Y’all know my schedule, I am off on Saturdays. I’d just like to share my Guest Post and to give a special thank you to Kim for hosting me. Here, I give you three of the biggest lessons I’ve learned so far in my Self-Publishing journey.*Comments disabled here. Please hit me on the other side.*
Welcome author, Yecheilyah Ysrayl to THE WRITER’S JOURNEY segment of Kim’s Author Support Blog. Take it away, Yecheilyah. This is her journey.
3 Self-Publishing Lessons I’ve Learned this Year
As we come to the end of another year, this one has been one of self-reflection for me both on a personal as well as a professional level. There’s been ups, downs, doubts, excitement, frustration, and everything in-between.
I’ve come out of my shell a lot this year and have learned to embrace my own vulnerabilities without fear of judgment. I used to be timid and shy about what I did or thought for fear that people wouldn’t understand me. This has caused me to, consequently, shy away from opportunities that could have been of help to me as a writer.
This year I’ve learned to be unapologetically me and to not let anyone bait me out of my character. I think…
As we come to the close of 2016, there will be some changes made to this blog.
The major change is that I will be transitioning from http://www.thepbsblog.wordpress.com to www.thepbsblog.com. I want to give everyone an opportunity to prepare for the transition (please save the new web domain) so I will not be making any moves probably until the end of this month or the beginning of next month. (Special thanks to the commentary that led me to edit this part of the post. I just want to clarify that I am not moving the site. I am simply purchasing the domain for The PBS Blog so its .com instead of .wordpress.com. That is the only change to this site. I am not moving. I would also add that I am not doing anything yet so if there’s anyone with insight into switching over I’d love to hear your thoughts before I make the move. What are your thoughts? Is social media sharing still available? Any technicalities I should know about? Did you switch? Are you liking it so far? Thanks!)
I didn’t want to acquire a domain in the beginning because I already have an author website I’m paying for and I did not always know that I would continue with this blog. There was a time where I did consider hanging it up or just doing it temporarily. As I’ve continued however and have started to put some real hours into nourishing this community and providing value, I have decided to stay for a while longer and for that will finally make that transition to a more professional look, starting with a domain name. (I will probably add a donation widget as well to the slide-side bar once the domain goes up for those who enjoy this blog and would like to see it continue to run).
Other changes are minor, such as updating all the pages and sticking to a more permanent theme. Once I settle on a layout that I feel is right for this blog (I do like this one, but who knows), I’ll be sticking with it.
I am also looking to add more author services to accompany the Book Reviews. I have tried once before to open for Guest Blogging but that did not work out. Instead, I am working on something I can add as a permanent feature for authors. I have not decided what that is yet (Author Interviews, Q&A, Author Promo or what) but I will let you know when I’ve decided. I will say I am leaning toward Author Promo since I already promote books through my email list and book reviews. I will consider adding structure to it as something for 2017. What do you think?
In the meantime, thank you all for your continued support of The PBS Blog! If there is anything you’d like to see more of I would appreciate your feedback. Please do not hesitate to let me know what it is you want. It is truly my pleasure to serve you. I mean that sincerely.
How well do most published authors write? Would you be surprised to hear that Jane Austen wrote at just above a 5th grade level, Stephen King writes at about a 6th grade level, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote at slightly more than a 6th grade level, and Leo Tolstoy wrote at about an 8th grade level?
To find out all of this information, Shane Snow did a readability analysis of the works of different bestselling authors. He based his exploration off of their scores for the Flesch-Kincaid tests, which were developed in 1975 on behalf of the US Navy to assess the difficulty of technical manuals. These tests take into account total words, sentences, and syllables in order to assess a written work’s grade level.
Snow’s analysis found that higher level writing did not necessarily result in successful sales. In fact, the bestselling fiction books that he looked at all fell…
Only a writer would be folding clothes at twelve o’clock at night and contemplating whether they should make a batch of coffee to spend just a few more hours writing, all of this while the History Channel recaps an episode of Pearl Harbor as background noise. It was then that this post was conceived. In fact, I still have a pair of pants under my arm as I am drafting this. What can I say, gotta write when the spirit moves.
As I took a break from my work to finish laundry that could have waited until morning for normal people, I thought about how much this blog has helped to fill in the gaps during my “Between books” stage (thanks for your support BTW!). I like to think I write at a decent speed (six months to complete the first draft) but after that things tend to slow way down as the revision and editing process kicks in. I thus find myself in the waiting room watching as an author after author fangirls over their new release while I’m in chill mode, waiting for my name to be called. It will be awhile before my book is ready. This is when blogging (among other things) helps a great deal.
It helps because while I am in limbo I can keep up with learning new things, reading new books, and keeping myself in tuned with my readers and supporters until the next book is due. It almost feels like teaching but being off for the summer. Some teachers volunteer to teach summer school for some extra funds while others take advantage of the free time. Blogging for me is like a writing summer school, a way to stay active between books. This also helps me to brainstorm on other ways to expand my business beyond the book itself and into other areas of product.
I do admit it’s a challenge to produce blog posts, engage with other bloggers, share content, engage in social media and keep my ear to the Indie Publishing ground all while writing a novel and there are days where I must turn the phone off. It’s either that or pull my hair out. However, I see it all as part of the work and it’s also a lot of fun to me. I’m a worker bee which means that I HAVE to be doing something and while the blog is still a small part of my life in the full scope of things, it does help to keep me active in more ways than one. I guess that’s sort of the point of this post.
It’s important to continue to produce material and sometimes that will take time. The Blog (and the email list) is the answer to how to stay engaged while you wait. Or at least it is for me. The ability to schedule blog posts is a huge time saver and I could sit my butt in the chair and finish what I’d been putting off. Patience truly is a virtue and I am quite pleased with the revelations I’ve been given so far. I can only hope for increased growth. #HWPO is something I try to keep at the back of my mind. That is, hard work pays off. Let’s hope so.
Now, I should probably go ahead and publish this post and get back to these clothes. It is after 1am my time after all. I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere in dreamland when you’re reading this…or not (shout out to my night-owls with the tiny light under the covers scrolling through blog posts).
Yecheilyah Ysrayl is the YA, Historical Fiction author of The Stella Trilogy, Blogger, and Poet. She is currently working on her next book series “The Nora White Story” about a young black woman who dreams of being a writer in The Harlem Renaissance movement and her parent’s struggle to accept their traumatic past in the Jim Crow south. “Renaissance: The Nora White Story (Book One)” is due for release spring, 2017. For updates on this project, sneak peeks of chapters, the pending book cover release, and full blurb for this series, be sure to subscribe to Yecheilyah’s email list HERE.
Interesting post on how reading impacts writing. I’ve been saying this for years. Post Quote:
“This article describes a study in which a group of adult readers identified their most frequently read materials such as online magazines (and memes), newspapers, genre and literary fiction, and other written sources. Researchers then looked at the level of writing that each participant exhibited and found a correlation between what types of material people read and the complexity of their writing.”
You are what you read. That is a simple enough concept, but it turns out that it means more than just that people who read mysteries may become better at writing mysteries. What a person reads fundamentally changes the structure of his or her writing.
In June of 2016, the International Journal of Business Administration published “Syntactic and Lexical Complexity of Reading Correlates with Complexity of Writing in Adults”. (You can read the full text of the article online.) This article describes a study in which a group of adult readers identified their most frequently read materials such as online magazines (and memes), newspapers, genre and literary fiction, and other written sources. Researchers then looked at the level of writing that each participant exhibited and found a correlation between what types of material people read and the complexity of their writing. People who spend most of their time reading Buzzfeed articles…
Valuable information for every author. Post Quote:
“The goal of marketing is to build a relationship with your readers so they grow to know, like and trust you. If you are constantly asking them to buy something, they will most likely tune you out.”
3 Self-Publishing Lessons I’ve Learned this Year
The PBS Blog 