Blogiversary: 14 years blogging and I’m still here

arizona tate university 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle
Fourtheen years later, we still do jigsaw puzzles every year over the holidays! Although there was a bit of a SNAFU this time when my parents’ cat stole one of the puzzle pieces…

So I actually missed noting this by a few days, but I posted my very first blog post 14 years and four days ago.

The topic, btw, was jigsaw puzzles and how much I love my family. “Working a jigsaw puzzle,” I wrote,

is a way for a few people you care about to gather around a table and share something, which isn’t the puzzle but your time. You’re facing each other — unlike when, for instance, people watch television together. You talk about whatever comes up, serious topics or lite topics or just how you’re certain that the particular piece you’re looking for is surely lost. You laugh, a lot. And if you pay attention, you realize how much you love each other and how comfortable you are together.

Coincidentally, I was back east over the holidays and yep. And we did a jigsaw puzzle :)

Meanwhile, however, over the last several weeks, I’ve been doing something else.

Tackling a long-overdue job: website cleanup

I’ve written nearly 1200 posts over the years (!).

And in all that time, I’d never gone back over them to do things like remove broken links or clean up taxonomies.

I had good reason to procrastinate: it was a lot of work. Dozens and dozens of hours’ worth of work.

But as of today, I’ve accomplished quite a bit. I’ve paired the published posts down to around 750 and fixed links. I re-categorized some posts and cross-linked them where needed to better capture updates on specific topics.

The exercise also served as a major explore of the ol’ memory-lane.

That time period — the mid 2000s — was a the golden age of blogging…

I can still remember how incredible it felt to be able to write about anything I wanted to write about, and publish it, without having to navigate any gatekeeper or satisfy anyone but myself. It was so, incredibly freeing. I’d been working as a contract writer for years, I’d co-written Outwitting Dogs, I was working on a novel that I hoped to sell to a publisher. Now, all of a sudden, I could just write.

All of a sudden, I could hit a button and be out there for anyone to read.

I discovered WordPress. I taught myself a little php coding so I could modify its default Kubrick theme (remember Kubrick? Oh, that blue… oh, how thrilled I was when I made my site turn green!)

Comment spamming became a thing. I told them to go away and wrote an ode. I discovered Akismet — phew :)

It’s impossible to understate how life-changing it felt to be able to blog.

And I wasn’t alone. I was part of a blossoming online community of people who appreciated what I published, who would link to me, comment on my blog — and of course I did the same for them. (The right-left divide was there, btw, but it didn’t feel as dire and insurmountable. It wasn’t vicious. We were still trying to understand each other.)

Many of us coalesced around our respective communities. I wrote a lot about Rochester, New York, where I lived at the time, and exchanged links and information with a dozen or so other Rochester-area bloggers, many of whom are gone, now. Mr. Snitch. Zinnian Democracy. For some topics of local interest, like Rochester’s proposed Renaissance Square, my blog could arguably be considered an important contemporaneous record.

Many of the sources I quoted about that project are no longer available online.

And then there were the other aspiring fiction authors.

We linked each others’ posts. We shared ideas and advice and writer resources. This started a year before Amazon launched the Kindle, before the indie author became a thing. One of our favorite subjects was literary agents: how to query them, what they liked, what they hated, which ones to avoid. (Remember Miss Snark?) (Her stuff is all still online btw.)

And then came 2007 and Kindle Direct Publishing — another moment I will never forget. Because, when you think about it, indie authors were to books what bloggers were to online journalism / opinion essays. There was that same sense of loosening and freedom and “now I can write what I want and put it out there and who knows? Someone might actually read it and like it.”

Writers who had focused on courting literary agents suddenly rushed to self-publish their books on Amazon…

I was one of them. I self-pubbed my first novel, ran a giveaway, and watched it climb to the #11 spot on Amazon’s Free Kindle Ebooks store.

Heady times…

Word had been spreading in the lit-o-sphere about National Novel Writing Month and I participated a couple of times (before deciding, ultimately, that the format doesn’t work for me).

And naturally, scammers began to emerge to prey on authors who dreamed of writing fiction for a living…

And Then Came Facebook

Oh, what a temptation it was! So much easier than running your own site, courting readers, vying for eyeballs. You could write a face book post and suddenly everyone you knew would read it and comment.

I fell for it. I essentially abandoned my own blog. Instead of publishing hundreds of posts per year, I’d do maybe a dozen.

Well, you know the quote, right? “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” It’s a concept that has been around for a very long time. And yet, strangely enough, we don’t seem to have fully wakened to the implications.

Products are things. Ergo:

If we let ourselves be turned into products, we can expect to be treated like products — that is, like things.

So why are we surprised to learn that Facebook would sell us out? Why shouldn’t it? We aren’t “people” to Facebook.

By definition — as soon as we agree to the Facebook TOS and start uploading “content” — which includes not only our words, our personal diaries (!), our insights and links and information-sharing but also all that “data” about ourselves, our likes dislikes comings going relationships, which in aggregate is essentially our selves in a very important sense — our virtual avatars — as soon as we enter that transaction, we agree to be treated like objects. Commoditized. Bought and sold.

It’s little wonder that there’s been a backlash against the platform. We’re slowly beginning to grasp what “a Facebook” is and how “a Facebook” is going to treat us.

(It’s no coincidence, either, that as a platform Facebook feeds political divisiveness and vitriol. We don’t treat each other like people on Facebook, either.)

Of course, when you’re a writer, there’s another nuance to this as well.

Writers create content. Content has value. Why should we give it to Facebook?

Of course, writers give our content away all the time. I do it. I run Amazon giveaways. My novel The French Emerald is available to read for free here and on Wattpad (where it recently broke 16K reads!)

But the difference is that in these instances, I am interacting with you, my reader, directly.

So when you find my blog and read a post, our shared experience belongs to you and I. It’s direct. It’s not beingi mediated by a third party.

I have the kind of control that a content-creator should have. If I want to pull The French Emerald off my site, off Wattpad, format it, and sell it instead, I could do that. It wouldn’t be a violation of anybody’s terms of service. It’s crystal clear that I own the copyright to those words and can do whatever I want with them.

I’m still on Facebook. I have a page for promoting my novels. I go on the platform from time to time to catch up with friends and family. But I no longer invest time in posting content.

Instead, I’ve recommitted to my home: this blog. I didn’t publish a single piece here in 2016 or 2017, and only did a handful in 2018. But in the last month of 2019 alone, I put up around 8 posts.

Will anyone see them? Who knows? I lost a lot of traction when I abandoned this site for Facebook four+ years ago.

But I’m good with that. In a way, it’s like it was back in the beginning, in 2006, when I first hit “publish” and put a little piece about doing jigsaw puzzles out there for the world to see. I don’t care if “I’m read.” I’m a writer. I write. That’s what matters.

Happy New Year to anyone who finds this.

And thank you, thank you, thank you for reading.

I disagree. Social media is a MUST for writers.

how important is website traffic to writers?

Fiction writers face peculiar challenges when it comes to generating search engine traffic.

Sabine Reed, in a guest post on published here [UPDATE: link no longer any good], tackles a topic of perennial interest to writers: how much time should we spend on social media?

It’s a good question and her answer is a thoughtful one, but I don’t think it goes far enough.

Sabine makes the following, very valid, points:

1. Google is by far the biggest source of online traffic. She points to this study, which notes that

social media sites do not drive traffic like content sites and search engines do, and it’s not even close. That means that, while all those retweets are nice to see, apparently, few people are clicking the actual link embedded within the tweeted message.

2. Writers need to generate saleable content. The corollary being: if you’re wasting hours a day on Twitter, you’re not writing your novel. And yes, that’s a problem.

But while I agree on both of those points, I don’t think they tell the whole story.

So let’s look at the problem a bit more closely — and tell me if you think I’ve missed anything here!

Yes, Content is King

As Sabine also mentions, the not-so-secret secret about driving Google traffic is to publish good content.

But what is “good content”?

It is text that Google’s bots determine to be

  • Relevant and
  • Authoritative

Relevance = keywords. Authoritative = linked.

This is a relatively straightforward problem if you are operating in the world of non-fiction.

Say I want to promote my dog books. All I have to do is write articles and blog posts about dogs, and dog training, and adopting a companion dog. There’s my keyword-laced content that all relates to dogs.*

I also network with other people publishing articles about dogs, and over time they link to my blog, which gives me authority.

This isn’t difficult to do, especially if you’re working in subject areas that are relatively narrow and don’t have  a lot of competition. I’ve done it lots of times, both on my own blog and for other peoples’ blogs.

But when it comes to fiction, what keywords are you going to use?

If someone hasn’t read my novel Can Job, then it doesn’t matter if I write 500 articles about Borschtchester, New York, or Miles Chacuderie, or the DipTych Digital Division of DipTych Corporation.

Nobody’s going to Google those terms, because they are all made up.

Now if you write genre, you may be able to get around this. It’s arguable that there are sets of keywords specific to certain genres that you could use as Google bait. Publish 500 articles about dragons and wizards and fairies, and you could find your blog generating traffic from people who want to read about dragons and wizards and fairies.

Lucky you.

Me, I’m not so lucky. Even my book about fairies isn’t really a paranormal so much as a romantic comedy with a paranormal twist.

So what about links?

It’s a funny thing, but links without focused content aren’t really useful from a search engine perspective.

Example. The New York Times has published articles about dogs. (“Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” anyone?) And The New York Times gets linked by bloggers, at the rate of probably a zillion links per nanosecond.

But type “dogs” into Google and The New York Times does not get top ranking.

Links without focused content aren’t an effective way to generate high visibility via search engine rank.

So although Sabine makes valid points, I think we need to re-frame the issue.

Social media is not about generating website traffic.

For writers . . .

Social Media is About Long-Term Word-Of-Mouth, Not Short-Term Traffic

That statement would give the heebie jeebies to your average SEO professional.

Your average SEO professional focuses on driving website traffic. He/she has to. When your goal is to get people to spend  money, website traffic is critical. It’s a critical link in the process of online lead generation and/or sales.

your readers are waiting

Your audience is out there — and chances are they’ll find you by word-of-mouth.

But as a novelist, I don’t care as much about traffic as about something more nebulous.

I’ve actually been wrestling with what to call it. It has aspects of “visibility” and “brand” and “platform.”

But ultimately what I need to do is generate word-of-mouth referrals.

And the way to do that is to be available when people want to connect — specifically, people who love books.

In fact, this relates to another point Sabine makes in her post:

Writers should write. The more books you have out there, the greater the number of people who will find out about you.

She notes that JA Konrath, among others, reiterate this point all the time.

But why does it work?

Word of mouth.

Write a great novel, and people talk about it. They recommend it. They publish positive reviews about it. And when they do, other people buy copies. And those people recommend it. And so on.

Which is where social media comes in.

Social Media Augments This Process

Social media can act as an amplifier.

Savvy writers know this. Watch them. They’re not tweeting to get people to go to their websites. They’re tweeting to start conversations about their books.

Yes, you need to strike a balance. You have to be conscious that time you spend on social media is time you aren’t spending on generating saleable content — novels or short stories.

But IMO it’s not accurate to say that Amanda Hocking’s success is based on the fact that she wrote a lot of books instead of doing any promotion. To quote Hocking herself: “The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting.”

So not only has Hocking invested her time in marketing, her success  can be directly attributed to social media — specifically, to word-of-mouth about her writing, which was spread and amplified via social media.

My advice, then?

Writers need blogs. They need Twitter accounts. The need to be on Facebook and probably a bunch of other sites like GoodReads.

And they need to invest time in connecting with people on all of those platforms.

What do you think?

New other stuff :-)

Okay, I went a bit overboard, wouldn’t you say? New background, changed the column background from white to pale green . . . yes, green’s my favorite color. But this is a bit over the top. I feel like I’m peering into a dish of lime Jello. (Is there an award for greenest blog btw?)

Trouble is, there are always little issues that come up. The theme is basically Kubrick, modified — if you’ve ever installed WordPress, you’ll know what I’m talking about . . . over the years, I’ve tweaked it in various ways. But right now, with these latest changes, I can’t get the .widecolumn to match up to the header exactly, and I can’t get the bottom margin of .widecolumn to match up with the bottom of the sidebar.

For the header, what I really need is help from a designer. Blurring out the photo helps make the title pop, which is a good thing, but it’s plain ugly typeface, which is not a good thing. Unfortunately my tools are limited, and so’s my time — we might have to live with it for awhile.

That said,  y’all come here for the scintillating prose, not how pretty it looks, right?

:-)

golf blog

Late last night, after a negotiating a harrowing technological labyrinth on and off for several days, I managed to upgrade to the latest WordPress version on my golf blog, Golfolicious.

It shouldn’t have been hard. I’ve put up a half dozen WordPress sites at this point; for the installation, my preference is Fantastico, an application deployment tool bundled with many hosting services. You pretty much click a button and you’re done. Even better, when it’s time to upgrade, you can use the same tool.

My Golfolicious WordPress instance, however, wasn’t originally installed using Fantastico — so I hesitated trying to use the tool to upgrade.

I could have done a manual upgrade, but the instructions published in the WordPress codex were long, complex, and included steps that I would have had to research further to fully understand.

Finally, I hit on another idea. I own the .net and .org versions of the domain name, as well as the .com. Maybe I could install a current version on the .net, transfer my theme, posts, and comments over, and then point the .com to the .net when I was done?

Call that plan B. Plan A, executed only when I’d done enough research on Plan B to satisfy myself that it was viable, was to try Fantastico.

I did. Didn’t work. Broke the site. Took me awhile to backtrack enough to make it somewhat usable again.

Plan B, OTOH, worked like a charm — particularly since the WordPress Wizards, my heroes, have built in handy import/export tools that make it extremely simple to transfer posts & comments between blogs/URLs/host servers.

Is there anything they haven’t thought of?

I heart WordPress!

And while I’m at it, I also heart Hostgator, my hosting service. Their chat tech support staff are awesome. They are patient, they are cheerful, they take the initiative to do a little extra research if needed to make sure an issue is resolved satisfactorily — my experience with them has really been top notch.

So thanks for all your help as I wrestled through that upgrade, Hostgator!

Now I need to catch up on golf blog posts. I put one up after I finished the upgrade last night — post about a late June trip to play a couple of courses at the Turning Stone resort. Scroll down to see my photo of a wild turkey :-)

My poor template

Unfortunately I have lost some of the changes I made to my template when I first created this blog, and haven’t been able to recreate them. And I guess that with Firefox the image I’m using for my header doesn’t display . . . I have no idea whatsoever how to fix that.

We’ll see. In the meantime, at least the posts are displaying . . .

Here goes . . .

I’m about to commence a long overdue maintenance session on this site today . . . wish me luck and here’s hoping when I’m done it looks rather the same!

One blog at a time :-)

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was when the Mortensen side of the family got together. My dad’s parents lived right next door, so several times a year my uncle and aunt would turn up with my cousins, and what a blast we’d have. And man, the noise!!! We have the sort of family where everybody loves to talk — and the one who talks with the most enthusiasm holds the floor :-)

So it comes as no surprise that we’re spilling out into the blogosphere. First my dad — now my cousin Hal!

LOL

Thanks!

To all of you, I hope you’re having a wonderful Thanksgiving. And thanks to all who visit this blog. It means so much to me to have people read & appreciate my writing. Thank you so much.

All golf all the time

Okay, after a couple of months of thinking this over, I’ve concluded this is an urge I can’t deny:

I’m going to do a second, golf-themed blog.

I’ll be putting it online in about a month. It’s going to have a combination personal posts, interviews, book & product reviews, and lots of other golf-related stuff.

And I’m going to put ads on it — because this isn’t just about golf, it’s also about finding an outlet for my Inner Capitalist ;-)

Wish me luck!

Okay, he tagged me

John aka Duke of Earle says I HAVE to play . . . who am I to argue?

1) One book that changed your life: Outwitting Squirrels by Bill Adler, because encountering it triggered a chain of events that eventually led to my co-writing Outwitting Dogs. ‘Nuff said.

2) One book that you’d read more than once: Hmmmmm. Anna Karenina, might as well use that one. Blogged about my second read of that book here.

3) One book you’d want on a deserted island: A honkin’ big blank book. Five subject college ruled notebook would do, although if the pages were unruled I could write really tiny and it would last even longer, even if later I wouldn’t be able to read a bit of it. Also a box of halfway decent pens.

4) One book that made you laugh: To the Nines, the first Janet Evanovitch novel I ever read, comes to mind. I laughed out loud a LOT reading that book. And later asked whether there was much higher to aspire to, as a writer, than to make people laugh . . .

5) One book that made you cry: Reading in the Kipling short story collection Debits and Credits some months ago I came across the “The Bull that Thought,” and sobbed uncontrollably at the end because of the redemption of brutishness by Art — by a mutual recognition of Art.

6) One book you wish you’d written: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

7) One book you wish had never been written: Hey, how about A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, since maybe if he hadn’t of written it he wouldn’t have offed himself. Don’t throw in your hand, Mr. Toole . . .

8) One book you’re currently reading: Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Carl Jung.

9) One book you’ve been meaning to read: Tristram Shandy. Started it, got distracted, will pick it back up one of these days.

10) Tag five people: Is this like a chain letter? All my doorknobs will fall off if I don’t? Is it okay if I ask people first? Hey, I can start with my dad :-) — Dad, want to be tagged? Erik, have you done this one yet? Carrie? E is for Editrix has probably done it, she gets tagged a lot . . . Zinn, how about you, interested in doing a book post?