Category Archives for Articles
Trello as an Editorial Calendar : How To Make It Work
Last Updated: May 28th, 2019
Managing an editorial calendar is a bit like the horror of herding kittens or trying to nail gelatin to a wall.
A frustrating and seemingly impossible task.
When I set up Craft Your Content, I got to experience this joy—with not only our own editorial calendar but also a dozen client calendars.
I figured out pretty quickly that we needed a solution that was more robust than the Google Spreadsheet, steno-pad planner, and wing-and-a-prayer method I had been using for my own editorial process.
Wing-and-a-prayer is not only unprofessional, it also causes a lot more headaches than it is worth.Continue reading
“He Cannot Choose But Hear” – Engaging Your Audience Through Storytelling
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
— from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In the age of information, how do we choose to communicate?
The answer is… in the same way as we have done for thousands of years.
Humans tell each other stories.
Everyone is Doing This Wrong in Their Author Branding (But You Can Fix Yours)
As an author, your brand is more than just a cover image, logo, and design scheme.
You’re told by publishers and industry professionals to build a platform and sell your book. When it comes time to act, however, there is little guidance provided for how to do that effectively. Pumping out “buy my book” messages makes you look self-serving and turns readers off.
There’s an entire flavor to branding that a lot of authors miss, and it’s hurting their chances of connecting with their target readers!Continue reading
Keeping Fresh Eyes
“It is difficult to keep the public interested… the supply of new ideas is not endless,” complains the narrator of Donald Barthelme’s “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace.”
For every writer, whether they pen literary fiction or produce streams of online content, the fight to stay interesting is an ongoing one.
Interesting to the reader, interesting to ourselves as writers, and interested in the process of putting words on a page. It is all too easy for overfamiliarity to seep in, causing mind-numbing boredom first in the writer, and in turn, the reader.