Well, in last week’s post, I spoke about what I wanted to do to revamp my author website, which was put up in sort of a rush last September. All I have to say so far is this: so much for this project taking only a week! Where I thought I would be remodeling, I’m now bulldozing!
There are some things I managed to do that I’ve been wanting to do since I started the website. One was to ditch the MyBookTable plugin. I deactivated it this morning, so, as a result, I had a blank books page. All the info is gone. I could, in a pinch, copy what I put on SB James, Doing the Write Thing’s book page, but frankly, at this point I get very little traffic to my website that I need to worry about being caught with the guts of my site pretty much on display. Right now, I have a placeholder Inventor’s Son Books page with a slideshow of the covers (which, come to think of it, isn’t half bad for doing something on the fly). And the blog is the first page that comes up when someone goes to sbjamestheauthor.com, which features at the moment a nice big fat image of my boxed set, so I guess it could be worse…
And here’s the best thing I managed to do this week: fixed up the image on the free book offer page. I think it looks very nice now, especially now that The Inventor’s Son: The Beginning actually looks like it comes as an eBook:
(There’s a guy that does really awesome book cover mock-ups at covervault.com and what is even more awesome is that they are FREE!)
So now what I have to work on is an entirely new hierarchy of the book pages, because I will be starting a new series this year, and that will most likely be before I wrap up The Inventor’s Son, so that series needs its own page, then a page for “Work in Progress,” where I will have a teaser for the new series…
I think it’s time for me to bring out the big guns: I’m reading a book by Vinny O’Hare about what to put on websites. I thought I was up to snuff on some of this, but I am having problems because I’m too close to the project, I’m thinking. Well, I have to give this one another week 😦 .
In other news, my experimenting with the DrumUp app is going pretty well. DrumUp is an app that helps you find articles or interesting things to easily tweet or post on Facebook or LinkedIn. They have you type in some keywords, and they pull a load of articles off the internet for you to simply tap on the “Schedule” button. Then they actually schedule for you different times a day to post. There’s a free version that lets you post up to three articles per day, and there are various levels of premium membership that lets you post a lot more with many more accounts. I think I might use it just for Twitter. I’ve already had a bit of response on there from the articles I’m posting, and I don’t imagine that using it for my Facebook page is actually worthwhile. I have not tackled Buffer yet, so I can’t compare, although I think they are two vastly different services at any rate.
I learned about DrumUp from the Social Media Examiner, which is one of those “must read” websites if you want to learn about all sorts of things related to social media. I also listen to their podcast, most of the time the shorter one (because they actually have two). The short podcast has TONS of info crammed into a ten minute podcast, so I definitely make a note of the URL they give me at the end so I can go and see the show notes!
So, maybe I didn’t waste tons of time this week, but I know I have a lot further to go. See you next week!
SB James, Doing the Write Thing 