September's Here

It's September. I'm back! I didn't go anywhere, but I thought I would take a few weeks away from the blog to do a bit of a reset, and to get my plans together for the near future. There are a lot of exciting things on the horizon, and I hope I have the right steps to get there.

Hanging Out on Medium

I've been trying to ramp up my presence on Medium. While so far all of it has been reposts of older works or excerpts of longer projects, I am getting ready to start producing more original content for my account. I'm still in the editing phase for what I've written, so more should be posted in the next couple of weeks.

My only issue with the platform is that I can't access all of the data that I need to. I can get data points such as views, referring websites, reads (and how a ten-line poem only gets a 33% read rate is beyond me...)--but I can't get data that helps me understand who pays for a Medium account. I have yet to make a dime from this site, and if I knew the demographics of who pays for their accounts, I think I would be in a better position to craft articles that target a better defined audience. It seems to me that a lot of articles making money in the space where I write is the writer who writes about writing. It's a bit redundant, but I think I can work with that.

Two Down, Two to Go

It's also the time to check in with my yearly goal of getting four works published by the end of the year. So far, I have If It Was New York, Summer 2009 and "A Picture at Sunset" published in Indiana's Best Emerging Poets 2019. I still have to get two more out there. September is usually when the last round of submissions go out, so hopefully I'll get an acceptance before December 31. If not, two original pieces published on Medium shouldn't be that hard to complete.

One Set of Research, Two Stories

I loved researching all things pop culture for that story I was writing set in 1970. The problem? My research led down another path for another story. I'm not abandoning the first story, but I had to see where this second on went. The first story is a lot of teenage angst/confusion/drama condensed into a few months for the main characters. The second one starts in the same era, but spans decades for the main characters. It seems like a daunting task to create a story that will probably have huge time gaps without seeming like it skips a lot, but I think that sharing the research between these two stories will eventually end up making writing both stories a little more efficient.

The Great Website Debate

This blog can get frustrating at times, with a lot of that frustration due to limitations of Blogger. I like that there is the ability to add the other pages, but updating them is quite a feat to get it to look right. I also don't like running multiple blogs on this platform, and I think that merging TSW and Book Review Bin is long overdue, especially since this change may get me more Fiverr spotlight gigs again.

I've always thought about transferring the blog to an actual website, but I don't know if I am ready yet to take on that kind of task. That, and there is always the debate about the cost vs. the effort spent. It wouldn't take much to buy a domain name, but the ability for any money spent to turn into a profit is always on my mind. I don't know if transferring this to a website would give me the ability to break even on domain/hosting costs, which is what I'm looking for before I get started.

And this wasn't the only website I was planning. I've been working on an idea for more than two years now that's associated with books and reading, but like transferring the blog I would need to find a way to make the website profitable. I know that I couldn't create all of the content on my own, and I definitely don't want to be an exposure-only outlet for other writers. This project is stalled until I can find a way to make it profitable enough to pay contributors. This is the time when I wish we could all go back in time and hit up the Social Register to find bored, rich benefactors to fund our work.

I'm still planning and planning. I even tried to make an editorial calendar for content last year, but I never actually got it off the ground. Eventually I will have to execute some part of this idea, or I'm just wasting my time.

Your Call to Action

I can't leave this post without a blatant self-promo section. If you want more of what I offer, Patreon is a good place to start. And don't forget to check out my work on Medium. I'll be back next week with another rousing account from the writing world!