forgotten that I had already created a personal site on WordPress last year – check it out at http://www.trailmixup.wordpress.com – and WordPress makes it really easy to update whichever one I want. When I click “New post”, there’s a drop-down menu asking which one I want to update. So that’s nice. Both categories and tags, that’s nice. WordPress also gives me static Pages, which is awesome.

Biggest problems that I can see – since I can no longer easily access it through my Google Accounts, it’s slightly more of a PITA to get at my blog. I can’t easily add my bloglist. Blogger had a widget where it would access my Google reader and keep a constantly updated blog list, sorted by categories, of the most recently updated blogs. That was nice. I can’t find anything like that on WordPress, so it’s going to take a little bit before I can get my links back up. I also can’t move my widgets around, which I find rather frustrating. They appear one right after the other, and are not very customizable at all.

WordPress gives me the option of downloading software and then uploading my blog to a server. Uhhh … no thanks. That’s a little more work than I want to get into.

So I spent all of last night playing around with WordPress and Blogger. And Twitter. Sigh … those who say World of Warcraft is addictive have never tried Twitter. There’s something about this constant stream of conversation which makes me feel all interconnected and happy. Yes, dear friends, Twitter is happiness.

Twitter is also a total black hole of time-suckingness. Oh, my.

Enough time spent on this

I need to be working on my novel, not agonizing over why my visitors can’t post comments. It is extremely frustrating. I do apologize, and I want any visitors to know that I definitely appreciate you. Stick around, please.

My word count is 20,035 Nanowrimo words (58,670 total words). Now I need to sit down and write 1632 words or more.

I know this sucks

Seriously. This site looks terrible and I know it.

Blogger apparently does not want people to comment on my posts. I’ve been happily posting until a very nice person on Twitter said, “I tried to comment, but I can’t”. Uhh-roooh?

I’ve tried uploading different templates. I’ve tried returning to the classic Blogger blog. Nothing works. I’m becoming more than a little fed up here.

Comments and the lack thereof

Well, at least now I know why I’ve had no comments. I’ve sent a comment to the people from whom I got the template, and I shall await an answer. In the meantime, if anyone can help me, please tweet me, or contact me through my contact page.

Going nuts

This should be simple. I want the blogger bar at the top so that I can easily post and edit things.
I want comments.
I want a full screen layout.

I apparently cannot have all three of these things, and I don’t know why. I was wondering why no one is commenting, and someone on Twitter just let me know – there’s no comment option! It’s turned on in Layout, but it’s not showing up.

Playing around with my template

If you’re visiting and things are looking weird, please be patient. I’m trying to move to a full screen template and I’m new to this xml stuff.

Targeted ads?

How is an ad for Ashley Madison appropriate for my site? If you’re not sure what that is, it’s a site for married people looking for other married people. But that’s the ad that I just saw sitting in the left hand corner. I’m still baffled by that huge stupid ad below my first post. It’s not supposed to be there.

I’m behind on my Nano. Like 6000 words behind. I hope the baby goes to bed early tonight, because I need to do some serious writing.