I am a bit distracted. You might have noticed the pop up newsletter sign up form when you came here. Apologies if that is annoying. If you close it, the form won’t pop up ever again. You wouldn’t believe how much effort and annoyance went in to understanding Mailchimp and getting it to work. It was a great achievement for me to get the pop up form working. I was going to put a embedded sign up form in the sidebar but I couldn’t get it to work either.
Mailing lists are important for authors. Some say they don’t work. Some say they are essential. But I’m going with the essential school. You see there are websites where you can give away a book and a person signs up to your newsletter. Maybe they will just unsubscribe or maybe they will like the book and want to know how to get the rest. Yet it is a way to capture and keep your audience.
Now if you closed that pop up sign up form but now find yourself interested in signing up well there’s a Newsletter page on the top bar and that has a url link to a sign up page. The sign up process requires a confirmation sent to your email.
One of the issues with newletters is content. I have a lot going on this first half of the year and also mark downs etc. I was thinking that there would be four newsletters a year but maybe I need the flexibility to do more.
Feel free to use the contact form to tell me what you think or topics you want covered.
So why am I writing about distractions? Well I’m meant to be working the PhD and learning how to do this stuff is a massive time sink. Essential to learn, unless you are paying top dollars to someone to do it for you. Having a newsletter has always been the too hard basket for me. Too much effort! And basically you think your publishers are going to do their magic, but it doesn’t happen that way. If I’m taking this self-publishing gig seriously then I have to do it right and thorough.
I have to earn money to support my PhD studies. I could get a job part-time and I did consider it seriously. I even thought about editing, manuscript appraisals and similar things and I am open for that but not in a big way. My PhD and my writing come first. For the first part of the year I’m focussing on getting some books out and smart marketing. For the PhD I’m focussing on my creative side and the survey stuff.
Yesterday I received feedback on my draft research proposal. Think ‘back to the drawing board’. Yep, so next Monday I’m going to start again.
The issues I had were that I used someone else’s structure, which I was told to do. But it doesn’t really suit my project. Then I was advised that I had too much in there, like three Phd’s worth of stuff in my proposal. That is probably true. A classic new PhD student mistake. I am doing a creative work and a 30,000 exegesis so not a lot of room. It was a fruitful feedback session and I have a much better question and will basically use my surveys and interviews as the core of my exegesis.
In other news, I heard from the editor of Oathbound (Silverlands book 2) and the edits are due Friday. She’s done. Big job ahead. Once I get a handle on the edits and know when it will go to the proofreader I can put Oathbound up on pre-order. It’s taken ages.
Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing 