Special Interview on Monday!
Can you guess who it is?
Just look around the site and you will get an idea.
© Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com 2014
The last article talked about Creating a Blog as in just getting your name set, and your Twitter Bio. The Creating a Blog part is pretty important as today we begin to look at Themes for our Blog. Yes, I said OUR blog. I am creating one right along with you.
“What is a Theme and why is it important that I pick any certain Theme?”
The Theme is the layout of your blog and the options you have. You can look at LitWorldInterviews and then compare it to RonovanWrites.
You will notice first that LWI does not have a Header Photo but RW does, the typewriter. Also LWI has a slider image option where you see the most recently interviewed Authors scroll by like a slide show. RW does not have this feature. The RW Theme is the Coraline Theme. This a good option for an Author.
The Coraline Theme gives you the option for different side bar layouts. It also has footer areas for Widgets, and you can even make the background to your text area transparent so if you have some image in the background you can have the words appear on top of it. Not really my preference but it is an option if you were doing some special event. So you have a lot of flexibility with this them. Click Here to see the details of the Theme and if you scroll to the bottom you can see other blogs that use it.
The Twenty Fourteen Theme is used by one of our resident Authors, PS Bartlett. Click Here to see it in action. I’ve played around with the Theme but not to the success that this site has going for it. Okay, so I haven’t played with it THAT much. I don’t know if there has been any premium upgrades made. It’s a nice layout and looks good. This looks like a professional site. She has made her landing page, her first page you go to on the site be about her. That’s fine. Many site owners do that. It’s all a matter of preference. Click Here to see the details of the Theme and scroll down for other blogs that use it.
The Mystique Theme is one I used for the longest time on RonovanWrites until I just wanted a change. I set it up on my RonovanRants site, a site that I haven’t really done anything with as of yet. You will notice that the header does not have a photo, you can have one or not. There are different layouts for the sidebar . I put it here as the right and put some widgets in the footer areas. A friend is looking at changing up their Author site and this was an example I gave them. They wanted something that did not appear cluttered. I advised for the About.me widget to be in the sidebar, possibly along with the Mystique Tabbed Widget which is at the bottom in a footer on the right. This makes for a clean look, with a slightly different background feel to it. If you have a book cover or a series of books this might be very nice. Basically Mystique is another versatile theme. Click Here to check out the details and other sites using it.
These are just three Themes you can choose from. This is the beginning of your journey. Some like to say they want a simple, clean and minimalist Theme. Okay, I get that. But you know what? Why not have a Theme that can be simple but can also give you flexibility in the future? Why do I say that? If you change from one Theme to another Theme you will often have to rebuild all of your Widget areas and do some other customizing. What I have done is found a Theme for my own personal use that I can change around any time I want, it will look different, and I don’t have to fix things all the time. And yes, sometimes variety and change is good when you’ve had a site for a while and you want to wake up your fans. Just make it easy for you to do it.
That’s why I go with the Coraline Theme. For the purpose of this exercise that is the Theme I will use. You don’t have to do that. You can choose what you like and apply what we do moving forward to it.
For the next time you will want to have an image for your Header Photo ready. That would be like the typewriter on my RonovanWrites site. One thing I did was make it so I did not need a Header Text Line by putting the name of my Blog on the Header Photo itself. The dimensions you need are 990×180 pixels.
Much Respect
Ronovan
© Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com 2014
Author Presence: Gravatar.com
You have a blog. Either a well established or at least one set up with things on it, or you just did it recently with me. Now let’s get your Gravatar. Gravatar.com is a site that you put an image on, as well as other information, that will be used on WordPress.com when you post articles or comment on other peoples articles. And yes, you will be commenting. So don’t give me that look or attitude. One thing about WordPress.com is that it has a great author/writing community that supports one another.
When you log into Gravatar.com it will basically tell you that you need a WordPress.com blog/account. Now you see why I had you go ahead and just get that out of the way. Now for some things to do that are similar to what you die with About.me.
So you have gone to Gravatar.com and clicked on Create Your Own Gravatar. Now let’s look at the places to go and see here.
You want to add an image to your Gravatars that you will be seen as around WordPress and other sites that use Gravatar. So think professional. Even if it is a fun photo, make it something universally acceptable. Anyone seeing this is a potential book buyer. More than likely if you look below the blue box that has your email address in it you will see a line beginning with Whoops. At the end of that line it says Add one by clicking here! Click.
Choose your poison.
Whatever you choose you will probably get the page that says crop and finish. Do that, and the next page you rate your photograph as appropriate for whatever age. Now you should be back at the Manage Gravatars page. Your image should be next to your email.
Now for the
Here you find all the basics like your name, location, display name, and About Me (Think Bio.)
For the Display name it will show whatever your site name is at first, like mine shows ronovanauthor. I will change it to Ronovan Author. As for the About Me part, what I like to do is use something from my About.me account. This way there is some uniformity across all the places that has Bio information about me.
Now you really only fill out as much as you want here. And you put in what you like.
Click Save Profile
You will notice on the right side of this page some options.
Photo Gallery-Yes, you can add more photos.
Websites-You can add your various website address, such as About.me, facebook, Twitter, any other blogs, GoodReads, Tumblr, Google+. You name you got it you put it. Everywhere a person can find you put where else they can find you.
Background-Yes you can load a background image, just like at About.me.
Contact Information-You can put in whatever form of contact you want people to use. Still it’s a good place to go ahead and put what you like.
Verified Services-You can add links to other places like Youtube and the like. (See the Help at the top for details.)
Cyrpto-currencies-You put in your wallet addresses. I don’t do these so not that familiar with them. (See the Help at the top for details.)
You might be thinking how this seems like a lot of STUFF by now. Well you don’t have to do it all at once, because for one thing you don’t have it all. Basically getting that image in there and your name right is good for now AND adding your blog address to the Websites option. You simply go in there, click what you want and you got it. One of my pet peeves is when a person has Gravatar and you see they make great comments on your blog or another blog and you want to check out their own blog. You click their image and no blog there. Sometimes they don’t have one. But most times they never put their blog in the Websites page.
This isn’t hard so far, right? Tedious? Maybe because of repeating some information. But you want to have everything in place and ready to go when your book is ready to go.
Until Next Time
Much Respect
Ronovan
© Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com 2014
During the previous article we talked about Your Brand Name. If you missed it, you really need to check it out as it will come in handy understanding the importance of what I mean by this and how important it is to you.
What are we talking about today?
We’ll discuss two things today.
So why are we doing two things today?
For one thing these will be relatively short and another thing, I want each day to be useful for everyone joining in. So for those with blogs, you might get something out of the Twitter Bio.
When you go to the site you will see where you type in a name and then click create blog. Once you have done this the fun begins. Don’t worry about today being intense, it won’t be. And you know what? If you change your mind about the blog name afterwards, you can create another blog with this same account. That’s right, you can create several blogs with different blog names/addresses within the same account. I have RonovanWrites.WordPress.com AND LitWorldInterviews.WordPress.com under the same account. Sure I might could have done it separately but I wanted to be able to keep up with the activity on both at the same time.
For this I am creating a new blog called Ronovan Author so as we walk through I will fill in things appropriately
There are four fields to fill out on the
E-MAIL ADDRESS–ronovanwrties@gmail.com
USERNAME–ronovanauthor
PASSWORD
BLOG ADDRESS–ronovanauthor ( the wordpress.com part is already there for you)
Once you have filled in these you scroll down and click Create Blog under the FREE column. I mean you can do the premium ones if you like as they do have things like more space, but often times you probably want to at least try out blogging first. You can always upgrade at any time.
Blog Title–Ronovan (I could keep it as RonovanAuthor but not right now, although it might work. I can always change it at any time.)
Tagline (Optional)–Author of Imaginations and Realities
Language–English (Yes you can set it to different languages)
Click Next Step
It looks like at the moment the default Theme is one called Reddle. It’s fine to go ahead and just click on Next Step here as you will be able to change your Theme later. Your main goal today is to get your blog name and get to the point where you can start customizing, not that we will be doing that today. So don’t worry.
It tells you about the Theme but don’t worry about it right now. And when you see words like ‘custom colors’ and things like that, often times you have to upgrade to premium to get those.
Click Next Step
Basically it is wanting you to connect your blog to facebook or Twitter. We will be doing this later, but if you want to you can now. I will still be going through connecting these two at a later date.
Click Next Step
Now it will want you to create your first blog post. You don’t have to. At the top of the screen you will see; Reader, My Sites, and Stats. You can click on any of these if you like and just look around.
Today I want to show you the ‘Dashboard’. The Dashboard is where you will spend a lot of time. You will create your blog post/articles here. You will select your Themes, create pages on your blog, and pretty much everything.
Click on My Sites at the top.
Now you will see all of your blog sites. By the blog you just created you will see a gear in the top right corner of the picture. Click the gear and then click Go to admin dashboard.
One thing you will see is a Welcome to WordPress.com Video. I want to say I watched it and it is rather useful so go ahead and watch it.
And that ends your Blog Talk for the day. You have created a Blog, an Author Blog. Next time we speak about Blogs I will want to give you some Theme ideas to use. The reason I want to discuss Themes before we get into the details of the Dashboard is because not all Themes have the same Dashboard options. But they all work basically the same way with just a few Appearance differences.
You might be wondering “I’m an author of YA SciFi/Fantasy/Dystopia.”
Nice. Yawn. Sorry, did you say something?
Yeah, that was a bit mean of me but I’m here for Straight Talk. In fact at times I do articles with the titles in them called Straight Talk with Ronovan. So let’s get to it. Your Bio needs to say who and what you are.
Here is my Twitter Bio:
Author. Promoter of Authors. Interviewer. Lover of History. Tacos are a food group. #Fibromyalgia http://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/ http://litworldinterviews.wordpress.com
Yeah, it’s not the best in the world. But it tells you what I am and do. It gives you a couple of insights into me. I love history, I obviously am a huge fan of tacos (humor there) (not really) and I have Fibromyalgia. I also have both of my main blog sites included.
I have had people follow me because of the Fibromyalgia. I have people comment on their agreement about Tacos being a food group. And I have had people say they Love History too. I apparently have some sense of humor by including the taco comment.
Be as creative as you like. Remember, be professional.
Neil Gaiman is famous. Being famous makes it a bit easier with the Bio but he still has to be somewhat creative.
“will eventually grow up and get a real job. Until then, will keep making things up and writing them down.”
Perfectly done. His sense of humor is there and he actually tells what he does in a creative way. In fact I need to rethink mine. Look around at your favorite authors and DON’T copy them but see how creative they are.
Jim Butcher is another popular author these days. Yeah, I met him and talked with him for a while during the first round of Dresden Files books. Was a really nice guy and humble.
“–Storyteller. Let’s not complicate things.”
Honestly, I can hear his Harry Dresden character saying this. Well not the storyteller part, but it is definitely Butcher’s writing style coming through in so few words.
Until Next Time
Much Respect
Ronovan
© Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com 2014
In my previous Author Presence article I discussed About.me, it’s importance, it’s various categories and some advice about what to do when setting your account up.
Your name is the best thing to use across all of your social media if you are an author or a blogger wishing to create a brand. Yes, you are a brand waiting to happen. So pop your top, let that fizzy goodness sound and get ready to drink success.
Picking your blog name, even if not your own name itself, needs to be something you are willing to actually say out loud to people. Think about it. “Oh yes, my Twitter handle is Cheetos Fingers, Mr. Top Literary Agent Ever.” Or perhaps you have something even less appropriate that we won’t get into.
Today is about determining what your Brand Name will be. Yes, I have advised it should be your name. Some use the name of their books or the main character in their books.
As always, remember . . .
Much Respect
Ronovan
© Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com 2014
Each day this week I will have an article about another piece to setup. I am not into doing everything at once in one article. We’re not in a hurry. Doing everything in one article makes people feel overwhelmed when all they really need to do is come back to that article the next day. So what I like to do is . . . one thing at a time. Call it the reasonable teacher in me. Yes, I was a History teacher and a corporate trainer type among other things.
Something important to remember as we begin this process together; I want you to know that I will be giving ADVICE here. Take it or leave it. After I give it you then make it work or not. Everything I or anyone else tells you won’t do miracles on its own. YOU have to work it. I have social media things out there that I don’t ‘work’ and they are not doing anything for me. Actually putting all of this together for you is going to make me begin to ‘work’ what I have more.
I strongly advise you to sign up for a Twitter account. I know you might never use it but set one up. For one thing you want to get your Twitter Handle, your Name you like saved by you. But the real useful thing is that you will be able to use it in other accounts you set up. And you will be amazed at how many social media services out there will allow you to simply log in with Twitter. I tell you it comes in handy when you can’t remember a password. I have problems with remembering things, long story, amnesia’s a bummer.
This one account is what I have showing on my Twitter account for people to click on to find out about me.
It’s the About.me account.
Yes, that’s a big font there for this. I want you to know why you need one of these.
Think of your About.me as your central hub, the Grand Central Station of your social media empire. From this one account people can find all the connections to your other media from one page.
I am going to give everyone credit for being able to sign up for an account. Once you’ve done that you will want to Edit Page. You do this by clicking your name in the top right and then Edit Page. If you are just signing in for the first time it may take you right to the Edit Page.
I’ll go in order of the tabs on the edit screen where you would actually be putting information you want to share.
As you are choosing images, links and information to share just remember that anyone can see this including agents and publishers.
Photo
Biography
Colors-(Play around to see what looks best on your page.)
Fonts
Apps
Links
Contact
Well that’s it for today. This should take you some time to set up if you do it properly and you know what? You can always make changes to it. I do all the time. And bonus tip time: Make sure to update your About.me page when things change About.YOU.
Come back tomorrow for the next step of setting up your web presence. It’s an easier one. Kind of. And it’s the next step closer to a Blog.
Much Respect
Ronovan
2014 © Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com
Are you near Boulder or Denver, CO? If so get it in gear and get there. And if you are, let us know. One of our followers might be in the area and you could find a friend to hang out with. Every little bit of support helps.
Meet Agents and Agencies that I’ve queried and been rejected and tell me how you succeeded.
Alex BarbaChuck SambuchinoErin ButerbaughRachelle GardnerRenee Nyenandra BrondSara MegibowSarah FreeseShannon Hassan
The latest Colorado Writing Workshop is now finished. Thank you to all who attended. If you are interested in attending the next area event, email us at writingdayworkshops [at] gmail.com and say you want to be alerted about the next Colorado workshop when a date is finalized.
————
After a successful launch in 2014, the Colorado Writing Workshop is back for 2016! Writing Day Workshops is excited to announce The 2016 Colorado Writing Workshop — a full-day “How to Get Published” writing event outside Denver, CO on July 30, 2016.
This writing event is a wonderful opportunity to get intense instruction over the course of one day, pitch a literary agent or editor (optional), get your questions answered, and more. Note that there are limited seats at the new venue (125 total). All questions about the event regarding schedule, details and registration are answered below. Thank you for your interest…
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One of the first things you will find out as an Author is that YOU ARE YOUR ADVERTISING. Agents and Publishers look at what your presence is online and how you are selling yourself. Don’t be offended at that word. Use the word marketing if you like.
The point is, you have to get attention in order to get attention. As soon as you realize you want to be an author start marketing. What are things you need to do?
Professionals will tell you to focus focus focus. Focus your energy on two or three media outlets and that’s it. Okay, I somewhat agree.
What’s the best way to control your presence, your marketing, your portfolio and establish a home where everyone knows your name? You got it . . .
Some of you are freaking out. Don’t. You want to know why?
Why should you have a blog?
Let’s go ahead and establish first that you should go ahead and use your pen name as your blog address or URL. Blog address? Yes, that’s the http://www.whatever.com thing you type. The Title of your blog can be anything else. Like I could change the Title of this site to The Literary World of Interviews. It will change nothing in the way of how you find this site. But I prefer for the name of the site to be the same as the address, the URL address. Being the same is less confusing. And by being your name it will be easy to find you and it’s professional. You can also use the name of your book series. A friend of mine and her family have written a series, the second is out now. The trilogy is called The Seeds Trilogy and their site is very nice. It gives character profiles and a lot of things to help you really get into the atmosphere of the books. One of our Authors, PS Barlett has a nice Author Blog as well.
Your Blog, your official Author site should be professional. It should contain your work and the image you wish to project. Keep the unprofessional things off of there unless you just don’t care. I am not saying don’t have fun and share fun things, I am just saying be professional about what you post.
A Blog is also your central hub that all of your other social media spin off of.
That brings us to . . .
I know you probably just don’t even want to think about it. It’s some alien monster beast that you don’t understand that speaks in hashtagonese but it’s easier than you think. And to be honest, you don’t have to do that much with it at first to get started. You can even connect it to your blog, very easily, and then everything you post on your blog would have a link to it sent to Twitter.
How important is Twitter to a literary type blog person? For this site, LWI, historically since it began the number one place we get people to come visit us from as of this writing is Twitter then WordPress Reader, Search Engines and Facebook. They are all very close in number but those are the top four. And those are the four ways I expect it to be at this moment. We have some great affiliated blogs that we receive quite a bit of traffic from as well.
Don’t just tweet about your books and your work. Tweet fun things, jokes, links to videos, interesting articles, anything. Also keep your image in mind. You don’t want to come off as some immature, racist, sexist punk. I apologize to you immature, racist, sexist punk Authors out there, you can tweet what you like. If you tweet just things about your work, you will lose people, followers. Look at Neil Gaiman. He has a great Twitter feed. He mentions other authors and even tweets funny things along with his work. His are some of the most humorous and window into his world tweets I have seen and it allows his followers to connect with him.
Facebook, in all honesty, is not what it used to be but it is still worth the effort to have an Author page. You can also set anything you post on your Author page to go to Twitter as well. You can so things on facebook such as launch parties and you can even use it much like Twitter now with the use of hashtags. In case you are not familiar with hashtags that is when you see something like #FreeBooks or #LitWorldInterviews. You just put # in front of a uninterrupted series of words or word. And you are not limited to 140 characters as you are on Twitter, although, when/if your facebook post does go to Twitter the 14o characters does become a factor so your message will be chopped if it goes long. I let mine be chopped. I just put my hashtags at the beginning or in the message itself.
Facebook is where, if you have a blog, you want to post other things. You can still post your work. I put links to things on my blog on mine. But I also do videos, little joke images, or sometimes I will do poetry that I only post on facebook. I put things you would only see if you followed me on facebook. Again, not a difficult thing to do.
Believe it or not, you can schedule things to post on each of these media outlets. You can spend a couple of hours and set up a post a day or three posts for the week on your blog, if it takes that long. Tweets can be done the same, and facebook as well. You don’t have to be there and be active all the time, but you do want to respond to people who might comment to you. That’s up to you though. But fans do like some acknowledgement at times.
I will be getting into each of these in detail in separate articles, but for now I would advise anyone reading this that has even the remotest thought of becoming an author to go ahead and set these up. It does no harm. Go ahead and do it. I use WordPress.com for blogging. It’s free and very easy. I’ve tried others and this one really seems the easiest to me so far. It might just be a preference but I do like it, plus WordPress has a great Author community that really does support one another. You want proof? You’re reading the proof now. Authors united to help other authors and to promote their work. That’s right, we want everyone to be a success.
Until Next Time
Much Respect
Ronovan
2014 © Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com
From LitWorldInterviews’ friend Chris McMullen via The Story Reading Ape. A great Author opportunity.
You’ve Been Searched!
Think about that for a moment. Who in the world would Search you? Why?
In other words, there might be people out there in the literary/publishing world looking for YOUR NAME. And why do they do this?
Writing a great book will not always get you published or make you the success you want to be, whatever success that is. Either traditional or self published it doesn’t matter, because people are going to look for information about you.
I Search for you. Yes, when I do interviews, book reviews, anything I do about an Author, I Search. Why do I Search? Why do Agents Search? Why do Publishers Search?
Personally I have a list of names that I want to ask to interview, but have to wait until the ones I have get caught up, or better yet . . . they ask me. You ask me and you are legit, 99 times out of 100, you get an interview.
We Search to see a few things;
Why do we want to know these things?
Yeah, I know, you dream of that big signing and everything gets taken care of for you. Sorry darling, that’s a rarity. It’s kind of like a rock band; the money is in the tours and the t-shirts not the albums.
Same for the Author, everyone wants you to sell yourself for them. You are the return of the original rock star, the author. You could sign with anyone but you have to promote yourself.
In days to come I will be putting out articles about how to get that network in motion NOW, before you’ve finished your first draft, your first chapter or even knew you were going to write a book. Start today setting up a network for whatever you want to do in the future, even if it is something as simple as setting up Twitter and gaining Followers. Do it now.
Read what I have for you or not, it will be coming to help you. Trust me, as a writer myself, I hate the idea of having to take time to do self promotion, but by doing a little at a time now, it sure saves a lot of time later.
Much Respect
Ronovan
2014 © Copyright-All rights reserved by litworldinterviews.wordpress.com
Stuck for ideas? Words not flowing? Need a break? Or some good old inspiration?
What better inspiration than a series of talks about the process of writing and what it means to write.
Here is the link to a TED playlist of 10 talks from authors like Isabel Allende and Melissa Gilbert, speaking about
Hope you find them inspirational, or at the least, entertaining.
Enjoy!
– Florence
Lit World Interviews 