by Joe Bunting |
If you’re trying to build your author platform, you want your site both to look good and be highly functional. Plugins are tools that do both, and they are one of the biggest reasons to upgrade from a free Wordpress site to a self-hosted Wordpress site.
In this post, I’m going to briefly describe sixteen plugins I use personally. My hope is that this list helps you create a strong author platform that brings you thousands of readers. That’s not too much to hope for, right?
by Joe Bunting |
“Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas,” says Frank Warren, “of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.”
In November 2004, Frank Warren gave out a few hundred postcards to strangers with simple instructions: write a secret you’ve never told anyone before, and mail it back. It was supposed to be a small, community art project, but then something strange happened. All the postcards came back. And then something stranger happened, he kept getting new ones.
Secrets went viral.
Since then, Frank has received over 500,000 postcards, many of which are available on the project’s blog, postsecret.com, or in one of his five books of secrets. The remarkable thing is not how widely Postsecret has spread. What’s shocking is that no one thought of it before.
by Joe Bunting |
“Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” says Charlan Nemeth. “It wakes us right up.”
The single best part of running this blog is the amazing community that has sprung up. One reader recently told me, “I have to say your blog is the bomb. It’s got the best, most lively and connected community.” I couldn’t agree more. Our Practitioners are the coolest blog readers on the Internet.
We tend to be some of the nicest, too. I love seeing all the nice comments after someone’s practice, “This was so great! I loved it. Thanks for sharing this with us! Yada yada yada.” Overall, we’re a very encouraging group, and I love that about us.
However, I recently read some research that has me questioning our niceness and asking some tough questions:
Does encouragement make you a better writer?
Will being nice help us improve as a community?
Do we need to be more critical of each other’s work?
by Joe Bunting |
Stop being so busy.
Busy is the enemy of Art.
Busy is the avoidance of Pain, and Pain is the only way to grow.
Art comes from Pain.
Busy kills productivity.
You will never be happy when you are Busy. But you will never be sad either.
Busy, like all drugs, can become an escape. It will always end in failure.
Be where your butt is, where your feet are. Be with your fingers and in the lining of your Lungs. Going in. Going out. Your shoulders relaxing into the world.
by Joe Bunting |
I used to think you should start a novel on page one with a bang, that you should throw the reader straight into conflict. I heard agents and publishers want a novel full of conflict, one that immediately hooks them, and I thought, I can do that. So I cut out all my world building and backstory and focused on the central plot from the very beginning.
Now I know how misguided I was. While it’s true you can take too long to introduce conflict to your novel, there is such a thing as too much, too soon.
