Learn From My Mistakes #1 – An Introduction

(Reposted as a blog entry on Saturday, April 28, 2018).

Hi everyone!  If you’ve stumbled upon this accidentally, prematurely published WordPress Page, from approximately 20 minutes ago, at 6:14 pm EST, then you’ll know why I have started this brand new blog series!  I have made TONS of mistakes over the past 14 months or so while self-publishing my first book, CROWS.  I’ll go over what I did then, and what I’m doing now, and you’ll be able to observe everything because I am going to document it for you, because I want writers like you to succeed!

Now, this mistake I made seems like the perfect place to begin.

I seem to have just made a mistake by publishing a blank post (all this stuff I’m writing now is an update).  And this post already garnered a Like from my good friend even though the post was totally empty!

It seems like a no-brainer, but I shouldn’t have hit the PUBLISH button until I was ready to actually publish.  Duh, Grace.  And since I have this account linked with Facebook, voila!  There’s a post on there now that says I just published an article.  Very professional and smooth!

In fact, for the past several hours, I’ve been wrestling with WordPress’ inflexible Customizer to edit my page.

My site looks gorgeous (in my opinion, and even in the opinion of a GoDaddy customer service rep one time), but it just doesn’t seem to be working the way that I want, which is a way to showcase my novel (and upcoming CROWS II) as well as displaying this new blog series prominently but also sort of isolated from the rest of the site.  I’ve found a Portfolio feature that I’m going to try out and I’ll let you know how that goes in my next post.

This series will basically consist of me changing my tactics for writing and publishing my next book, CROWS II.  I will document everything from my writing process, to the programs I use (always, ALWAYS open source!), to how to get a website, how to get hosting, how to fight with WordPress’ Customizer, everything I can possibly think of that will save you time.  I will also write about what I do to promote my upcoming book, while I’m doing it, what seems to work, and what doesn’t, how to use MailChimp, what works in getting subscribers to your email list and build an audience.  Everything.  That way, you can watch me, week to week (or even day to day, if I happen to post that often) and observe the results of my experiments for yourself!  I hope you’ll join me and follow my blog.

Thank you!

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