Episode #308: Were You Ever Given Bad Writing Advice?

Coffee so mediocre that it didn't want to be open for fear of polluting the air with the coffee beans that were lying around on the ground beneath the coffee bush for a year before someone finally took notice and showed pity on them.

I gotten plenty of good advice over the years in regards to my writing, with the majority of it being indirectly (i.e. reading about it from reputable people) acquired, for which I am very grateful for.

I've also gotten a bit of bad advice over the years, some of which that cost me money and reputation (i.e vanity presses and agents). Others had given me advice that basically cost me time and enrollment in the school of Sunken Cost Fallacy.

Once such piece of advice that in 20/20 hindsight was bad, was to create an author's page. This was suggested to me by my one and only publisher back in 2009, as a way to promote myself and my book(s). Naively, I went along with this suggestion, not realizing until many years later that I could've done the same by simply promoting my regular personal page for my writings.

Over the years that page had more or less stagnated, as it got to be very time consuming in posting fresh content on that page. But earlier this year, I had the ability to cross-post/share from my personal page to my author's page, which in turn generated some mild interest and a few extra eyeballs.

But as we all know, all good innovations introduced by FB must also be taken away because it was a good innovation. So as a matter of record, I lost my ability to cross-post and to share to my page. And thus, I once again found myself with a stagnant author's page that averaged at most, one post a week, which was a link to my latest blog post.

I realize now that creating an author's page was redundant, and I also realize that I should've kept it deactivated when I had the opportunity to do otherwise (not sure if I can deactivate it now w/o messing up my personal page). I also realize that I simply can't abandon the page no matter how much I want to, again we circle back to the sunken cost fallacy that I had mentioned earlier.

So I came up with a plan that if anything, will hopefully make people inquisitive enough to check out my writings and blog: posting my editing/publishing journey as it relates to my five volume fantasy series.

For past couple of weeks, I started writing short blog posts that are less than 200 words in length*, first with pen & paper, then transcribe to the computer before doing the very predictable copy/paste (lesson learned from long ago when I would be halfway through a good FB post, only for my computer to suddenly glitch or me hit a stray button and POOF! no more post).

As of the day of this post, I have thirteen posts completed and ready to be launched. If I couple it with my weekly blog post, I have either thirteen weeks of FB posts (one per week), or six and a half weeks if I add two per week. I haven't quite decided, but I'm leaning heavily towards two per week, if only because I play to start editing in earned this month and I don't want to be writing about the editing of book one when I'm starting on book two.

*fun fact: because I was never able to uncramp my printing from previous decades spent filling out forms with ludicrously small spaces, I gave myself to hard caps for writing these FB posts: maximum of thirteen words per lone and sixteen lines per post. this gives me a standardized  goal of 208 +/- words per post, which translates to one quarter to one third typed.

I'm not sure if I will do this with anything else that I might create in the future, but at the very least I will enjoy shaking my tired groove thing while trying to drum up a few more eyeballs my way. If anything, I have a new pseudo blog to play around with that won't involve any of the inherent stress that this blog sometimes brings to me (general purpose vs one specific purpose).

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