A New Life in Seattle

A New Life in Seattle
August, 2018

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Why I Gave a Post I Liked a Pair of Cement Shoes

When we're active on more than one blog, we have to consider positioning. A post I'd had high hopes for--paralleling cutting our own hair with formatting our own ebooks--didn't attract many readers. Rather than tout the post through daily ReTweets--netting me 100-200 readers--I chose to analyze my 'failure' and consider where else I might place it.

Conclusions:
1) Southern Scotch, this blog, is an occasional potpourri of short or shortish posts on whatever strikes my fancy. At least half the posts have to do with the writing process or publishing industry--but not necessarily ebooks. The other half include posts on Feng Shui, film reviews, inspiration, positivity, martial arts, other writers, etc., etc., etc. So a much longer post about formatting ebooks wasn't tailored to my audience.
2)  Then again, Authors Electric--the British collective blog consisting of 29 writers who all publish a post once a month--might turn out to be ideal. AE posts range in length--the ideal ranging from 1000-2000 words--but if a writer needs more room, the moderators are cool about that. The AE membership and readership share an interest in literary-minded posts. And: as the site's name suggests, the main focus is on 'electric' or digital authors. All in all, I had better chance of reaching more folks on AE.
3) My AE posts appear on the 12th of each month. This gives me a full month to Tweet and ReTweet, steadily drumming up interest. With care and correct application, I'm more likely to read hundreds of readers--maybe break a thousand--on AE than here on Scotch.

Why I changed the title:
The original title was On Cutting Your Hair and Formatting Your Own Ebook. But I had more room on AE and wanted to have more fun with it. At the same time I'd learned that even the cutest of titles had better deliver the goods--and be seen to relate pretty quickly. It might be fun to draw one other, shocking parallel: cutting your own hair...formatting your own book...and--what?
\
The new title after a few days' debate:

On Cutting Your Hair, Killing Your Spouse and Formatting Your Ebook.. 

I think it's found its proper home. Now I'm left to find a replacement post on this blog--since my fans don't like to wait too long between entertainments,.


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