IE #15: Time to Blog

(This is the fourth entry of four about how and why to set up a blog.)

Like golf clubs you buy at a garage sale for $2 or a new top-of-the-line brand you purchase for $5,000, developing and maintaining a blog can suck as much of your time and energy as you're willing to spend.

Before you make the investment, determine what you expect to gain from a blog, which will give you an idea of the effort you should put forth.

If your blog is more or less an online journal you'd like to share with others, you can go the garage sale route, though if MySpace and Facebook are any indication, you'll spend an inordinate amount of time personalizing your presence.

If you're using a blog to increase your business prospects, you'll probably want to go the more expensive path, given the polish necessary to nab business may call for a professional designer. A quick look at the blogs of your competitors will give you an idea of what to spend.

I'm using my blog for both business and personal purposes — to sell my book and classes while hopefully incubating writers — and because I'm a writer first and marketing babe next, I've stuck with the basics. In terms of development, I used a packaged graphics template and spent most of my time deciding what content I'd like to offer writers. Here's the time breakdown:

— 3 hours scoping out blog development tools

— 3 hours deciding what features I'd like to include on my site

— 2 hours brainstorming ideas for content

— 5 hours creating the blog with the desired features

— 4 hours polishing the site

That makes 17 hours. Then in terms of weekly maintenance — three to four entries a week — I probably spend four to five hours a week.

Obviously I'll need to personalize the graphics and change what I offer to better suit those who happen by (if you have suggestions, let me know: martha@engber.com). But for now I have a blog I can maintain without infringing too severely on my personal writing time.

Want to find out how much time other people spend?

jill/txt

Is Time Spent Blogging Too Much Time?

Rob Hobb Rants Against Blogging

And for those of you who've read this far, I did find out why my book is selling at half.com for $154. But that's a story for next week.

Happy writing!

Expensive Rare Book, or Lousy Distributor?

What a laugh I had today when checking my blog and seeing the cost of my book had shot up on amazon by almost 200%, from $13.95 to $39.95.

I assumed there was something wrong with the amazon link until my husband poked around to find the increase is no joke. My book is listed on amazon for $39.86. But that's a bargain compared to the prices on half.com, a used book site. One copy lists for $58.24 and another for a whopping $154.64!

What happened?

My book has become a rare collectible. No kidding. If you're wondering how a trade paperback for writers on the subject of character development could suddenly become a sought-after item, consider the options: 1. the author won a Nobel Prize in literature and the worldwide attention created a worldwide demand, or 2. the demand is greater than the supply because the supply is nonexistent.

I'll give you a hint as to which is true for my book: If I won the Nobel Prize, nobody told me. Which means my book is no longer easily available. This, you may surmise, is not good, as in not good at all.

How could this happen? Well, one of my book's distributors is Biblio, which in January sold out to AtlasBooks. My publisher told me there would be a lag in book availability as the company contacted the 500 publishers having their books switched from Biblio to AtlasBooks. That lag continued through February and here we are March with precious few copies of my book on the market. Dare I guess my book has been lost in the shuffle?

On behalf of my lax-to-nonexistent distributors, sorry for the SNAFU! Until this mess gets straightened out, feel free to buy a copy of my book for $17 (including tax and shipping) by emailing me: martha@engber.com.

Stay tuned to learn how this knot gets untangled, or even more exciting, whether anybody buys that $154 copy.

Happy writing!

Online Critique Group

Hey all.

I'm running a six-week online critique group starting the end of April. Here's the info:

April 23-May 27
Limit of 10 people
$110
To register: email me at martha@engber.com

The goal of the group, conducted via email, is to give 10 writers feedback on six components of their writing projects in order to help them develop the confidence to continue the development/rewriting process independently. The six components include concept, character development, plot, narrative, dialog and research. Participants will submit up to 2,000 words per week and get feedback from me within four days. Participants can also network and offer feedback to one another.

Any questions? Let me know.

Happy writing!

WW #15: Ax the Adjectives

Good morning!

And because it's Monday and the start of a new week in which the weather here in California has returned to sunny and warm, today is ripe for a writing exercise to agitate the gray matter.

The directions are simple: write a paragraph of description without using any adjectives, or for extra points, adverbs. The goal is twofold: to demonstrate how much we rely on these parts of speech (how much we overuse them) and help us focus on what's happening in the scene.

What I'd suggest is you write the paragraph with adjectives and adverbs, then take them out. That way you'll see if you've given readers the proper action to understand what's going on, rather than relying on adjectives and adverbs to distract readers, while noting the difference in tone. Which paragraph do you like better, the before or after, and why?

Feel free to look at my effort at the bottom of this page.

Now for a little news:

I have on my desk a copy of a book titled Wild Goose Chase: A Quilting Mystery by Terri Thayer, a fellow California Writers Club South Bay branch member who closed a six-book contract deal with Midnight Ink, an imprint of Minnesota New Age publisher Llewellyn Worldwide.

The back cover blurb reads,

A computer techie by trade, Dewey Pellicano would rather swallow needles than be pinned down to a life of quilting. But when her mother passes away, Dewey must exchange code for calico as the new proprietess of Quilter Paradiso... During a national quilt show, quilting celebrity Claire Armstrong offers to buy the shop. But before Dewey can accept, she finds the famous quilter lying dead on the floor — a bloody rotary cutter at her side...

The book sells for $13.95 ($15.95 in Canada). So if you love mysteries and want to support a fellow writer — or fellow quilter — buy this book! And congratulations, Terri.

Happy writing!