Tag: technology

Interview Technology

Posted on by Sue L Canfield
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Interview Tips for Authors

Years ago media interviews were done in person at a studio. Today many interviews are done online using Skype, FaceTime, Zoom or some other technology. If you’re not yet familiar with these platforms, now is the time to learn. Willingness to use one of these platforms for an interview increases your chances of being selected.

You’ll still want to prepare well for these interviews. Make sure you still dress the part and have a quiet place to be during the interview. Practice with a friend to be sure your equipment works, the lighting is right, and that you know what to do if something goes wrong.

Embrace the new interview technology, and look and sound your best when speaking about your book’s message.

I Can’t Spend All My Time Marketing!

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

And you don’t have to. You shouldn’t. Marketing, rather than being a flood of information about you and yours, should be a steady drip, drip, drip, like watering a delicate plant, not hosing down an elephant.

I’ve spent my adult life working with automation and efficiency using computers so any time there’s a task with repeatable steps, I look for a way to make those repeating parts automatic. It allows me to spend my time on the unique bits, the parts I can do better than a computer because they require creativity or special knowledge.

Automating and scheduling your online marketing is smart. Create messages (that’s the ‘unique to you’ bit) and schedule them in a single monthly session. (We use and recommend Hootsuite but there are a number of social media automation tools available.)

You still have to check in daily to interact with the real human beings who touch your social media messages, but you don’t have to be online 24/7 to keep your message (remember those 80/20 principles, both of them) in front of potential readers and fans.

Custom Author Website for $300

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

We’re considering adding custom author websites to our offerings.

These would be extremely affordable but worth about ten times what they’ll cost. I have nearly 25 years of experience in web development so I work quickly and efficiently and I love doing this.

For $300 (three hundred dollars) one time cost you’ll get a custom made WordPress site with a blog and as many pages as you need. It will include all the content you provide, text and images, and will be designed to match your book (or whatever color scheme you provide.) Once the site is created you’ll get one round of edits, which includes virtually any changes you like to layout, colors, fonts, text.

There must be a catch, right?

Not really.

What’s not included is the domain name and hosting, which you’ll have to buy from our preferred hosting company Charlottezweb. Domains are $10 per year and hosting is $52 per year. We also provide managed hosting; we charge $25 per year for domains and $125 per year for hosting. Managed hosting means we keep your site backed up, updated, and generally trouble free. It does not include updates, which you can do yourself easily. If you already have a domain name we can use that.

To summarize: a unique, custom WordPress site and blog for $300 plus hosting costs.

I want to do this for one author to work out the kinks before I make this a general offering. Whoever says yes first gets it.

Some of My Work

I’ve done loads of websites over the past 20 years. I haven’t been promoting my web business so my most recent work has primarily been for our own businesses, but there are a few for clients here as well.

This site, of course.

My author site.

My author coaching website Someday Box.

My music site, tunehenge.

A site for our client, author Errol Barr.

Custom Massage Work, my massage therapist.

Don’t Ask Technicians to Build on a Non-Technical Foundation

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

It happens all the time in my web business; someone comes to me with ‘everything ready’—they have a domain name, hosting, email, content; it’s all ready to go. This will be the easiest website you’ve ever done, they say.

Wrong.

Invariably, they’ve registered the domain name with a service which is, well, limited. They’ve chosen user-friendly hosting, which means that it’s not geek friendly. They have Yahoo email. They have all their content in a Word document, neatly formatted, with images precisely positioned.

The first step, in this case, is to start over.

The choice of hosting has to come after the choice of development technology. My platform of choice these days is WordPress, which means I need hosting on Linux or some other flavor of UNIX. Not Windows. I also need true FTP access for direct access to the files. Not an online file manager.

Email should be you@yourdomain.com, not yourdomain@yahoo.com. I can’t ‘move’ that email, or work with it in any way, without costing you lots and lots of money.

Microsoft Word is not a web development tool. The beautiful formatting in your document will not transfer to the web automatically. It may transfer, partially, to WordPress, but the cleanup will take longer than starting over.

The images embedded in a Word document may very well be useless. Word is not an image management or editing tool. The images may be too small or at too low a resolution to be usable for your site. At the very least, extracting them from Word is going to cost, because it’s a tedious process I don’t enjoy.

This only covers web development, but the principle applies to choosing a cell phone, your next computer or printer, your internet service . . . any technology—and the people who’ll be working with it on your behalf:

Step One is always, always to ask for professional advice from someone you trust.