My blog is now a dot com 🙂 I went and finally bought my own web address. I’d been meaning to do it for ages, but have been slack. But I’m planning on being more professional and owning your own domain name is crucial.
Category: technology
How clouds are made in Holland
While in Holland we saw how both regular clouds and storm clouds are made. Observe below.
Regular white fluffy clouds are being produced. It is so that Holland can have the classic cloudy European look.
We experienced days of clear weather and so it was nessecary that storm clouds then be produced to ensure rain would occur. You can see the transormation from white to dark.
And here are what the wind turbines are actually used for – directing which way the clouds drift. All the re-newable energy stuff is a con 🙂
Feet or Fins is now on Amazon
I bit the bullet and uploaded my novel on Amazon. In the past I’ve kinda had issues with Amazon because of its business tactics, but I’m not selling enough through Smashwords. So here I am.
And I’ve already got a sale 🙂
I found the process of uploading surprisingly easy actually. No repeated rejections from meat grinder here. In terms of formating, I just used my smashwords version with the license section cut out and it was accepted the first go.
So now that I’ve got my book out on multiple sites I believe that I’ll be getting more sales 🙂 At the moment Feet or Fins is not available as a physical book, which is something I’m going to do in the future 🙂
Discoverability guys . . . (a rant)
I just read an article by Sara Sheridan on authors/writers and using social media. As I read it I was shocked at how adverse other authors were to setting up a blog, a twitter account or facebook page in order to increase their notoriety. At uni I did a class that specifically revolved around online social media and the publishing sector. And in another we looked at the idea of discoverability.
Discoverabilty is pretty much the most important thing that a author/writer needs to have. If someone can’t find your work then they can’t read or buy it. And the people in this article seem to not only complain that they are losing readership, but they seem adverse to even try to gain new readers. Its like they are intentionally trying to cripple themselves. You can’t afford to stop putting in effort on your novel once you finish writing it. Publishing houses now have to expectation that you have social media skills because, well sometimes they don’t.
As an author you need to put yourself out there. And you need to do it before you publish your first book. The more attention you can garner the better it will sell.
New computer
The other day I got a new computer, which I must say it is pretty good. I’ve had my old computer since the beginning of 2008, just after I graduated high school. It has served me through multiple universities and tons of assignments.
But as time wore on and after a complete hard drive replacement a few years ago, it was slowly starting to die. It would take ages for it to think about doing one task, while I, not only did multiple non-computer tasks I also said quite a few swear words.
(image from here)
I had been looking for a new computer since the beginning of the year, but have been putting it off because I figured my computer still had a little bit of usefulness left in her. But not that much because sometimes there is a lag in when I type. Not only that, but all the movies/TV series I downloaded* were also affected by the lag, also the DVD player didn’t read all the CDs/DVDs that I put in it.
I was excited when I got my new computer. It had windows 8 which took me a while to get used to and a touchscreen which makes life easier. I adapted to it fast and in class when we had to use the computers there I would occasionally touch the screen expecting it to do something 🙂 I’m still working things out and I found out the Microsoft word trial I got on this computer does not show up previous tract changes from word documents saved over from my old computer, but it doesn’t matter because I’ll figure something out.
* totally not illegal
Stephanie Haggarty 