Being an author is about way more than writing books. Every Friday I post The Week in Links- a list of writing, book marketing, fantasy…articles from the week. I started this series to help authors and drive more traffic to my blog. I’ve done more specific resource posts which were popular. Some writing and fantasy sites do a list of links either daily or weekly. I had the resources to do my own curated list. Here’s a look behind The Week in Links.
It starts on Monday
It takes way too long to go through all my resources on Friday. I start writing the post on Monday since I read all my resources every day looking for things to share on social media. It also helps me keep up with any publishing, genre or marketing trends.
Where does it come from?
I’ve spent years collecting writing, fantasy, nerdy websites. They’re in Feedly now. I used Google Reader before it went away. Since I like lists, I categorizes each of my resources under Writing, Fantasy, Horror, Nerdy, Social Media Marketing… Feedly is the first place I go when creating The Week in Links.
Paper.li is the second…and third.
“Paper.li gives you access to an ever-expanding universe of articles, blog posts, and rich media content. We automatically process more than 250 million social media posts each day, extracting & analyzing over 25 million articles. Only Paper.li lets you tap into this powerful media flow to find exactly what you need, and publish it easily on the web and in social media.”
In short, Paper.li lets your create your own online magazine. You provide the resources–websites, Twitter hashtags and lists– the site organizes the content and publishes them daily at a time that you set. People who subscribe to your paper get it emailed to them at your set time.
I created my own Paper.li in hopes of using that to boost my author platform. It looks cool. They gave me a widget so I could add the paper to a blog/website. And more importantly, it’s free. I couldn’t get people to read, subscribe or share the paper, so I gave up on promoting it and now I use it as another aggregator like Feedly. I also read Jane Friedman’s Paper.li Best Tweets for Writers Daily.
SF Signal does a series- SF/F/H Link Post. It’s published daily. I love this and check it out every day.
Deciding what to put in the post
If I take every useful article I come across and put it in The Week in Links, the post would be way too long.
-The date of the articles is a main deciding factor. People tend to share things they published months or even years ago. That’s the beauty of evergreen content. If the article wasn’t published that week, then I can’t put it in The Week in Links. Some articles don’t have a date. In that case, I read the comments. Those always have dates. If there’s no date and no comments, I add it to The Week in Links since there’s no way of knowing when it was published.
-I do a mix of what you would find interesting and what I find interesting.
-Some sites are my go-to. They usually end up in every Week in Links.
Social Media Examiner
Tor.com
SF Signal
The Creative Penn
Writer Unboxed
Social Media Just for Writers
Jami Gold
-I try not to include more than 2 links from any one resources. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable. Social Media Examiner tends to have the best and easy to follow advice on social media marketing.
Deciding the title
The post title for The Week in Links is something like this: The Week in Links 11/20/15 X-Files, Jessica Jones, Agent Carter
What content gets highlighted in the title depends on what I think would get people to read the post if the title was all they saw. Also, if more than one site talks about the same topic such as NaNoWriMo, then it’s put in the title. I also try to keep in my trending topics. For instance, Jessica Jones is in the title because it was trending on Twitter the day I posted The Week in Links.
That’s how The Week in Links comes about. What other behind the scenes funness would you like to know?
