#TravelTuesday A visit to Nora & the Boonsboro Inn

I’ve been lucky to have been able to travel to lots and lots of interesting places thanks to both my legal job and my writing. One of my fav places to visit was Nora Roberts’ Boonsboro Inn.

I went there with friends one Christmas season to see the rooms during their open house and then again the next year for the big July signing where I was able to sign next to none other than Nora. What a fan girl moment for me!

Each of the rooms at the inn has a different literary theme, like:

You can not only enjoy the luxurious rooms, you can visit the Turn the Page Bookstore to pick up releases from Nora or from a number of other authors.

For history buffs, the Antietam National Battlefield is just a few minutes up the road and totally worth the trip.

So on this Travel Tuesday, I’m sharing some photos from one of my trips there!

Hope you enjoyed taking this trip with me!

August 30, 2011

To Blog or Not to Blog…

That is the question. Sometimes it’s damn hard to find something to write about or in which you might be interested. It’s not a problem uncommon to bloggers who regularly write.

I even found an interesting article about IBM’s Blog Muse which helps bloggers get past blogger’s block.

Unfortunately, I understand the system is not readily available to all bloggers. 🙁

That means the rest of us will still have to decide whether to blog and what to blog about. Which leads to this question:

What would you like to see me blog about?!

I know you love those luscious men on Wednesdays and the excerpts from myself and friends on Wednesdays, but what about the rest of the time? What things would you like to see?

January 20, 2009August 18, 2009

Building an Effective Web Presence Part 4

Part 4: Getting people to visit your site

You may be asking yourself, as a pre-published writer, why should I worry about getting people to visit my site?

If youâ€™ve been reading the publishing news (and Iâ€™d highly recommend that if you havenâ€™t already subscribed to Publishers Lunch that you do), publishing had its Black Wednesday recently. Layoffs at Simon & Schuster and Houghlin Mifflin announcing that it had a freeze on acquisitions. Lots going on at other publishing houses as well.

What does that mean for all of us? Maybe less slots available for commercial fiction.

If youâ€™re a publisher and have a choice between two pre-published writers â€“ one who has regular visitors to their website and one who doesnâ€™t â€“ who would you choose? One has demonstrated that they know how to get publicity and may already have an established group of people to notify about their book.

So how do you get people to visit your website?

Iâ€™m a firm proponent of blogging based on my own experience. I have nearly 4 times the visitors I had two years ago since I started blogging. But like anything else, if youâ€™re not going to commit to doing it regularly, donâ€™t start.

Whatâ€™s regular? Thatâ€™s really up to you. Once a week? Thatâ€™s fine as long as you let your readers know and they can expect that weekly post.

If youâ€™re going to post more than once a week, consider themed days. I do that so readers know when to visit. Some like the fun days, some like the excerpts. I do each on the same day each week so people know when to come back.

Also â€“ you can feed your blog to various other sites, increasing your presence on the web. If youâ€™ve got friends with blogs, get together and put together guest blogs. Share banners or links with those friends or get listed on other similar sites as well.

You can also consider writing articles to draw traffic to your site.

Finally, make sure you get listed on the search engines by submitting your site to the search engines and by making sure youâ€™ve got the right metatags in your website (ask your programmer on how to do the metatags). That will help people find you on the web.

Hope this Tuesday Tip was helpful!