It’s been a busy few weeks, which is why I’ve missed the last two Best of the Blogs posts. I attended the Omega Christian Writers Conference in Sydney, Australia, followed by a few days at a writing retreat with friends in Queensland. I got home and was immediately (and unexpectedly) off to Wellington for a week. Fortunately I got home before the earthquakes and the subsequent flooding. “It never rains but it pours” might be a cliche, but it’s appropriate in this case.
Anyway, now I’m facing the age-old struggle of how to fit four into two … and it’s not working. But I found two articles on productivity that have given me some new ideas, as well as two excellent articles on branding and marketing. I hope you find them useful:
Productivity
Getting it all done. It’s a problem we all have. This week, Michael Hyatt suggests that we should start with an easy task rather than procrastinating about starting a difficult task:
https://michaelhyatt.com/most-difficult-task.html
Then Donna Cummings visits Romance University to ask if she can have 15 minutes of your time … because scheduling big jobs in 15-minute chunks is a way to work towards the big goals without becoming overwhelmed. I like the idea—it fits nicely with Michael Hyatt’s approach, and it’s something I’ve been doing for a while … only without actually thinking about it.
http://romanceuniversity.org/2016/11/14/can-i-have-15-minutes-of-your-time-donna-cummings-2/
Branding and Marketing
This is an older post, but it’s got great information about something all authors need to know about: building an author website. Tim Grahl has built a business on being “relentlessly helpful”, and this article is an example of his helpfulness:
http://timgrahl.com/how-to-build-the-ultimate-author-website-in-1-hour/
If (like me) you have no idea about how to actually build a website, then I recommend Shannon Mattern at WP-BFF and her free 5-Day website challenge. That’s how I built this website and my author website (yes, you’ll see they look a lot alike. That’s a deliberate branding choice).
As an aside, Shannon also offers a paid WP-BFF Academy, and a WordPress Protection Package—I haven’t used these packages, but I’m happy to promote them because Shannon is someone else who practices being relentlessly helpful. Yes, I am a WP-BFF affiliate.
And branding … how do you choose an author brand, especially when you write in more than one genre? You can take my approach, and have separate websites. Or you can be clever, and combine your writing under one overarching brand (this might take longer than 15 minutes). June Stevens Westerfield visits Romance University to explain:
Well, that’s me for this week.
