Stuff That is Coming Soon

 

I’ve gotten back in full swing of working again. Whatever sort of derailment I had back in July (probably the heat) has lifted, and I’m working on several things at the moment. So I thought I’d do a rundown of all the things I have going on that will come your way soon.

New Stories

First up, I found a story I’d started, I have no idea how long ago, that appeared by accident one day as I was trying to do something else (what that something else was is a story for another time) and I thought, hmm. . . I like this and this story would fit in with my Office After Hour series I started that I sort of fizzled out on.

So a third story in the Office After Hours will come your way. I’m almost finished with the first draft. So far, this one is looking like it will be my longest story yet. It’s another MMF story.

Getting Her Clients, my other MMF story, didn’t do as well in sales. I thought maybe MMF stories aren’t the way to go. But, I like reading those kinds of stories, and I’m having fun writing this one.

While I want to please my readers (I’m a hopeless people pleaser) I also want to write things I enjoy and like reading. Who knows, maybe this story will do better?

I feel good about this story, and if I’m enjoying writing it, maybe someone will enjoy reading it.

Also, I had a spark of other story ideas that I hope to get started on soon. Plus, I want to do another Office After Hours story, before I either stop working on the series, or I at least take a break from it. Who knows, I often feel like I’m just winging it anyway.

Site Changes

I’m also thinking of changing this site some. Mainly the way it looks. Which will probably entail changing the theme completely. While I like this theme, I think it would be better for readers of this site to have full blog posts appear on the home page, instead of the current text snippets I have.

Why?

Well, I read a lot of blogs from other writers. So I’m looking at this from the perspective of a blog reader. Recently John Scalzi changed his site design of his Whatever blog. The first design he chose didn’t go over well with his readers. I read the comments to see what people liked and didn’t like. His blog gets a lot of traffic, so it was a good way to hear what readers like and don’t like when they visit a blog. It was interesting as both someone who has a blog and as a blog reader.

One thing that did and also didn’t amaze me is the amount of people who still read blogs on their computer. Many experts say that the web is becoming more mobile centered. I don’t doubt this but according to my site statistics (who knows how accurate they are), I get very few mobile reads. I also take this into consideration.

I enjoy searching out other blogs to see how others have done theirs. In this process I noticed a few things:

1. When there are full posts being displayed, I’m more apt to take the time to read the posts. Why? Well, I skim down the page, something catches my eye, next thing I know I’m reading the whole post and on to the next one. This saves me from clicking on individual posts in a constant back and forth.

2. I often return to some of those blogs. Because I’ve found their posts interesting, it has led me to read the books these authors have written. Which means I’ve discovered a few new authors this way.

3. While my stats on my blog say I’m getting a small amount of daily traffic, I have some posts that have no page reads at all. For example, when I released Her Holiday Fireworks, according to my dashboard stats (again who knows if they’re accurate) that page recieved no reads at all. Which saddened me a bit because I’d written some witty stuff about the story that I didn’t put in the description on Amazon. Granted, that is my best-selling story so far, so it didn’t affect sales, but still. . . I’m a writer, and it makes me happy when I put something out in the world and people actually read it. (Yes, that's my writer ego talking)

4. The other post that didn’t get any reads was my Happy Independence Day post. I think the reason it didn’t get any reads is because of the way it was presented on the main blog page. I didn’t put a photo with that post, but where the text snippet ended, it looked as if that was the whole post. It wasn’t.

5. I’m lazy. And I know there are other lazy people out there too. (To those of you denying this, I’m giving you the stink eye LOL!) Meaning that when I go to a site, I don’t want to have to click forever on the screen to see everything I want. (And don’t get me started on pop-ups!!!! Grrr...) Meaning, when I visit a blog it’s nice to have things on the home page to draw me in. I don’t feel my home page really draws people in to my site.

So what does this all mean?? Well, on the Blogger platform (which I enjoy using) it means to get full blog posts on my home screen, I’ll either have to do some in-depth html work or revert to a theme that is not as mobile responsive as my current theme. The latter is the route I’ll most likely take at this point, mainly because I don’t have the time to play with html right now. I could search for a 3rd party theme, but again, I don’t have that kind of time at the moment.

Back when I first decided to blog (under a different name) I put a lot of time into how the blog looked before I put it out in the world. In fact, I learned I spent WAY too much time on that. The important lessons I learned after were that content is still king no matter what (in my case a really sexy king ;-) and also, a blog is a constant work in progress. Meaning it will change and evolve, or at least it should.

Anyway, sexy readers, I’m sure I’ve rambled on enough for one day (and I wonder why people don’t read my posts). So that’s all for today as I must get back to my steamy writing. Till next time, stay sexy!