Welcome to the new blog!

I’ve finished up the first draft of the Building an Online Presence for Writers class, and am in the process of incorporating feedback from the first readers into the text. At the same time, I’ve been doing a lot of research and adding some new tools to my promotional toolbox. Here’s some of the new ones:

• Authorgraph: Developed by a reader here in Seattle, Authorgraph provides a way for authors to electronically sign an e-book. Sign up on their site to allow readers to request a personalized signature. Authorgraph provides a way to add a Facebook page that readers can use to request signatures as well.
• Wikis: The SFWA blog recently featured my write-up on wikis and how authors can use them for both writing and promotional purposes.
• Reddit: Another post for the SFWA blog talked about Reddit, which holds a number of lively reader communities. I’ve been enjoying participating over there and have been gleaning some interesting new suggestions for my to-be-read list.
• Buffer: I’ve been using Buffer lately for scheduling tweets and am pretty happy with it. Here’s a pretty exhaustive guide to it that goes into great detail.

I will be hosting a special free session of the Building an Online Presence for Writers – details forthcoming in the next day or two. If you’re interested in being informed when the book comes out in November, you can sign up here.

I’ve been teaching online classes for a few years now. They have been awesome and one of the coolest things has been the number of talented writers I’ve had the privilege to work with. However, I’m scheduling a break from teaching during the latter half of 2014, and it’s for a few reasons.

The first and most important is that I can feel a little burnout creeping up around the edges. I’ll be talking in a class and think to myself, “I know I’ve said this before,” and it will be because I have said it before, repeatedly even — but not to that class. I can tell that if I don’t take a break, that feeling is going to drown me.

The second is to focus even more on the writing, because there’s at least two books I’d like to finish up this year, along with the usual roster of short stories. (I’m at ten completed so far this year, which is unusually productive but highly pleasing.)

The third is because I don’t want to get in a rut. I want to go think about some new things and then come back ready to talk about them to students.

So – if you want a class with me in 2014 — check out the list now. I’ll probably list a couple more conversation classes in June, but that’s it. But I’ll be back in 2015!