2018 – A New Year and a New Blogging Approach

2017 was a year where I really focused on building up my blog. I discovered that, although I nearly doubled my followers, it chewed into my writing time. Between interviewing other authors, writing help articles for authors, and promoting the work of others, my own work took a back burner. I’ve published an average of 2-3 books int he past five years and did not publish a single book in 2017. I’m going to shift the balance on this in 2018 so that I can write more (and make the voices in my head calm down).

I faced some health issues that required attention at the end of this year. This gave me time to reflect on where I am and where I want to be with regard to my writing and assistance of other authors.

Here are some of the changes for my blog that I will be implementing in 2018:

• I will not be focused on daily stats. I was obsessed with each day and each month outdoing the previous one and this caused me to overextend myself in providing original content, reblogs, author interviews and passing on book announcements and reviews.
• I will be cutting back on reblogs. I will pick five posts each day that I think are the most useful to share with my followers and will reblog them. I feel like I was spending a great deal of time (hours) each day looking at each post and reblogging so many that it was clogging your inboxes.
• I will not be reblogging posts about books or book reviews. If, however, you have a book coming out and wish to create a guest post for my blog, I will gladly host it.
• I will cut back on the number of blogs that I follow just so that I can better manage the time spent daily reading blog posts. I will only follow those that I will spend time reading.

Enough of the bad news. Now here are some of the positive changes or continuations for my blog in 2018.

• I will continue offering author interview opportunities in some form. I will be discontinuing the Perfect 10 template, but will start some new type of author interview format that will hopefully be engaging.
• I will be creating a new page called the Author Directory. This page will contain an index with links to the nearly 200 authors I have interviewed in the past two years. Look for an announcement as I roll this out soon. If you see your name included and with to not be included, please let me know. Any new authors interviewed in 2018 will be included. If I’ve interviewed you more than once in the past two years, I will provide links to both interviews.
• I will still post some original content related to author tips. I tried to do this 1-2 times per week in 2017. This will become more of a monthly feature.
• I will continue to post original writing in the form of weekly short stories or serial installments. This has been fun and has kept me writing.
• I will occasionally promote my own work as new releases are published. Your tolerance of this is appreciated.
• Eventually, as I gradually approach retirement from my day job in the next several years, I will be expanding my writing life to include helping other authors with professional services. I have already started to do this informally by helping with editing and formatting tasks for authors that are starting out or that need assistance. As this expands, I will offer high-quality services at a very reasonable price including editing, formatting, etc.

I still believe that my blog is an important component of my author platform. As I look to balance my work, personal and writing lives, these changes are necessary. I hope you understand.