Chapbooks

Maggie Toussaint at Sweeter Romantic Notions has written up an article on her experience making a Chapbook. A chapbook is basically a little booklet with an excerpt in it that you use for promotional purposes.

Check out Maggie's post if you want to create your own chapbook!

Managing Your Life on the Interwebs

If you're like me, sometimes you get a leeeeetle carried away with promoting yourself, especially when it's so easy to do. I mean, really, it takes 20 seconds to create a profile on the newest social networking site and BAM! that's more promotion for you (and your Emeril for the day).

Do not get me wrong: You will never hear me say "promotion is bad." That will not pass the lips of the Promo Ho. But you still need to be able to manage your promotion without giving up all your writing time. After all, writing a great book is the best form of promotion.

["Yeah yeah," says the peanut gallery. "Everyone always says that, but we came here for promotion ideas and we don't want to hear, 'write the best book you know how, rainbows and sunshine and kisses.'" So ok, moving on.]

In reality, setting up a profile just about everywhere is easy, and probably won't hurt anything, as long as you're not going to be obsessive about being uber (that was your German for the day) involved in every community. Par example (that was your French for the day), I have a MySpace page which I rarely check. I slapped up the profile years ago and updated it when I started my writing career, and I haven't paid much attention to it since. Every week or so, I log in to delete the comment spam from hot chicks trying to get me to take surveys, accept friend requests, and generally do on-site clean-up. I used to cross-post all my blogs to MySpace too, but I'm lazy and not of infinite time allowances, so I don't do that anymore. The point is, it's free marketing, I have a presence on the site, and it takes next to no time to maintain.

The trick is figuring out where your home base is online and directing people to that. Par example (again), my MySpace page has a link to my main page and my blog. My main page is where you find all my writing info, and my blog is where you find everything you ever wanted to know and more about little old me. All my profiles around the web link to my main page and my blog.

And on my blog, I have links to all my social network sites and various other profiles in my right-hand sidebar, thanks to Profilactic.

Lifestreaming is a new trend in social networking. Basically, the goal of lifestreaming is to get all your social network "feeds" (the pieces of info you update regularly, like your blog) in one centralized place. That's next to impossible, but Profilactic does a really decent job and is my lifestreamer of choice. Others out there are FriendFeed and MyBlogLog and there are a bunch of others I haven't tried.

Think of organizing your online life as creating a treasure map. You can leave little pieces of you all over the internet, but your ultimate goal is for people to return to your home base and find the real good stuff.

Good luck! Leave your tips on social networking and lifestreaming in the comments.

Multiple Email Disorder

If you're anything like me, you have several domain names, each with their own email address. How do you manage all that stuff, and how do you keep your identities separate?

I would suggest getting yourself a Gmail account. In my opinion, Gmail is the easiest way to manage multiple email addresses in one simple, web-based inbox.

Here's a great post on how to get all of your emails consolidated into one Gmail inbox: Using Gmail as Your Universal Email Account

Done that? Good. Now we move on to the pretty stuff.

Unfortunately (because Gmail is awesome in so many other ways), Gmail's default signature option is boring: plain text or plain text, you decide. So if you want your email signatures to have a little flare and you want a different signature for every address, consider installing Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on, so unless you're using the Firefox web browser (why wouldn't you be?) it won't work. Luckily, Firefox is free. Download Firefox.

Greasemonkey is really easy to install. Just go to the Greasemonkey website and click Install Now. Told ya.

Now that you have Greasemonkey installed, you have to install the Gmail HTML signature script. That sounds all technical, but it's not. Just go to the Gmail HTML Signatures website and click Download/Install. It does everything for you.

Now you're ready to go. Open Gmail, and compose a new message. The dropdown menu at the top will contain all your email addresses, and you'll notice a new link to the right that says Create Signature. Click it and a blank box will pop up. Now put whatever HTML code you want in there and voila! Pretty signatures!

It does require a little bit of HTML knowledge, but only really basic easy stuff. For a quick and dirty primer, check out the HTML Cheat Sheet.

Here are some of mine, just to get your brain jogging.

--
Sonja Foust

[For the signature above, I used some code that I'd set up for my blog using Feedburner. That's a post for another day, but it's a cool site to check out if you're interested in optimizing your blogging.]

--
Sonja Foust

[Feedburner again.]

--
Sonja Foust
Webmaster, HeartofCarolina.org



--
Sonja Foust



Pretty cool, huh? So go wild with your new efficiently done email. Have fun! Email is internet word-of-mouth and it's one of the best marketing tools you have!