Elaina James

When Elaina kindly invited me to be her guest, I thought for a long time what to say. In the end I decide to focus on ORGANISATION . The thing an author most lacks is time. Look at some of the things an author has to do: 1) Before starting the novel, there’ll almost certainly be the need for research, which may be ongoing. Even contemporary novels usually need some research, although less than for an historical novel. 2) Actually write the novel. 3) Ideally, the ‘finished’ novel should be edited by the author before being sent to a critiquer/agent/publisher. 4) Marketing. If the world doesn’t know your novel’s out there, how will they find it? It doesn’t matter how big the author is (talking in terms of being well-known, not size!), almost everyone has to help with publicising their novel. This is ongoing and time-consuming, and may have to be done when one’s trying to write the next novel. 5) Real life. Families and friends expect a look in, too. With good organisation, you’ll m...

Thank you for inviting me to your blog today, Elaina! When you asked me to write a post about social media for writers, I tried to think of what might be useful to writers who have been using Twitter for a while, but who struggle to keep up with all those tweets in their timeline. It’s worth trying out the following to make life easier, and to save time. Setting up and Using Twitter Lists It can be difficult ploughing through all the tweets in your timeline to find the content you really want to see. If you set up Twitter lists for areas relating to your ‘brand’ (the subjects and themes in your books, as well as those you’re interested in); you can add a column for each list to Tweetdeck (my preference) or Hootsuite. It’s possible to set up private or public Twitter lists, and I always go for private because otherwise when you add someone to a list, they receive a notification. You don’t have to follow someone to add them to your lists. There are other people’s public list...