Write on the World has a whole new look!

If you come here often, you were probably in for a bit of a jolt when you stopped by today. I’m teaching a WordPress blogging class right now at my local community college, and I got a little jealous when I saw the fresh, clean templates my students were using as they built their blog sites yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I finally decided it was time to update my blog site. It’s still a work in progress, but you have to start somewhere!

How to give your books away on #Rafflecopter

You can enter to win a free copy of “With Envy Stung: Valley of the Bees #1” for a limited time. | Current book (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My marketing plan for Book 1 of the Valley of the Bees eBook serial is moving right along. I got a small pop of pre-orders that assured me of a spike (however tiny) in sales on release day. The final manuscript for book 2 is almost ready to be uploaded, so I went ahead and set up my pre-order pages for that book so I could add links to buy at the end of Book 1. And now that Book 2 is available for pre-order, I’m ready to give away several free copies of With Envy Stung: Valley of the Bees #2 to keep the ball rolling!

Now, you might be asking why in the world I would want to start giving away free copies of a book that just released two weeks ago. Lucky for you, I like sharing what I’ve learned about book marketing, so I’m going to tell you why! It’s very simple, really. A book giveaway at this point will do two things for me (I hope):

Book description, Book 2 of Valley of the Bees #VotB

I am currently working my way through the process of finalizing my manuscript for With Envy Stung: Valley of the Bees #1 so I can upload the file to my retailers. It is an arduous process. My latest task was to convert my manuscript to an ePub file so I could read through it on my phone. You wouldn’t believe the errors I caught just by looking at the book in a different file format on a different device!

Valley of the Bees Logo by Jendy at https://jendy.threadless.com/.

Anyway, this afternoon I am working on a description of Book 2 so I can add some marketing copy to the end of Book 1. This is the description I am working on for marketing book two in my Valley of the Bees series:

Would you read this book?

4 Tips for writing a “Pinworthy” DIY blog post

This is my latest DIY project: a crocheted handbag recreated from a picture I found on Pinterest.

Has this ever happened to you? You find an interesting recipe or craft project on Pinterest that you want to check out only to click through and find the blog post is missing one or more essential elements required for you to actually be able to bake the goody or make the craft yourself. Or maybe everything is there, but it’s so disorganized, you immediately give up figuring it out and move on. You return to Pinterest without repinning the post. And that blogger just lost an excellent opportunity to see her blog post “go viral.”

If you’re like me, it probably only takes you a few seconds to look over a blog post and decide if you want to repin it. A few minutes ago, I found a blog post on making a “relax bottle” (aka “mind jar“) for counting down a child’s timeout minutes. I love the idea, the pictures are great… but I got to the blog post and couldn’t immediately figure out if the bottles are made using supplies I might already have on hand. And, where are the instructions? There are tons of great pictures, but the how-to part is all over the place. I still wanted to do this project, but I had to go look elsewhere for better instructions.