I hope you have enjoyed reading the excerpts from both of my
books. Even though so far I am a
“starving author,” I am absolutely loving this new career. On my post of June 28, I mentioned I was
approaching 200 “likes” on my Facebook page, and now I am going for 250,
sitting at 236 as of this writing. I
have to admit I never dreamed I would get 100, much less where I am heading
now. I’m also getting to know other
authors, have purchased some of their books, and have written or plan to write
reviews of their writings, and they are kindly doing the same for me. One thing I always loved about my medical
transcription career was the friendships I developed and still have to this day
with MTs from all over the country. Now
it would seem the same is happening with my communicating with other
authors. It is a true joy to support
other authors, especially new ones like myself, as well as their support of
me.
Along with my writer’s Facebook page
(facebook.com/PattySeitzWriter), I also have liked other author pages and
author publishing pages. I plan to get
active on Twitter and will begin to develop a presence on websites such as
Smashwords and Goodreads. As much as I
would love to spend all my time just writing, you also have to market yourself
by getting involved with social media and in more than one place. Facebook allows you to boost your posts for a
range of fees from which to choose, and that allows for more than just family
and friends to see your post entries. I
have found a lot of author pages spend most of their time promoting their books
or books in the works, which is fine, but my approach is a little different. Obviously I do want people to read my book
and future books, so I do promote them on some of my posts, but I also want
them to get to know me beyond just the writing.
It’s been quite the journey from medical transcriptionist for 37 years
to now working on this new career of writer and blogger. My hope is that, as readers get to know the
person behind the writing, they will want to give my stories a try.
I mentioned in a previous post that I had a somewhat
unpleasant experience with a women’s website message forum, and since then, I
have asked a few authors to like my page, since I had liked theirs, only to
have them not follow up by liking my page.
At first I was disappointed, but then I realized some of these authors
have quite a large following and probably get lots of requests from us newbies
and can’t reply to all of them. At
least, that is my hope as to why they chose not to reciprocate the favor.
I’m actually glad I have had some negative experiences. It made me realize that if I am one of the
lucky ones who does become popular to the point of thousands of readers, I will
make a concerted effort to help and support new writers. It was always such a thrill for me to bring
students into the medical transcription profession, and now I hope someday I
can encourage and help along new authors, just as many are helping me today.
I’m working very hard on my second novel, A Life Well Loved,
the story of my mother’s grandparents, and it’s been wonderful for me to find
out things about them and their parents and siblings that I did not know before
starting this novel and the researching behind it. It’s also bringing back memories of things I
had long forgotten, so this trilogy is bringing to life family members either
from my childhood or even family I never met, but now I feel like I have gotten
to know them through my storytelling.
