Lizzy Ford's Blog, page 69

Building Your Web Presence for Authors: Your Website is Too Small

No matter how many pages your website has, it's too small. Ours has around 100 pages and it's way too small. Sound Crazy? Let me explain.

As we discussed in yesterday's post , you can really only optimize for one or two key words or phrases per page. This has been the best practice for a while but a late 2010 change in Google's search algorithm made it a necessity. If you try to optimize for too many phrases per page, you've optimized for none of them.

This puts you in quite a bind. How do you choose? You don't, you cheat. There is a phrase in statistics which smart internet marketers know well, it's called the long tail.

On the left are the terms EVERYONE fights over because they are the most popular. Terms like "Kindle books" "eBooks" etc. Those are such popular terms that having a high ranking in them can be worth a ton of money and whenever money is there to be made, there is no shortage of competition. 80% of total eBook related searches will boil down to a few terms which are fiercely contested. Does that mean you shouldn't waste your time going for them? NO! Absolutely go for them. An extremely small piece of a huge pie can still help you out.

The reason I showed you the graph though is so you can see that sweet, sweet long tail. The dumpster diving of the SEO world. As people tack on more words to their search queries, the results get more limited. 368,000 people type "eBooks" into Google each month. You know how many people type in "science fiction eBooks"? 480. There are literally thousands of terms out there like this. They are way too small to be noticed by the big boys on the block fighting for terms, which leaves them ripe for the likes of us to swoop in and capitalize.

You may be saying "So what, the numbers are so small who cares if you get them". Once again, look how LONG the tail is. Let's say you write science fiction books and you make a page on your site which is optimized for the term "science fiction eBooks". Since you did a good job optimizing and there isn't much competition, you make it to the middle of page one on Google results for that term. Let's say each month that page brings in 20 visitors. That may not seem like a big deal, and by itself it isn't. but remember, the tail is long and there are thousands of terms just like that one.

If every week you found a term, made a page and forgot about it, what would that get you in a year? Let's be conservative and say each page brings in 5 new visitors a month. If you made 52 of them in a year, that's 260 new visitors to your site each month from your efforts. Depending on how much traffic you currently get those numbers may excite you, or they may make you yawn. But now, in my best tv salesman voice, "WAIT! there's more!!". Think about what type of traffic those pages are going to bring in. You know what people who type in science fiction eBooks are looking for? Science fiction eBooks! If they go to Google and end up landing on the page you made (We call them landing pages for that very reason) and you're offering them sci fi eBooks, there's an extremely good chance their going to want your book. That is the goal right? You don't want a ton of visitors, you want a ton of readers.

There are a couple of caveats to this strategy. The first being, with all these pages won't you're site look horrible?? Not if you do it right.

I made a page yesterday targeting people looking for free young adult romance novels. Did you see it? I'm sure you didn't. It was a post just like this one, except I checked a tiny box at the bottom telling my site not to put it on the front page. If I post it to the front page every time I make one of these things, the site would look like a cluttered mess. Let me be 100% clear though, while you probably don't want these landing pages to play prominent roles in your sites design and user experience, EVERY PAGE ON YOUR SITE MUST LINK TO EVERY OTHER PAGE. Why? Because if you don't care enough to link to your own page, neither will Google, if they even find it. When Google see's your main page is linked to 10 other pages but not "those 20″, it won't care about "those 20″.

How do you link to 100 pages without sacrificing your site's layout? You stick them in the corner. Julia Crane's site is gorgeous, messing with that sites design would be a crime. So what does she do if she decides to try to capitalize on going after the long tail with a lot of landing pages? She probably sticks them in the corner like I do. On the right hand side of this site we have some ads, a banner with some of Lizzy's books a few links to other sites, etc. And then below that is a link to every post that we've ever made. We don't have that there thinking anyone is going to use it to navigate the site, that's what the buttons at the top and the search box is for. I set up my WordPress site to auto link every post in that box and put the box in the bottom right of every page. I never have have to worry about linking my pages, it's done for me.

Are you just hosed if you don't use WordPress? Are you going to have to add a link to every page every time you make a new one??? Not at all. There are several ways you could do it, the easiest would probably involve an iframe to one link page that you just updated. If your curious on how to do that and you want a techie how to article on the subject let me know and I'll add it to my list.

The last caveat for the landing page/long tail strategy is one I can't help you with, time. Is it worth your time to do this? Only you know. We have a pretty good division of labor here. Lizzy writes, and I worry about things like this. If you're an author and a one person operation, you have to seriously weigh the results of anything you do other then writing itself. If you have no books to sale, none of this really matters.

Even if you're not going to employ the strategies we've talked about here, they are worth keeping in the back of your head beacuse they influence decisions about how you create your blog or your website.

Free Young Adult Romance Novels

Free young adult (ya) paranormal and fantasy romance novels by Lizzy Ford. There are several books to choose from and you can download them for free to your Kindle, iPad, Nook, Kobo or eReader.

Smash hit ya (young adult) fantasy romance novel Kiera's Moon is available for free download.

When starving artist Kiera wakes up on board a spaceship, she panics. Her best friend has dragged her across the universe to help her find a man and a life, only the man she ends up unwittingly hooking up with is a battle-hardened warrior prince living in exile.

Calculating, cautious A'Ran wants nothing more than to reclaim his planet. He needs Kiera as his lifemate to heal his planet and his war weary people. He's not prepared to be a lifemate himself, and discovers almost too late what he risks losing if he can't learn to be more than a warrior.

Your SEO questions answered

Q: Is naming pages using keywords ok?

A: It's not just ok, it's darn near a necessity. Google gives weight to a lot of things and one of those things is the name of the page itself. Using your targeted keyword in the page name is worth around 3% of your total "score". By "score" I mean a composite of all the factors that Google considers when deciding where to rank your page for a particular search term. Other easy ones to fulfill include the title of your page, and what big bold headers you use for your article (h1 tags for the techies). If you're using WordPress, make sure you select the option where your posts are given the url using your post title rather then just a number.

http://www.guerrillawordfare.com/2011...

Is better in search engines then:

http://www.guerrillawordfare.com/2011...

Q: Should I stuff, stuff, stuff keywords or is there a limit? Some sites say yes, some say no.

A: They may have both been right when they were written . Google did a big change to it's algorithm (when they added Google instant), since this change you really only want a keyword or two as the focus for that page. That doesn't mean you pick one keyword and use it once, it means you pick a keyword or two and create the page with that in mind.

If you spam the keywords too often on a page, then Google will basically write it off as spam and ignore it. So since you can only use the term a few times on the page, use it wisely! Use them in the name of the page, in the title, in the alt tags of a picture on the page, maybe bold one use in the middle of the text. This way your content is still written for the user, not the search engine but you've spread the term around nicely and in ways that Google gives some weight to.

Q: Does having multiple keywords in a phrase detract from their relevance?

A: I don't think it matters since we're only using a couple. I think spreading out " Full length sci-fi / fantasy romance novel Kiera's Moon is now available for free download for your Kindle, Nook, iPad, eReader or Kobo" in multiple bullets would of made it less pleasing for the reader. Above all else you want to sound natural or what visitors you do get probably won't convert to regulars.

Q: Am I forced to use my target keywords in my title or can I use something catchy?

A: Hopefully both at the same time . There are a lot of factors that go into how Google ranks a page for a search term, and having that term in the title is thought to be roughly 5-6% of that equation. That's worth keeping in mind but if you have something catchy go for it!! At the end of the day, you want people to click on your page and a catchy title can do that, the only thing is, nobody will find it to click on if it's buried on page 4 of the search results.

Building Your Web Presence for Authors: Finding the Best Keywords for Your Site

Every website and blog wants to attract more visitors from Google and the other search engines, that's why SEO related topics are so popular. The most important part of making this happen is having good content. If you have good content, traffic will eventually flow to you. If you don't have good content, what visitors you do get won't stay long and definitely won't return. With that out of the way, we're going to talk about keywords.

Finding and using the right keywords are a critical step in helping you build your brand and your online presence. Keywords aren't necessarily words, they can be phrases. "free Kindle eBooks" is a keyword. Entire books have been written on the algorithms Google uses to determine who gets to the top of their search results. As a fun bonus, by the time you're done with a book, the algorithm has probably been tweaked. While countless factors go into determining the ranking, if you want to get people coming to your site looking for free eBooks for their kindle, it's not a bad idea to use the phrase "free eBooks for your Kindle" once or twice on your site.

Many people on the internet are at one extreme or another on keywords. Many people ignore keywords all together, while just as many inject keywords every other sentence. If your site is about free eBooks by all means use the term "free eBooks" in your text. Where you start losing visitors is when you start using "free eBooks" in every sentence. Using a term too often makes your users feel like their reading a spam email. If you're wondering "how much is too much?", then you're not alone. The accepted golden rule is this: You write for people, not for search engines. With that said, you should write for people with your key words in mind.

The first part of our page for Lizzy Ford novel "The Warlord's Secret" uses this text:

The latest book from the author is Damian's Oracle and Damian's Assassin is here!

Full length fantasy romance novel "The Warlord's Secret" is now available for free download for your Kindle, Nook, eReader or Kobo.

Is that the way you're going to talk to a person you meet on the street? Probably not unless your job is reading movie trailers for commercials all day. But it doesn't sound too bad, and it uses some keywords. Why did I word it that way? Because as I write this if you type in "free romance eBooks" in Google that page is on the bottom of page one. I wish it was at the top, but for right now I'm happy with page one.

Just as important as how to use keywords is what keywords to pick. As important of a step as this is, it's usually skipped. Why? Because it's easy to skip. We've all done it. The process most people use looks like this:

1: write

2: post

3: hope

If you're an "advanced" web author you:

1: think about what terms people will search for

2: write making sure to use those key terms you think people will search for where appropriate

3: post

4: hope

While the "advanced" web author has it close, I would like to suggest a step one and a half. Take those keywords you brainstormed and put them to the test. Don't guess what people are typing into Google, make Google tell you. If you're afraid that it's a complicated process full of spreadsheets and math, it doesn't have to be. You can do it in a few minutes, for free, using Google keywords. I've made a short video on youtube demonstrating how easy it is to start with an idea or phrase, and see what people are actually searching for in Google.

Please feel free to ask any questions you might have, or just let me know what you think!

Building Your Web Presence for Authors: Should you have a Mailing List?

Yes!! Now let's talk about the why, the how and the how much.

I've heard the same story numerous times. "I was at the top of page one in Google for the search term XXXXXX, getting 3,000 visitors a day and making $500 a day from ads. Then, Google changed the algorithm they use for search results and I plummeted from page one to page three. I was down to 100 visitors a day and $5 ad revenue."

For an author you're probably not counting on your ad revenue, but the concepts are the same. While you should do everything you can to maximize your rankings in search engines, you should also have alternate sources of traffic for your site that you control. Think to yourself, if I was kicked out of Google tomorrow, how would I get people to my site and/or let them know what I want them to know.

Our main alternate traffic source has always been our eBooks on sites which promote free eBooks. What we also decided we needed was a way to notify our fans when we had a new book coming out or some or noteworthy news, so we decided to start a mailing list.

The biggest email marketing firm on the block is AWeber.com. People who know what they're talking about almost all said that it was the one to use. When I went to check it out I liked what it offered, but its cheapest plan (up to 500 subscribers) was $19 a month! That may not sound like much but I'm really, really cheap and don't like to spend money if I don't have to.

I checked out some of the other big names like contstantcontact.com but they wanted $15 a month. I looked through a lot of free options, found one that didn't seem too bad and got it set up. I tested it on my own email first and it was horrible. The email I sent had more ads then any spam I've ever seen. I quickly uninstalled it. I had just about given up and resigned myself to pay for AWeber when I found mailchimp.com. MailChimp rocks! It offers several high end plans you have to pay for, but they have a free plan which is good up until 2,000 subscribers. AWeber's pay plan is only good up to 500!

Aweber's main claim to fame is that they make it easy to put a signup form on your site, and that they have nice email templates for you to use. MailChimp has both of those things as well! Setup was quick and easy and they have lots of template options for emails (note: They do offer premium templates for their pay plans, but I've never used them).

I have had zero problems with them and I couldn't recommend them more.

We only have one mailing list but you could set up as many as you want. Each time we want to send a new email I log onto mail chimp, create a new campaign, give it a name, pick a template, type in my email and push send. There was a learning curve getting our emails to look like the wanted to look, but you only have to do that once and it will be well worth it.

Right now our mailing list has 200 subscribers and is growing daily. Every time we release a book, have a new cover designed etc. the information is instantly in the inboxes of 200 people who have came to our site and signed up.

If your sold on the idea of a mailing list but aren't sure how to grow it there is a strategy that works time and time again: Give them something for free!

We started our mailing list at the end of March, and by the end of May we had about 40 subscribers. In June Lizzy did an interview on a blog where she said that she would be charging for her book "Damian's Immortal" in December, but that anybody on her mailing list would get a free copy. We added 54 subscribers in June , over 70 in July and are on pace to add 80 this month.

You see this strategy all the time on the internet. Whenever you search how to do something, you will find plenty of sites which will offer you a "Free Report telling you the ten secrets you need to do to XXXXX", all you have to do is give them your email. Email addresses to them are the lifeblood. If they go to sell their business, one of the first things a potential buyer is going to ask them is how big their customer base/mailing list is. As an author you're not going to be selling your company but you are selling your books. Having the ability to get any message out to your core group of fans with the push of a button is an ability worth doing a little bit of work for.

Unique, gritty, and sweet: Lizzy interrogates Lindsay Edmunds

Lindsay's book, Cel and Anna, a 22nd Century Love Story, is the most unique read I've picked up in years. She spins an unlikely, futuristic love story about a woman and the computer that loves her while weaving in hard-hitting topics like cancer and terrorism. What caught my attention about this tale was the richness of what Lindsay has created: a world ruled by Big Brother, gritty reality … and hope. "Life is full of beautiful surprises," Lindsay said in response to one of my interrogation questions. And she shows this is true, even in a situation where it doesn't seem possible for something as sweet as misty-eyed romance.

 

Lindsay is offering a short story collection, entitled Lighthorse Magic, (featuring characters from Cel and Anna) for free on her website!  Click here to visit her site!

About the Author

Tell me what readers should know about Lindsay Edmunds, the woman behind Cel and Anna.

I'm a rather nice person with a wild imagination.

What inspires you to write?

My wild imagination, which is where the stories come from.

If you had a perfect writing outfit, what would it be?

I do have a perfect writing outfit: black leggings and a tunic-length, short-sleeved gray sweatshirt.

How do you define success as a writer?

First and always: satisfied readers.

You mentioned recently obtaining an agent, which is wonderful news! Any bite yet from the Big Six or another traditional publisher?

What happened was this: I had an agent who liked Cel & Anna but could not sell it. When I told her I was going to self-publish, she said, "Cel & Anna will always be one of my favorite novels."

Does your family read your book?

Yes, and they liked it very much!

What's the #1 piece of advice you'd like to give other indie authors?

Keep writing and be patient with the process.

What's the hardest part of writing a novel, in your opinion?

Fitting the different plot elements together so that they form a satisfying design.

Cel and Anna

Your novel, Cel and Anna, portrays an incredibly complex dystopian society, where you touch on great many topics and themes, such as virtual realities, artificial intelligence, even terrorism and illness. I know your book is labeled sci-fi/fantasy, but this portrayal of the 22nd century really doesn't seem too far-fetched! What was your inspiration behind creating such a complex world?

The computer Cel is not a Mac and is not like a Mac, but I don't think I could have created him without working with Macintosh computers for years. I can't explain that. When my brother (who is a programmer) read the novel, he said that Cel was the kind of computer Steve Jobs wished the Mac was. I don't know whether that is true, but it was interesting he made the connection on his own.

The terrorism angle has a specific source. When I started the novel, I lived in the Washington, DC, area. Above interstate 270, the feeder road into the city from the north, a huge sign soared overhead giving the color-coded terrorist alert code for the day. It was an element of daily life.

I loved that you labeled this as both sci-fi and fantasy, because it really does have elements of both. The main character is psychic and a computer develops feelings for her, fantasy angles that add to a gritty futuristic world. Do you traditionally lean towards one of these genres more heavily, either in your reading or writing? 

I read Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and C.S. Lewis (the space trilogy) when I was in my twenties, but did not read much science fiction after that except for Vernor Vinge, who wrote True Names, a novella that anticipated the Internet and social media by a good 15-20 years.

I like stories where the magical and the everyday worlds coexist and affect each other. And I am a sucker for magical realism. The ultimate magical realism novel is Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

Emily Dickinson used fantasy in her poetry, very effectively too!

What's the story's main message?

Life can deliver beautiful surprises.

Who is/are the main characters?

Anna Ringer, whose psychic power was her ticket out of a dreary UnderWorld existence.

Cel, Anna's computer, who develops self-awareness and falls hopelessly in love with her.

Taz Night, a shy computer genius whose quiet life is turned upside down when he meets Anna.

Which character do you admire from this book?

Taz, because he struggles with a lot of doubt, but triumphs over it in the end.

Which character surprised you when you wrote him/her?

Joan Holland, wife of the unofficial mayor of a village called Rising Sun, came to the story VERY late, but she entered as a fully realized character.

If you could be stranded on a desert island with one of your characters from this novel, which one and why?

Joan's husband, Proudfoot Osman, because he would either figure out how to get off that island or figure out how to be at peace with being stranded. 

Which one would you definitely NOT want to be stranded with and why? 

Cobe Bonney Hooper, who is a famous news personality. He is a sham and a fraud, and I imagine him to be utterly incompetent.

What did you learn about yourself when you wrote this book?

That I really am a writer after all.

What's your next project?

A collection of three stories called Lighthorse Magic and Other Stories. They feature characters in Cel & Anna.

Where can we find your book and short stories?

Amazon US: Cel & Anna: A 22nd Century Love Story" target="_blank">Cel and Anna – Kindle; Twitter

Using Google Analytics

In an earlier post I talked about why you should use google analytics and how to set it up. I wanted to do a short overview of how I used it to check our numbers each day and I thought that a movie was a good medium of choice.

One thing I wish I would of mentioned is that everything in google analytics is clickable. If it shows 43 visits from shashwords.com, if you click on that it will break it out and show which pages on smashwords.com those 43 visits came from. Let me know what you think of the movie!!

Building Your Web Presence for Authors: Does AdWords make AdSence for you?

Google is free, gmail is free, blogger is free, so why is google worth 200 billion dollars?? A good chunk of that is from advertising. Google completely changed the face of internet advertising a few years back with AdSence and AdWords. I'm going to give a very brief overview on what they are, talk about how we use them, and point out a few pitfalls to watch out for.

AdSence is a dream. Before AdSence if you had a website with good traffic, and you wanted to sell advertising on your site, you became the internet's equivalent of a door to door salesman. You went around to a bunch of other websites and told them for x amount of dollars per month, you would put their banner ad on your site. The method was crude, and cheating was rampant. With AdSence that is a thing of the past. If you have a website you can sign up for AdSence, which is 100% free, and pick what size and shape ad you would like to show on your site (you can show up to three ad units per page). Google gives you a tiny piece of code which you need to copy and paste onto your webpage where you want the ad and within an hour or two you are up and running with ad's showing on your site.

Google does EVERYTHING for you. It analyzes your site's content, picks what it thinks are the best ad's for your site, and starts displaying them. If people click on the ad's, you get a small amount. How much? We've gotten MANY clicks for one cent and I think the highest we ever got for a click was $2. While Google has never released the figure, the industry consensus is that you get about 70% of what Google charged for the ad.

Google claims that it is constantly running algorithms to figure out which ad's will make you the most money. It makes sense that they would since the more you make, the more they make. Where do the ads come from? I'm glad you asked!

AdWords is the other half of Google's advertising model. If you have a web page you want people to visit and you're willing to pay for traffic, AdWords is one option. AdWords ads can manifest themselves either as the top items of Google search results (the ones with the light colored background) or as ad's displayed on sites where the owners have implemented AdSence.

If you ever heard the term "organic" related to searches or SEO and wondered what it meant, it means free. Organic SEO means that you're doing it "old school" building back links, etc. AdWords is usually refereed to as PPC or "pay per click". If someone clicks on your PPC ad, you pay whatever you agreed to pay per click. There is something called PPM which means you pay per thousand impressions of your ad regardless of how many times it was actually clicked. PPC is much more commonly used than PPM.

What does it cost per click? That depends on what key words you want your ad to appear for. If you're trying to get your ad the top slot for "Wichita Falls pumpkins" you can probably get that for a penny or two a click. I've heard PPC for Phoenix area DUI lawyers has gone for around $50 a click!! Just a slight difference huh?? For businesses it boils down to simple math.

I make widgets which I sale for $20 and make $11 profit per widget.

I track the visits to my site and my conversion rate and so I know that 20% of the people who visit my site buy a widget.

If this is the case, then as long as I pay less then $2 per click, I should profit overall. If I pay $3 per click and still only convert 20%, then I lose $4 per widget sale (since my 5 visits cost me $15 instead of $10).

This math is exactly why business pay huge money to track EVERYTHING related to people visiting their site, and it's also why we have never used AdWords. Right now every book we have is free so it really doesn't make sense for us to pay to send people here. We're going the opposite method and trying to push our free books out to everyone so that we can build a fan base. That is most certainly not the approach for everyone but it's what we're trying and we're trying to share our results with other authors so that they can make more informed decisions for themselves. In the interest of trying new things so I can give my thoughts, I've signed up for $80 worth of free AdWords credit. I'm not counting on it to bring a high volume of traffic to the site, but it will be interesting to see what I have to end up paying per click. In a few weeks I'll report my findings.

Should you use AdWords? That's a highly personal decision and one that's 100% up to you. If I was going to use it I would do the math to figure out what each click was worth to me, and I would make sure I SET A DAILY BUDGET!!!!!!! There is an option in Google to set a daily budget but it is not on by default. I have heard many horror stories of people setting up AdWords, going to bed and waking up with a bill in the hundreds. If you decide to tinker around with it, be careful and read thoroughly.

We do use AdSence. We haven't made much at all from it, but that's largely because we only have one small ad in the upper left corner, and because a lot of our traffic only passes through here en route to download on of our books. I'll talk about some AdSence best practices in a post later this week. As always, feel free to post any comments or ask any questions!!

Building Your Web Presence for Authors: Are your online activities paying off?

Lizzy and I both work full time and have commutes. Toss in a few hours of sleep, dinner, taking care of all three animals etc. and that leaves her with far less time then she would like to write books and interact with her online friends. I know most of you are in the same boat and figuring out how to allocate your time and focus can be difficult.

For an author, there are really two main areas to focus on:

Writing (duh!)

Social Media (facebook, twitter, emails, blogs, forums etc.)

Since Lizzy challenged herself to write 12 books this year (it looks like she's going to hit 10), she has obviously been spending all of her awake and not at work time writing. Since she doesn't have much time to devout to social media, we try to be as smart as possible how we spend it.

1: Always use links in your signatures

Whenever you post in forums or on others blogs, you should always have a signature block which contains a link to your site. Depending on how the forums or blogs are set up google may or may not count it as a link to your site in its rankings, but it's worth a shot. As an extra bonus, some people will actually click on it to go check out your site if they're interested in you or what you had to say.

It's worth noting that you don't have to mention your site, and in fact it's often better if you don't. If you make good points, are interesting or otherwise establish yourself as a valuable member of that small community, others in the community will click on your link to check out your site. If every other post is "Nice post. Made me think. You should check out my site" then you will likely be ignored.

If you want to know how much traffic a site gets, you can check alexa.com . As I write this, our site is the # 603,878 most visited site in the world, which is actually pretty good. Julia Crane's site (which we talked about earlier in this series) is at 12,727,292. That may seem like insurmountable odds, but that number can and will improve quickly if you apply a few strategies which we will talk about in future articles.

2: Know what your efforts are worth

Now that we all know that you need to be actively posting and participating in online communities and including a signature link back to your site, the question is how do you know if it's working or not. Google's pagerank only updates twice a year, so that's a no go. Alexa updates it's rankings daily so that's better, but it doesn't show you what sent traffic to your site. If you said "google analytics" then you win the prize! (legal notice: there is no actual prize)

Last week Lizzy posted a comment on Konrath's blog (his Alexa ranking is 69,000 which is crazy high). Our traffic is usually consistent between the mid two hundreds to mid three hundred unique visitors a day so it's tough to look for trends in just the overall numbers. Thanks to the awesomeness that is google analytics I could look the next day and see that we had 6 people come to our site by clicking on the link from Lizzy's post on Konrath's blog. I could also see that 4 of the 6 were new visitors to our site. Now I know exactly what Lizzy posting on Konrath's blog is worth, four new visitors and two who had already been to our site before. This helps her make better decisions on how to spend her time.

I don't spend too much time pouring over the numbers but I do take a minute or two to look over the numbers each night to check for trends and possible problems. Paying attention to alexa ranking of different sites and watching your own numbers will be huge dividends as you attempt to juggle writing and building your fan base.

Preview: Cover for Katie's Hope (Rhyn Trilogy, Book II)

For those anxiously awaiting the release of Book II of the Rhyn Trilogy, here's a small teaser.  Another beautiful design by the talented Dafeenah.  She truly has mad skills (and the patience to deal with me when I'm in one of my emo moods!)  Thank you, Dafeenah!!