On my last post I spoke about developing an action plan following my time at Alt Fiction as the weekend. So one week on, how am I doing?
A quick run through my “to do” list and I can cross off some of my tasks: I’ve written this post (when I finish it!) , I have signed up with the British Fantasy Society, and I have started to look at my web presence.
This is a strange phenomenon and could come across as narcissistic, but the results of a quick Google have shown:
“Richard Barber” – comes up on Google UK on Page 5
“Richard Barber” +horror – puts me on the first page of results in second, third and 5th.
“Richard Barber” + author – comes up on Google UK on Page 2
An interesting observation is that writing this column does not, per se, seem to improve those rankings as I have been using “Google Alerts” and last week’s post never came up (although I did find out about a lot of other Richard Barbers). Perhaps more concerning is that none of these results found my website.
Obviously this is just the start of a process and there’s a long way to go… and I need to keep in mind that this is to support my writing, not to replace it!
At the same time I have reviewed how I promote my writing when I get published. So far I tend to put a message on my website and on Facebook to draw attention to anything I get published. However this time, to be more assertive, I’ve sent emails out to a group of people I know. My first message was on my latest short story “Race” which has just been published in Morpehus Rales IX. Will this make any difference? It’s hard to know yet but I’ve had some positive feedback from the people I have contacted so far.
