Welcome to Robyn Braemer Writes Blog
The introduction post begins now.
I let the website for Robyn Braemer go earlier this year. Dropped it like a hot potato. There were multiple reasons. When I started, the same month I published my first book, The Heart Key, the price was quite reasonable. Every year the price climbed until it was no longer feasible for what I was doing with it. Frankly, I was not doing much with it. As a struggling author, a penny saved is a penny saved and since it was not paying for itself it had to fall away into the abyss.
But I do want a presence out here in the glorious land of the internet, so we're relying on the steady (and reasonably priced -free) blogspot solution.
Let's face it, authors want to write stories. We want to write books. We want to imagine amazing cover art that will draw in a potential reader and grab them by the shirt collar and wow them and, yeah, you get the idea. What we don't want to do is try to sell ourselves and wrack our brains for some marketing copy editing stuff. Sure, it's easy to write up great reviews for restaurants or motels or a book on selling antiques in a limited market but when it comes to selling ourselves it's not so easy.
In fact, selling myself is the hardest thing in the world for me to do. Is that a deflated ego? I think it's part of that Minnesota nice thing you hear about, dontcha know! It's bragging. Very difficult. Painful even. The words kind of freeze and refuse to budge from head to fingertips placed in anticipation on the keyboard. And then there's that professionalism edge. We don't want to sound like a frat boy on Saturday night after Finals Week with a beer in hand (suggesting a sense of say anything connotation) and having had beans for two days straight. It's a thing. Oh, the tales we could tell. I'm sure everyone has eye-popping stories from college.
Not sure how I slipped into the royal we. I think it's a bonding thing. You, the reader, possibly a potential writer (I follow way too many writer sites on FaceBook), and I are thinking the same ideas, albeit in a slightly skewed way. Am I right? You know I'm right.
Funny how a blog which will most likely remain hidden in the vast multitudes of internet traffic gives me a sense of freedom that I never felt with the official Robyn Braemer website. Stuffy and afraid to step off the professionalism rails is what held me in check whenever I made a forced entry, as in when another book was published.
Freedom! Let's let my personality shine! In a few years it's highly likely I will look back on this post and cringe but that's life. You just have to stick your neck out and be yourself. This is me. Irreverent about following rules (except writing rules, of course. I always try to stick to writing rules so that when I break them you know I did it on purpose and not because I possibly flunked English. I never, ever flunked English. I actually tutored English in university. In fact, it always puzzled me why they kept teaching the same thing year after year because we really learned everything we needed to know about English by the end of 7th grade.) but a good irreverent. I don't even have a beer in hand. I always thing about starting up drinking but I always forget.
Toodles!
I let the website for Robyn Braemer go earlier this year. Dropped it like a hot potato. There were multiple reasons. When I started, the same month I published my first book, The Heart Key, the price was quite reasonable. Every year the price climbed until it was no longer feasible for what I was doing with it. Frankly, I was not doing much with it. As a struggling author, a penny saved is a penny saved and since it was not paying for itself it had to fall away into the abyss.
But I do want a presence out here in the glorious land of the internet, so we're relying on the steady (and reasonably priced -free) blogspot solution.
Let's face it, authors want to write stories. We want to write books. We want to imagine amazing cover art that will draw in a potential reader and grab them by the shirt collar and wow them and, yeah, you get the idea. What we don't want to do is try to sell ourselves and wrack our brains for some marketing copy editing stuff. Sure, it's easy to write up great reviews for restaurants or motels or a book on selling antiques in a limited market but when it comes to selling ourselves it's not so easy.
In fact, selling myself is the hardest thing in the world for me to do. Is that a deflated ego? I think it's part of that Minnesota nice thing you hear about, dontcha know! It's bragging. Very difficult. Painful even. The words kind of freeze and refuse to budge from head to fingertips placed in anticipation on the keyboard. And then there's that professionalism edge. We don't want to sound like a frat boy on Saturday night after Finals Week with a beer in hand (suggesting a sense of say anything connotation) and having had beans for two days straight. It's a thing. Oh, the tales we could tell. I'm sure everyone has eye-popping stories from college.
Not sure how I slipped into the royal we. I think it's a bonding thing. You, the reader, possibly a potential writer (I follow way too many writer sites on FaceBook), and I are thinking the same ideas, albeit in a slightly skewed way. Am I right? You know I'm right.
Funny how a blog which will most likely remain hidden in the vast multitudes of internet traffic gives me a sense of freedom that I never felt with the official Robyn Braemer website. Stuffy and afraid to step off the professionalism rails is what held me in check whenever I made a forced entry, as in when another book was published.
Freedom! Let's let my personality shine! In a few years it's highly likely I will look back on this post and cringe but that's life. You just have to stick your neck out and be yourself. This is me. Irreverent about following rules (except writing rules, of course. I always try to stick to writing rules so that when I break them you know I did it on purpose and not because I possibly flunked English. I never, ever flunked English. I actually tutored English in university. In fact, it always puzzled me why they kept teaching the same thing year after year because we really learned everything we needed to know about English by the end of 7th grade.) but a good irreverent. I don't even have a beer in hand. I always thing about starting up drinking but I always forget.
Toodles!
Comments
Post a Comment