Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Two weeks ago, I posted a helpful piece from children’s author Sarah Allen about using Substack. A Substack newsletter is the trendiest way for authors to communicate with readers right now. But here I am, still blogging, with no newsletter, much less a fancy Substack one. In fact, this is my […]
by Anne R. Allen Yes, Ruth and I are taking a break. I’ve kept this blog going for fifteen years, posting every Sunday morning for most of that time, except the 5 months in 2020 when I was hospitalized. During that tough time, Ruth took the reins and kept the blog going with great […]
by Anne R. Allen For the past few years, authors have been urged to give up blogging for newsletters, especially using the trendy Substack. Substack encourages users to put their good content behind a paywall, so only elite readers have the privilege of reading the entire newsletter. I was going to write a whole post […]
by Anne R. Allen A lot of people hope to write a book when they retire. And that’s a great plan. Late blooming writers can do very well for themselves if they learn to write well and have something unique to say. Some writers who became successful authors in their later years were Laura Ingalls […]
by Anne R. Allen These days, pretty much all writers need to learn to write Web content. Yes, even if you’re a Victorian romance author whose readers care more about reticules and spatterdashers than retweets and SEO. Even if you don’t have your own blog. Any website needs content. Plus you may want to […]
Fragmenting Social Media Creates a Problem for Book Marketing By Anne R. Allen I know how it is: your readers started fading from Facebook all through 2022, disgusted by invasive advertising and slimy tactics that spy on your every move. They are also fed up by those bizarre, arbitrary algorithms that send you to Facebook […]
by Anne R. Allen So you have an author blog on your website, but you haven’t posted there for over a year, when your last book came out. Or maybe you started a blog a while ago, but nobody visited, so it’s just floating out there in cyberspace, collecting spam. It can seem pointless to […]
Blogging is a great way to build platform by Anne R. Allen I started this blog on March 13th, 2009. It was Friday the 13th. Obviously I have a need to tempt fate. I knew pretty much nothing about blogging. I simply wanted a place to put the unpublished columns I had written for Inkwell […]
An author blog gets Google’s attention by Anne R. Allen Should all authors blog? Of course not. We’re all different and we write for different audiences. There are lots of ways to establish an online presence. Anne Rice does a good deal of publicity from her Facebook page, and Stephen King is big on Twitter. […]
Yoast SEO Secrets from the hard-working (if judgemental) WordPress Elves by Anne R. Allen Our fantastic webmaster, Barb Drozdowich of Bakerview Consulting, put a Yoast SEO plug-in on this blog when she rescued us several years ago. (After my disastrous attempt at turning this into a “monetized” blog. Note: Author blogs shouldn’t be monetized.) Like […]
A social media executor will keep you from becoming a social media ghost. by Anne R. Allen We’re living through a time when we’re forced to face something our culture prefers to ignore: our own mortality. We’re discovering, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, that although we do not stop for death, it kindly stops for us. […]
by Anne R. Allen. I’ve seen a steep decline in the number of people commenting on blogs over the past few years. I’m not sure why that is. But commenting on blogs is still an easy, painless way to get your name into search engines and build an “author platform.” I realize I’m partly […]
by Julie Valerie. From Book Blog to Book Deal. First things first, because I’m sure this question is on a lot of writer’s minds: does a book blog still land a book deal? My answer? Of course they do. Great writing and great content will always find an audience, and where there’s an audience, especially […]
