Elaina James

photo courtesy of Anita Chapman On Saturday I set off on my writer related travels again. This time to London, for NeetsMarketing's Social Media Course for Writers, run by the lovely Anita Chapman. It seems fitting that I met Anita through social media. After learning lots of useful tips from her NeetsMarketing blog  I invited her to be a guest on my blog back in March, and she wrote a fantastic post for me on Taking Twitter to the Next Level . We finally got to meet in person at the RNA conference in July and caught up with one another again at the HNS conference in September. But it was great to attend one of her courses and learn from her in person. Saturday's course covered twitter, facebook, instagram and blogging. Whilst I've been blogging and using social media for over a year it was amazing to discover there was still so much that I didn't know. Anita was full of handy tips that were like little light bulb moments, as I discovered there's a much easi...

This week I'm delighted to welcome author Mark West to the blog. I started publishing in 1999 and managed to catch the tail end of the small press zine world - those ‘for love’ magazines and periodicals so beloved of genre, homemade and often stapled though some were perfect bound. Moving into the noughties, as the Internet slowly grew in usage, those physical mags became webzines. It was a brave new world out there and, Luddite that I am, I resisted for a while - I didn’t want my story to appear online, I wanted it to be in an edition I could put on my ego shelf (I often still feel the same way as we careen towards the ‘20s!). But aside from markets, the Internet promised much more - a web presence. I think most of those early adopter websites have long since disappeared (thankfully) but I’m convinced that if you could find any now, they’d be full of rotating skull gifs, dripping blood gifs, screams (whoever thought a website that screamed at you whenever you clicked on i...

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...