Going it Mostly Alone: the Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness
To be fair to myself, I hadn’t been sitting around staring at my screen, clicking on everything else I could to avoid doing work, which would have been easy given that the 2016 presidential campaign was running parallel to the launch. Despite that distraction, I’d gotten things done, several actually, and had sold a handful of books. The blog was going, and it had gained followers not only on WordPress but also on Medium, and gathered a few readers, likes and other reactions on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This blog lives on a website that wobbled, but held together and has been improving since, meaning my designing all of the artwork on Canva, and learning how to use WordPress better, creating and loading copy and adding links to capture emails for the mailing list: ‘Join the Adventure’ per the ideas from the books Platform and Your First 1000 Copies
Cohabitates with other websites is a better description for it, as A Perfect Blindness has its own URL and website, with its own big “join now” button in order to capture emails that live on the same WordPress site on its own page, just like the home page for them both, and actually the whole site: wlancehunt.com.
Originally, www.aperfectblindness.com was its own standalone site, but as Tim Grahl points out: putting all the work into a site for a single book defeats the purpose of building an email list for me, the writer W Lance Hunt, and having an author site is better long term. What I do to the book’s site gets done to my author site automatically, and collects all emails into a common list. That is something I debated about for a while and was not sure this was a good idea for time: more indecision and waffling preventing action by way of consideration and planning.
Speaking of email lists, I had used Directmail for Mac before as an Email Service Provider, so I didn’t have to learn yet more software. This would prove both advantageous yet problematic when I stepped up my site with Sumo App in the future.
More on that later.
From just before the launch and per all the articles I’d read, I’d created a social media Editorial Calendar, which I tried to follow with the recommended 2 FB, 3 Google +, 3 Twitter, 5 Pinterest, 1.5 Instagram and 1 LinkedIn post per day, plus my blog, with elaborate plans of what content to post where and when.
As the whole point of driving traffic to a social media platform with good content is to get people to join a mailing list, I inhaled what I could of each platform to create arrows pointing to my mailing list and websites. I could keep this up only for a bit over a month.
The pace was too hard to manage— I had no coherent grasp of my content. Frankly, I had too many ideas, none of which had a sufficiently solid foundation upon which to build any long-term plan, essentially to taking random shots in the dark and hoping something hits. This project joined with the too many other ideas that needed more time than I had, and better planning—hell, any sort of path to action at all, straight or not. Something to let me divine how I can fit a blog, with social media posting, with a website that is limping along with so much needing to be done, so many elements needing to be made, and ideas for very many pages needing built, and pages upon pages of other ideas sitting next to me on a table like so much moldering seed.
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To ask a question or follow along with the self-publishing adventure, join the “Publishing Path of A Perfect Blindness” here.