It has been a while since I’ve written one of these. I’ve been meaning to, but my busy schedule took control for a little bit.
I have three topics in the title, because I’ve seen the most growth in these areas. Let’s go one by one.
Blogging
As I mentioned here before, my blog has grown over 230% since last year. But I’ve written the same amount of posts. I’ve covered the same amount of topics. I’ve kept the same schedule for writing, editing, and posting blogs. So, what was the difference?
For one, I learned how to market my blog better. I got more active on writing Facebook groups. I searched, liked, commented, and followed other blogs. I interacted with many more brilliant bloggers. Be a friend and make a friend. I’ve found some great blogs that way. I also found that certain WordPress blogs promote my work and let me get feedback like on Go Dog Go Cafè every Monday.
Also, since I had been blogging for two and a half years by last January, I had run out of the more stereotypical posts. I wrote about more creative topics like how many rejections is too many and if we should use freelancer or another title. So, I still covered the same topics, but I went deeper.
Since I graduated college, I was able to invest more time into my blog, which helped so much. Having that little extra time to get myself out there more as a writer was key.
More research
It’s coming to a point where research has to be 60% of writing and editing. Every time I think I understand, I find more information that I had never heard of before.
Now, I have been around for a while. Where could I possibility have found this new information? Good question.
Some new information is from Facebook groups. Upon acceptance, they had files with backdates with tons of answered questions. And the groups are there if you need any more help.
I also became a member of AWP recently since I’ll be attending their conference in March. They had a great series where experts went over querying, editing, and more. I’ll be updating my querying series with some of their advice soon. But their videos on that series are still worth checking out!
I also recently got the Writer’s Market 2020, which is one of the biggest nerd books for writing jobs. It had good information about some publishing houses to query, agents (though if you’re looking specifically for just this, I’d suggest their Guide to Literary Agents 2020), trade journals, consumer magazines, writing contests, and more. They even had a multi-page graph that lists how much writers make on average for certain jobs.
I decided to do what I had been meaning to do for about two years now: get more active on Twitter. I found two tags that stuck out to me the most: #WritersCommunity and #writerslift (also spelled #writerlift). No one had told me about these before. But these two tags had gotten me over 3,000 more followers in little over a month.
There’s a huge community on there that’s about 99% friendly. It’s sometimes a ‘follow me, I’ll follow you back’ atmosphere, but they ask about who you are, not just what you’re selling. The more active you are, the more you interact with the same people and make friends. They also have promotional threads to help out indie authors, blogs, and more. I wish someone would’ve told me about it earlier (even though I’m still not a big social media person).
Another big hashtag though is #MSWL or Manuscript Wishlist. This is a tag literary agents use to say what kind of manuscripts they are looking for. It’s interesting to see what agents are looking for.
This part of my journey seems like a big burst of information, but I hope it helps you. Let me know if you have any questions! Or if you want to share your own stories, please leave a comment below!
I’ll try to update this series more this year. I’m hoping to accomplish more. Write to you soon!
Robin LeeAnn 
Hi. Thanks for the tip about Go Dog Go Cafè. Never heard of it before. Off to check it out. 🙂
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It’s a great community over there. You’ll like it.
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You’re making a lot of good progress here, Robin! I do know that twitter is awesome for writers. I engage with the writing community on there often and they are always cool and helpful. Great post!
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Thank you!
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Thank you, Robin, wonderful information saved your blog review. Reading all this will be a big learning journey too. Fabulous🐞
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Thank you! I’m glad you liked it!
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