The much neglected blog

I have been pondering the future of this blog for some time. It's just not attracting enough of an audience for me to spend much time on it. But then again my twitter account is not giving me the return it once did.

A year of more ago I had about 8000 followers. A typical day of writing and regular tweeting would see maybe 5,000 impressions. on some day I remember seeing the number into the teens (of thousands) - 13,000 or 14,000. Now after writing and tweeting for an afternoon I've had less than 700 impressions - despite now having 11,000 followers.

So where does that leave me social media wise. Well, I do have a Facebook page. I post there occasionally but it's got maybe 50 followers. I could probably spend more time and get this number higher but that has its own problems. You see it's all about effort.

 I have a day job. It's always going to come ahead of my writing because it pays the mortgage. This is not a complaint. I like my job. I'm fortunate that way. And I also like my home life. When I get in I want to spend time with my wife. This means I have little time for this writing malarkey and it seems that time has three or four competing things pulling on it.

There's the writing. Without this being an author is just a lie.

Then there's the submitting the finished results of such writing.

Third there's trying to build a social media following

And fourth there's the additional promotion of books. Completing an interview takes time.

If I up the amount I spend on social media I don't get the others done. Not without impacting the other parts of my life (not an option).

I had thought twitter was my thing. it gave me a high level of interactions and didn't eat too much into my time. That's no longer the case. So how else to spread the word.

YouTube? Vlogging? No, basically no. I'm not the type. I'm in my fifties now and whereas I'm not saying all us old types don't do this vlogging thing, I'm saying if I was ever going to take it up I would have needed to be in my twenties when I started. This version of me just can;t be bothered with all the palaver - learning all about the tech and how to edit etc. It's just not me.

Anyway I know I'm just bitching a whole deal of first world problems. So please let me reassure you I'm not really bitching. I'm trying to explain what I'm going to do. The blog isn't going to be killed off. It's not going to be updated as often as it was once - although maybe more often that the last two months (not hard).

Facebook will be posted to from time to time. Although I don't see myself ever becoming a real fan of it. Twitter will continue to be my main foray into social media-land but I will be on the lookout for other avenues. If you know of any please let me know.

On the writing side - I suppose I should include some writing news - I have signed contracts for two novellas - both featuring my everyman character Ben Williamson. These are a Parallel Life and the Intersection. These should be coming out later in 2018. I've seen the cover for the Intersection. It's good. And writing, well I'm doing some again after my layoff when my wife's health took a turn for the worse in January.

I've written over 50K of the sequel to my 2017 novel the Stairs Lead Down. This book, titled Breath of Imagined Dead, sees me attempting to turn a standalone novel into a trilogy. It's going to end on a bit of cliffhanger.

And I'm working on another Ben Williamson novella - in the hope the first two sell well enough to justify another. It's called Room 1B and features several familiar characters, well familiar to anyone who reads wither of the first two.

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