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Social Media and Internet Links for November, 2014

Photo of a clock shaped like a Neko Cat, altered with the Percolator app.
Covers the basics of creating and maintaining an online presence for writers. What you need on a website, how to effectively use social media, how to find readers via social media, what free resources are available to writers, whether it's worth it to pay for online advertising, and, most importantly, how to promote yourself online without using all your valuable writing time.
Nobody reading your blog? 10 reasons to persist!: Tne more than valid reasons to keep blogging, even when the only person commenting is your mother.
12 Places to Find Fabulous Content: Some good stuff here that’s adaptable to whatever type of blog one might be working with. “Your own bloopers,” for example, is a nice one.
How to Use Social Media Listening to Create Better Content for Your Audience: Along the same lines, identify relevant topics to write about on social media as well as identifying influencers and building relationships.
How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You’re Not a Big Shot): If you’re trying to build your authority — as well as links to your website — getting interviewed is a valid strategy. This should help get you started, but be aware it requires a little bit of brazeness.
Content Distribution Tools: A variety of additional ways to share content, such as a list on List.ly
13 Experts on How To Promote Content Before Hitting Publish: Some of these steps seem more actionable than others, but some useful stuff to think about when strategizing content production.
7 Practical Ways to Find Content Your Followers Will Love: Primarily about tools rather than different approaches. Covered are Buffer, BuzzSumo, ContentGems, Feedly, HootSuite, Klout, and Swayy.

Community
Building a Sustainable Community. As a sometimes moderator of the SFWA boards, and the person the moderators currently report to, I keep an eye out for interesting or useful community building pieces. This is one,although it’s aimed at a community of fans.

Privacy and Security
No one knows where it came from, but there’s new spyware called Regin out there, and it is widespread in crucial industries such as energy, telecom, hospitality, and travel. It’s there and actively monitoring, but experts don’t know why. “Once they [Regin’s operators] gain access, they can remotely control a person’s keyboard, monitor Internet activity, and recover deleted files….O’Murchu said Regin is part of a disquieting trend of government-written and government-enacted malware.”

Social Media
What Is Pinterest? A Database of Intentions: An interview with Evan Sharp, one of Pinterest’s co-founders, about the image-centered social network. “What’s cool is that because every object was put there by a person. It’s not the largest inventory in the way that maybe a nerd like me would get excited about. But everything that’s on there, at least one human found interesting, so there is a very good chance that at least one other human is going to find that interesting. So, it’s a good set of objects. It’s the world’s largest set of objects that people care about.”
I put a couple of Twitter-related blog posts out in November. They were Twitter Basics and Best Practices and The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping: My thoughts on some Twitter best practices.
2014 Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet: “Understanding why you should use images is the easy part. It’s the mastering of how to actually do it that can be tricky. In addition to finding the right images to post, tweet, pin, and share across your different networks; you also need to figure out the right dimensions for your images, as well.” That’s pretty dead on, which makes this a very useful resource.
The 10 Latest and Greatest Social Media Strategies to Boost Your Results and Save You Time: Some useful and interesting stuff here, at least a couple of which I plan to try.
Social Sharing Powerhouses: Some places (or strategies) you may not be trying, like Guy Kawasaki’s approach of tweeting a piece of content four times over the course of eight hours.
10 Data-Driven Steps To Dominate LinkedIn Publishing: I still don’t feel like I’ve got a good handle on how to use LinkedIn, but this article may provide a decent starting point.
Whats the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing? Unsurprisingly, being able to schedule content plays a part here too. Includes the 12 tasks of a social media manager.
8 Piece-of-Cake Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers: Pinterest remains a social network of interest to me. These are some decent best practices for posting on there.

Technology
10 Boring PR Tasks to Automate: Some of this is probably stuff you don’t worry about doing, like tracking the click rate of your e-mails, but I strongly suggest automating social media where you can with something like the Buffer app.
What do I mean when I say something like click rate? Here’s a basic overview of terms like click rate and conversion.
List-Building Strategies: Your email list is supposed to be your best place for selling things. Here’s some hints on building that mailing list.
7 Indispensable and Free Website Graders and Content Scorers: Some useful ways to look at your website for weak spots. Very nice to have something to looks at accessibility issues, which is a review that (IMO) websites should conduct every year.
How Big is Email? This big.

I follow links like this in order to keep my next edition of Creating an Online Presence up to date. If you want to track my links as they occur, you can follow me on Delicious. If you’re interested in the next online class on it, it’s Sunday morning, February 15th, 2015, 9:30 AM-12:30 PM PST. The cost is $89 for former students; $99 for new students.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

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WIP: Teaser from The Bloodwarm Rain (YA SF)

Picture of an abstract sculpture.I’d been feeling queazy for miles “” too much fresh fruit last town, trying to pack in as much as I could “” so finally I tapped Roto on the shoulder and we left the bus during a stretch and pee break. Big Fredo was driving the tents truck and he had a sweet spot for Roto, so he let us climb up into the sheltered spot just behind the cab, where we were sheltered from the wind but still could feel the bite of the air and where, if I needed to, I could lean out and vomit into the sandy gravel of the road.

It made me feel better almost immediately and my mood, which had been gloomy and self pitying (or so Roto kept informing me), lifted, as though the high blue sky overhead were pulling it upwards.

Okay, maybe I had been being kind of a bitch. I shrugged at Roto in apology and he shrugged back. That was one of the nice things about Roto. Once a fight was over, it was done with. It was a quality I envied, and couldn’t begin to claim. I was capable of holding a grudge for years, and had all my life, even though that was only fifteen years so far.

He grinned sideways at me, whiskers twitching, and leaned back to let his upper torso, bare except for the stripes of dun for, smolder golden in the sun. I settled back myself, though I stayed in the shade.

On my right, past Roto, was the steep downward slope of the cliff, covered with slides of shale and wiry brown bushes and past that, a blaze of sunlight on the ocean, dazzling and headache inducing. I looked away and up the mountainside. We were swinging out and around a curve before going inward and Sieg, who was the pace setter up front in his jeep, was, in my opinion, taking it a little fast.

That’s how I saw it. Flash flash. Two blinks of light from far up the mountain ahead of us. Then again. Flash flash.

I squinted up the mountain but didn’t see it again. But I crawled forward, clinging to the netting that held the ranks of tents in place, and tapped my knuckles hard on the cab’s back window. Kali was riding shotgun, her own window open and dreads flying back in the wind. She twisted around to slide the window open.

“I saw someone signaling up ahead,” I shouted.

“We’re on it,” she shouted back. Big Fredo tapped the bead in his ear. Someone else must’ve seen it as well, and gotten to our radio network faster than I had. That was always the story. I was never the hero. My spirits sagged again.

Kali slammed the window shut and turned back to watching the road ahead. I made my slow return to Roto. It seemed to me we had sped up a little but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was just my own anxiety.

Roto gave me a questioning look.

“They’re on it, she said.” I shrugged. Not like we could do much about anything. Better to move forward with our eyes open than let them know we had spotted them and they should open fire.

A faded blue sign flickered past. “Rest stop 1 mile Gas Services”

“You know that’s where they’re going to try to hit us,” Roto said. He stopped lounging and leaned forward.

“Yeah, but what else can they do? There’s no other place to turn around.”

We both wriggled back as far as we could, putting furled canvas between ourselves and possible missiles. The smart-canvas of the main tent might stop a bullet but the thick rolls of more ordinary heavy fabric would still foil arrows or darts.

My stomach wasn’t queasy anymore at all. Instead, hot bile chewed at the back of my throat and worry threaded all my bones. We hadn’t brought weapons with us from the bus; June doesn’t like us carrying them around, but when we’re traveling, we’re supposed to have something with us.

Roto had claws and teeth. I had nothing but my own blunt fists and wits.

Gravel hissed under the wheels as we swung left and slowed. I tried to peer out.

Roto put his palm on the top of my head and shoved downward. “Don’t be an asshole, Meg.”

We held still. I could hear the other cars and trucks pulling in, slowing. The turnaround must have been blocked, otherwise Sieg would have used it to lead the whole convoy to circle back as quickly as he could while Vera had our backs. But stopping there meant there was some sort of blockade.

A voice from up ahead. A man’s voice, and one that had meanness in it despite the pleasantness of the words. “And a good afternoon to you folks!”

Car door slamming and then the crunch crunch of footsteps, barely audible over the sound of the last few stragglers pulling in. I knew that if I looked back people would be fanning out as best they could. We all drilled aon what to do on occasions like this, but I’d only been in a few fights. And not since I had become, technically, an adult.

But surely an adult would have known enough to carry at least a knife with them. I glanced over at Roto and was relieved to see that he looked as anxious as I felt.

June’s deep voice, carefully modulated and empty of emotion. “Afternoon, gentlemen.”

I angled my line of sight upward, hoping to catch a glance of Vera. So much depended on what these bandits were carrying. Hopefully, just a few guns, but probably a bit more than that.

“We were just discussing how it looked as though your trucks were too heavily loaded,” the voice said. “We thought maybe we could help you out, maybe take some of the livestock. That way you’ve got less to feed, we’ve got more to feed ourselves with.” He laughed, the sort of laugh where you could easily imagine the sneer that came with it.

June’ voice, so polite. “I’m afraid that the livestock are members of the troupe as well.”

The man mimicked her. “I’m afraid that you don’t have a choice.”

“That’s a point of debate,” June said. “Vera, now.”

Not many people have seen any of the old war machines. Some were disabled, others disabled themselves. We don’t know what side Vera was on back then. Just that she was on ours now.

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Steampunk Western Teaser

I wrote this beginning of a steampunk Western story at ArmadilloCon this year. I’m transcribing a lot of stuff from my notebooks and thought people might enjoy this excerpt.

We came out of Texas with fire and iron in our blood. Our maker set us loose, said get ’em, gals! Then he stood back and spat.

She was in Kansas. Our leader, our model. We had to get to her.

So we walked, all thirty of us, dressed in tough black serge that tore nonetheless, got pulled away by thorns, and rough fingers of grass, and sand burrs. Bit by bit the clothes fell away and we weren’t a pack of black-bonneted little old ladies anymore. We were glittering steel and a spark of bright blue electricity in each eye.

Robot Carrie Nations, ready to spread the Temperance Word.

Let us backtrack and tell you the why and how that our Maker would have come up with. He talked about her all the time, had been in an Oklahoma saloon when she came through! Smashed it to flinders, used her famous axe on a whisky barrel till an alcoholic sheen covered the floor and old man Harcourt was there trying to lap it up off the planking. That was what made him see the Light, he said. A grown man, old enough to be his father, lapping up whiskey like a dog. That was when he took the Pledge, the same one engraved over each of our hearts.

We’re going to find Mother Nation. We’re his gift to her — thirty automatons, powered by phlogiston and hot blue liquid, ready to be set to work on the Crusade. His tribute. Another man might have sent flowers, or a diamond the size of a buffalo’s eye, or lengths of paisley silk. Not Thomas Y. D. Swift (or so the soles of our left feet read). Is he wooing her or enlisting in her army? We’re not sure. Humans are confusing sometimes.

(is that teaser enough? 🙂 )

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