Tag: A to Z

C is for Content Creation

Erin Penn

C is for Content Creation. Without the big publishing’s marketing teams … and even with them, it is on the authors to create social engagement through content creation. This is on top of writing the books and the blurbs. On top of reading to learn the trade (nonfiction) and reading to find where the trade presently is in one’s genre (fiction). Now one has to figure out a way to engage an audience.

What works for you might not work for someone else. In fact, it might not continue to work for you. I have seen friends swear by Facebook ads … and then the ads stop working when FB changes their algorithm. Another friend mastered twitter with the perfect drop schedule to push people to buy books, until it became X. Others have done brisk business because of TikTok and its shop, until it became a “when will they actually shut it down”. Basically every two to three years you have to reinvent your marketing scheme in this industry. Kindle Unlimited right now is in a failing spiral as Amazon keeps paying their creators less and less.

Now my colleagues are exploring Discord, Substack, and Patreon for additional income generation. Others continue to have success through Instagram and the good-old-fashion email’ed Newsletter.

Once a platform is found, the engagement can be behind-the-scenes, how-to-do what I do, fan art, or advance materials. All of this takes away from making the actual books and the day-job to put food on the table.

What do I do?

  1. Well, I am participating in A-to-Z. This often creates additional material for my blog, especially for my monthly segment to point people to other blogs that I found interesting.
  2. Maintain a blog. I try to produce three pieces of work every week: something book review related, something editing/writing related, and a flash.
  3. I create material for my YouTube. I tried putting editing rants up, and might do so again if TikTok goes away. I enjoy them but I only have so much content creation time. Until then, I’ve been dropping TikTok videos on my YouTube channel: @erinpenn7745
  4. Even with the on-and-off again TikTok has been going through, I drop regular BookQuotes over there. They are about 15 seconds long and feature a bookquote of something I or one of my friends or followers have read. I waste way too much time making them (hence nothing new on YouTube for the editing rants), but I am having fun. My TikTok is: @erinpennbooks
  5. I make memes based on bookquotes as well – you can see some of them below. I also make…made (sign, it shall be missed)…memes for NaNoWritMo, specifically to make more “You should be writing” memes featuring women and people of color. I regularly post them here, and on my Pintrest: https://www.pinterest.com/ErinPenn1/
    1. Recent NaNoWritMo & “You should be writing” memes on my site: Memes: Write Something (Five) – if you like stuff like this, I highly recommend you follow me on Pinterest for the writing folder I have over there.
  6. I recently became active on Discord. I am still working that out, but I participate in Falstaff Books discord channel (I am one of their editors). If you would like to join me there, drop me a comment below asking for the channel details and I will email you.
  7. Of course I have the old stand-by, an author’s page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ErinPennBooks/
  8. As a book reviewer, I am active on both Goodreads and Storygraph.
  9. Things I am thinking of making a substack newsletter or reactivating my patreon account. Should I set up a personal discord channel or do a private email newsletter. I really need to set up something that can be monetized but when to find the time?

Yes, that is a whole lot of stuff and all of it takes away for writing. But all of it is CREATION, which is very satisfying.

     

      

     

     

Other Cool Blogs: Onomastics Outside the Box

Erin Penn

Photo by Christian Chomiak on Unsplash

What is in a name?

A lot actually.

The history of language shaped over time. People who have worn the name with honor or infamy. Family members. Religious ties. Locations. Countries. Word forms with constants and vowels. A thousand different things to hold meaning.

Carrie-Ann has a website dedicated to names:

Onomastics Outside the Box: Names beyond the Top 100, from many nations and era

I ran into her during A-to-Z April blogging, and her themes include “Apple Names”, “The Many Forms of Sarah”, and longer series like “Theophoric names” which is up to part 14.

Her most viewed post of all time from October 12, 2020 is “Doll and Puppet Names.”

If you are a writer and stuck on a name, you might want to hit up this blog for ideas.

If you prefer to copy and paste instead of direct links – here is the link to her blog: https://onomasticsoutsidethebox.wordpress.com/

 

Other Cool Blogs: Write with Fey – Fung Shui

Erin Penn

Photo 51791512 © Strnfoto | Dreamstime.com

During A-to-Z, I discover lot of cool blogs, one of which is “Write with Fey”, a very helpful writing website. To give you an example look at her April 7, 2023 posting “F – Feng Shui + BONUS” (https://www.writewithfey.com/2023/04/f-feng-shui-bonus.html).

Now don’t go turning up your nose at the concept of Feng Shui. While crouched in mysticism and “energy flows”, most of it is basic how the eye follows things around a room and how people move from the entrance of the house to the back of the house. If the house is messy, the house will be tiring to live in and difficult to create in. If things block the way, people will bump into things more – breaking the things and/or themselves.

Ms. Fey’s post gives advice on where to position your desk and how to decorate it.

Me, I have two monitors – absolutely essential when editing. My desk is set up so my back is to the room (bad fung shui), but I can see the door out of the corner of my eye and it faces the front window which is totally covered with blackout curtains – basically creating a lighted wall (good). The second monitor turns me closer to the door. If I didn’t have the window covered, the view would be of a shopping mall parking lot.

I have a middle desk with the primary monitor, keyboard on a lower surface and the upper surface are all my tasks. My left has the second monitor, files, and a printer. The right has a hole then a shelving unit with my research materials.

The image on my computer screen is “Don’t Chase Your Dreams – Humans are persistence predators – follow your dreams at a sustainable pace, until they get tired and lie down.” It is surrounded by pretty vine work. (great fung shui)

I try to clear the central position by the end of each night, but truth to tell, it is never empty. But Spirtuality is getting less messy; I am getting better at controlling piles of work. The left back position – Wealth – behind the second monitor – is a dragon and my con badges. The health position is all my folders of things to do – overstuffed mess. I need to get that better organized. Better than it was, it still isn’t a “happy” place to look at constantly.

I’m missing on the right side “helpful people” – no surprise there. I do have a small piles of notebooks a little further out – so Creativity is within reach, but I need to work for it.

Creating this post and reviewing my desk made me add two beaded roses I created for the Love and Relationship but also doubles in the Creativity section. I’ll need to get a real little vase for them to keep them in front of the books.

Clean work area, but with touches of beauty, memories, and encouragement.

Connect with “Write with Fey” – lots of her posts are interesting and helpful. This is just one example.

Writing Exercise: Y is for Yoke

Erin Penn 6 Comments

Photo by Steven Ungermann on Unsplash

Normally, this post would be titled “Heating the White Box” or something like that, but it’s April and I’m in the middle of the A-to-Z blog – and do you know how hard it is to find a “Y” word? So Y is for Yoke, as in – yoking the scene to reality. Today will be a writing exercise related to description.

I know most of us have heard the story about the English Teacher asking student why the thought the author made the curtains Blue. Description can enhance theme, but sometimes the curtains are Blue because they are Blue.

As a writer, when writing flash and short stories, work to have all description pull extra weight, where Blue has a reason for being part of the story beyond making sure the room is not just a white box. (Although that is a legitimate reason to make the curtains Blue.)

Oh, some of today’s readers might not be familiar with the White Box concept. Newer writers often have one skill set they are good at and need to develop others – they might be good at plot, or description, or characters, or dialogue – and when they write a scene, the other aspects are underutilized. For example, a dialogue writer could have two characters talking to each other, but they don’t interact with the room – does it have furniture, are they indoors or outdoors, why are they in this room and not elsewhere? They are in a “white box”, an empty stage.

To break the white box, the characters need to interact with the room. Today, though, the writing exercise is have it be heavier than just description. Yoke the description to the story in some way. Bonus points for giving a Show instead of Tell of a secondary aspect to the story. The characters walk across the wooden floor and the taps on their shoes ring (letting us know they are tap dancers). The characters do dishes which can carry all kinds of relationship and emotional signals. The characters sit down in heavy carved chairs, one higher than the other, indicating status in the fantasy world without expressly stating one is more powerful than the other.

WRITING EXERCISE: Write a dialogue flash with one bit of scene description that pulls extra weight. A little more complicated than normal, aim for 100 to 200 words.

My Attempt: In Argumentative Law – M is for Monday (see links below), I had the heat kick on. I did this to indicate that the class was held in the late fall to early winter in the Northern hemisphere, as would be common for the first semester of a college course. While all the other aspects of the room, from the chairs to where the teacher stood in relation to the class, are fairly generic, I added this to set the class in time and place without expressly stating it. 

Argumentative Law series

  1. L is for Legality (4/14/2024)
  2. M is for Monday (4/15/2024)
  3. O is for Options (4/17/2024)
  4. Editing Rant: Q is for Quorum (4/19/2024)
  5. Writing Exercise: Y is for Yoke (4/28/2024)

Other Cool Blogs: I is for My Indie Bookshelf

Erin Penn

Logo from the website

Hey, hi everyone visiting for the A-to-Z challenge. I have a variety of types of blogs I do, one is pointing to other cool blogs. Today is pointing to a cool website. Many people participating in the challenge are readers, book reviewers, and writers. If you haven’t checked out this site, I highly recommend it. Looking for your next favorite indie author? You might find them here.

How it works is indie authors just upload their books, and you get randomly recommended one (within the limits you established). Best-selling author or brand-new, everyone gets the same chance to be recommended. Plus you can sign up for Beta read and ARCS.

Check it out!