Marketing

Website Critique: Trisha (thefarseas.blogspot.com): a blog about you

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We’re continuing our website critique series today with Trisha’s blog, WORD+STUFF. Hi, Trisha!

Content & Navigation
One of your strong points is your topic and content. I like that you have your blog as a place to talk about writing, but you’re free to do more than that. You’re more than just a writer, and your various topics show that.

I like how you have social media links in sidebar. You could highlight them just a touch more with a header for that section that’s a call to action—Connect with me or something similar.

However, those shouldn’t be the only way a visitor can contact you. I always advise a contact form on your website!

On your Projects page, I like the way you let us know the story behind the projects, but a little more info about the projects themselves might help to hook us better. (This may not be a big issue if you’re not pursuing publication on some of your older works.) Also, the link to the excerpts doesn’t work (you need to capitalize Excerpts in the link). If any of the excerpts correlate with the projects you list here, consider linking directly to those excerpts in the description of your book.

Design
The eclectic design seems to reflect your tastes, but you might consider something that relates a little more directly to your blog’s topic and theme—and that of your writing, if you have a genre or subject area that interests you most. I’m not clear whether the art in the background is yours. Maybe you could explain this on your about page, and talk a little about your art. Your Art page could explore this further, talking about your training, media, inspirations, etc.

Search Engine Presence
As far as your search engine presence goes . . . well, it’s really hard to say, since you don’t use your last name on your site. I understand concern for your privacy, but if you’re selling your brand (and you are your brand), it helps to actually have that on your site. You’re not Google-able without it. (I did try searching for Trisha, just in case you’re actually a super-famous one-named artist in Australia, but no luck yet.) If you’re going to use a pen name, you might think about branding that now, too.

Good luck!

What do you think? Is your blog topic broad enough?

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Marketing

Website review: Sierra Gardner (sgardn.blogspot.com)–highlighting blog content

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All right! A little behind schedule, we’re digging into the website reviews. Ted will get to the visual side of the reviews ASAP, but I want to get these reviews up even sooner than possible (ESTP?). And we’re starting with one of my fellow crusaders, Sierra Gardner!

Hi, Sierra! Since I’ve subscribed to your blog for almost four months now, I’m familiar with some of your great content already. Highlighting that content can be a challenge for all bloggers, but I can see you’re working very hard to do just that. We’ll also look at your future marketing efforts, since you’re not pursuing an agent or a book deal yet.

Content and navigation
I’m always happy to find an About page quickly and easily on a new blog. Your bio is cute and personable. You might consider using the sidebar widget version of “About Me” in addition to the page, so we get some idea of the face behind the blog without having to dig deeper.

Also, you might consider breaking contact me into a separate page. If I came to your blog to contact you, I might not think to look on the about page for that info—and if I did, I’d still have to scroll down to find it.

You’re working hard to highlight several types of content on your blog, and that’s great. You’ve got a page that lists writing samples you’ve shared as well as one for your favorite posts. Both of these are great ideas. You might be able to make these pages work even harder for you by sharing a short summary or synopsis of the post or sample to encourage clickthroughs. On your writing samples page, at the very least an indicator of the genre could help entice readers to click. The favorite posts page might also benefit from a sentence or two of description to hook your readers.

The Submissions page is a little bit confusing, especially on a writing blog since we’re used to seeing submissions on only agent and publisher sites. While the name is appropriate, a title like maybe Guest Posts & Questions might help, too. If you have any examples of either type of submissions, maybe list & link to them underneath.

You might also consider moving the followers widget higher to highlight that feature of your site and encourage people to follow your blog. Generally, the archive isn’t the best thing to have first in your sidebar—it doesn’t ask your readers to engage or take further action as effectively as subscribe buttons, a Followers widget, social media buttons or even your bio. Show your readers how to

Search engine visibility
On Google, your blog comes up third for your name. Your LinkedIn profile is fourth. There are a couple Facebook profiles, but they’re not yours. In Bing/Yahoo, your LinkedIn is first, but your blog doesn’t show up in the top 10 results—although your Blogger User Profile does. When you’re ready to begin the agent search, be sure to include your name prominently on your site, and get links using your name as the link back at your site (such as from guest posts). If possible, it might be good to move your blog to sierragardner.blogspot.com (or better yet use Blogger’s Custom Domain feature to put it at sierragardner.com, sierragardnerauthor.com or blog.sierragardnerauthor.com).

Optimizing for your name does post some challenges. There are a lot of people out there named Sierra Gardner or Sierra Gardener, and there’s even some competition from the Riverside, CA, community of Sierra Gardens. However, it doesn’t look like anyone is actively trying to rank in search engines for your name, so a little bit of effort could pay off quickly and well.

I’m sure you come across this pretty often, but it might be difficult for readers to remember how to spell your name. (NO, I’ve never had that problem. Sigh.) You might think about also optimizing for Sierra Gardener so your site ranks high when people search for your name spelled incorrectly.

Sierra, thanks for sharing your site with us and good luck in all your writing and blogging efforts!

What do you think? How can you highlight the content in your blog better?

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Technique

There’s no such thing as a muse

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I’m Jordan and I’m a writer who doesn’t have a muse. And I’m okay with that.

It seems like most writers, and other “creatives,” have a muse—an imaginary personification of their creative capacity. When “the muse strikes,” it’s time to write. When the muse kicks off for the day/week/year, we’re out of luck. It seems like the only time I hear about a muse is when it’s not doing its job:

  • “My muse snaps her gum at me and rolls her eyes at my plot ideas.”
  • “My muse goes after every shiny new idea that crosses my mind like a raccoon with gambling debts. Also, he’s in charge of my similes.”
  • “My muse’s got nothin.”

Having a muse does alleviate some pressure to create (something I think I learned from Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED speech?). It can be draining and stressful to have to come up with everything yourself. If you’re stuck for an idea, dwelling on that fact can make you feel even less creative and more pressure to come up with something.

Maybe it’s pride, but I actually like coming up with ideas myself, or brainstorming with others. I like to think of myself as creative—and good enough and smart enough (and gosh darn it, people like me) to come up with solutions to my problems and ideas I can’t wait to write about. For the most part, I rarely disappoint myself—though it can be a little bit of a struggle when I’m burned out or just taking time off.

I think the biggest problem I have with muses is this idea that we’re abdicating the responsibility and the ability to create ourselves. Clearly not everyone with a muse does this, but some people use the muse less as a tool to encourage creative freedom and more as a slave driver.

As I said a few years ago in comments on a friend’s blog,

I think true genius is one that can still function as a normal human being while mastering his or her art. Those “geniuses” who ditch other people for their labs or their tablets because their fickle muse strikes them momentarily are at the mercy of capricious bouts of insight.

[The person she quoted] seems to be buying into the “genius is the ability to write pure, unmitigated, beautiful truths to power as they flow ceaselessly from my pen—while the muse lasts” school of thought.

For probably 99% of people, however, genius is the stroke of artistry that manifests itself while you’re trudging along—whether that trudging is through the other 70,000 words of your manuscript or through 70,000 diapers. “Genius” and talent, even taken together, rarely go anywhere without hard work, discipline and dedication.

What do you think? Do you have a muse? Is s/he a slacker, or does s/he work as hard as you?

Photo by Happy A

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Technique

The right way to do backstory

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This entry is part 19 of 20 in the series Backstory

Right now, I’m dragging myself through a book. It’s supposed to be really good, but personally, I despise the main characters. They’re too perfect. Their lives aren’t perfect, but the bad stuff that’s happened to them is presented in a way that makes them victims instead of strugglers with strength.

Ugh. Just thinking about it gets me all het up again. Let me just give you a bulleted list as to why this wrong, immoral and bad.

  • All this bad stuff happened to them years ago, but their struggles . . . well, in hindsight, maybe they weren’t so bad. Now life is practically perfect in every way. (You want to hear about those characters now, don’t you?)
  • There’s nothing going on in the present as we spend pages twelve through sixteen recounting the last ten years of the characters’ lives (characters we met on page eleven).
  • Five pages of telling. In the first 20 pages.
  • It’s backstory where we need to get some story.
  • The antagonists’ storyline is more interesting. I want to read more about them. Something is happening over there other than people sitting and thinking about their lives. The so-called heroes? Not so much.

In a romance, we don’t have to hear about every person the main characters have ever dated, and every bad date they’ve ever been on. In a mystery, we don’t have to have the hero’s case-solving track record presented in full color. In any genre, we don’t need a character’s life story the first time we meet them (this drives me nuts!). We just need to know what’s pertinent to the story. There is a better way to deliver backstory!

In fact, Livia Blackburne did an in-depth analysis of some comparable titles to her work to see how they handle backstory in the first chapters. Surprisingly, both Graceling and The Hunger Games deliver big chunks of backstory that early in the novel.

However, I think the key is how they do it, and what they choose to include. Livia catalogues each line of backstory from those chapters, including flashbacks. The backstory:

  • Informs character relationships. Often just a line or paragraph about how they met or a nickname, but these seem to highlight their power dynamic now. (Katniss & Gayle, Katniss & Peeta.)
  • Builds the world—focusing on conflict. (Katniss learns to hold her tongue about the government.)
  • Shows history that relates to this moment in the story—especially as it helps us understand the conflict. (Livia notes that there was one section of backstory which she found less than compelling, which dealt with the history of the civilization.)

Agent Rachelle Gardner has a great post about choosing and using backstory:

When you’re bringing your reader into the world of your novel, you’re trying to engage their senses and their emotions right away to get them involved in the story. You need to make an emotional connection with the reader as quickly as possible. The way to do that is in the here and now, the action and dialogue taking place in the present time. It’s highly unlikely you’ll make an emotional connection through backstory. . . .

There are ways to bring the backstory into the book, and the key is to do it slowly. Think about giving just enough information to illuminate one tiny aspect of your character at a time. Place your characters in situations, let them react, and let your reader wonder how they got there and why they reacted that way. You want to be strategic, almost cunning, in the way that you let little bits of information from the past appear on the page. Use those pieces of backstory to slowly and carefully flesh out that character, never giving away too much, always leaving the reader guessing a little.

I worry that in the past I’ve come down too hard on backstory. It’s useful—really!—but in many cases it’s more useful to writers than to readers. You know that lady that corners you and makes you look at photos of all seventeen grandchildren? Don’t be that lady when it comes to backstory!

What do you think? How have you seen backstory done well?

Image credits: history—Kristian Bjornard, applause—Jonathan McPherskesen

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Technique, Works

How to fall in love (with your story) again

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It’s no secret I’ve been flirting with burnout. I’m halfway through the very first revision (i.e. the major work of fixing the story problems, and the frustration of not always knowing how to do that and still working in a vacuum).

But I know what I most need to do: I need to fall in love with my story again.

Here are some ideas I’ve had to help me:

  • Read awesome (and awful!) books in your genre—but not too similar to your story.
  • Reread your favorite parts of your story, the “candy bar scenes” you waited and waited and waited to attack (or attacked first).
  • Make sure you’re not “renovating a condemned novel“
  • Rethink your story structure. These things that you think are written in stone—are they really? Do they have to happen this way? Is there a way that’s better for your story, your readers, your genre?
  • Read craft books directly related to the problem areas
  • Take a break and explore other creative outlets—or even menial tasks!
  • Remember your original inspiration. What made you devote months of your life to this in the first place?
  • Write something short and fun, or challenging. See how good it feels to finish something? Don’t you want to feel that way about your novel??

What do you think? How do you fall in love all over again with your story?

Photo by A Klar

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Technique, News & Contests

Avoiding burnout (and website critiques!)

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So I set a goal to finish my revisions by May 25th.

Ha. Hahaaha. HA!

I set the goal because I was having a hard time getting motivated. But in this case, a deadline just made my problem worse. I wasn’t having a hard time focusing and working because I was lazy or distracted. I was shirking because I was on the verge of burning out.

Burn out, for me, happens when I push myself too hard just for the sake of being done. I find myself completely blocked. If I do may any progress at all, it’s just throwing something on the page so I can move on and be done with it, often not really improving the problems (or simply noting them and moving on).

I can work quickly, especially when I’m really excited about a story. But if I’m not excited about the story at the moment (or just overwhelmed by it), I need to allow myself to slow down. So I am. I might flirt with a story I shouldn’t be writing if something strikes me. I might just work on my crafts or play the piano, or explore another creative outlet.

But I still have good news for you: I’m going to do some website/blog critiques! Sign up in the comments before noon EST on Friday, and I’ll randomly draw three sites to critique. Website designer Ted Finch will also be on hand to critique the visual aspects of the lucky websites!

Don’t have a blog or website yet? Don’t worry! I’m also looking for one volunteer who doesn’t have a website or blog. We’ll be working together to get you set up, with the results posted as a tutorial! Again, this will be chosen at random from the comments left here before noon EST Friday.

The lucky winners will be announced on Friday. The critiques and tutorial will be posted starting June 6.

How do you avoid burnout? (Or just volunteer in the comments 😉 )

Photo by Patricia Espedal

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