I’ve recently gone out on submission. Meaning my agent has started to send my manuscript to publishers. I’ve been at this novel-writing business for ten years or so. Longer if I date it from the time I penned the first chapter of my first unfinished novel (40 years). However you look at it, I’ve been on this road for a long while.

I know writers who have gotten agents and sold their novels within a few weeks. I also know writers who have gone through several agents before they’ve sold—writers who haven’t sold for three years, or more, after getting their first agent. So I know better than to get my hopes up. Early on, each time I hit a new plane in my journey, I’d think, “This is it. I’ll sell this year, for sure.”

Several years ago I figured out that it’s never a done deal until it’s a done deal. Until you have a contract, there is no need to get all excited and start fantasizing about how you’ll spend all your money. 

I know enough authors by now, to know that even after you have a contract and even after your book is on store shelves, the journey doesn’t suddenly reach some pot-of-gold ending where the writer lives happily ever after. Whether you sell for a small advance or a big one, the journey is still made up of writing and waiting and revising and waiting and brainstorming and writing and waiting. And new contracts aren’t guaranteed. Sales matter. With. Each. Book.

So I’m looking at my next step in the journey.  The book is with the agents. They’re doing their thing. What am I supposed to be concentrating on? I don’t know how long it will take me to find a publisher. I don’t know if I’ll sell this book or if I’ll have to write more books before I sell. Or maybe I’ll never sell. I can’t be sure, but I need to make plans based on educated guesses. Now that I have an agent but don’t yet have an editor asking for edits, I need to concentrate on two things. I need to write the next book, and I need to try to get a step up on building a platform.

So…as I’ve been learning about marketing, in this age of social media, where things are changing every day, I’ve come to realize that there are some things I can do each day to try to increase my visibility on the net. I am trying different things in regards to commenting on blogs I like, and I’m playing with posting at different times on different social media platforms to see if I can come up with a schedule that is easy on me and that reaches new blog readers.

One thing that I’ve been concentrating on this week is blog grades and technorati authority. No matter who is grading us, incoming links matter.

I’ll post more on blog grades and what we can do to increase them, I think, but for right now I want to talk about incoming links and search engine placement. Incoming links raise our credibility with search engines. There are ways for us to get more incoming links to our blogs. They take some time, but one thing that struck me yesterday is that while I’m working on getting links back to my blog, I can provide others with links to their blog without taking much time at all.

Once a month I can copy and paste URLs from blogs I read, into an open draft of a blog post on my blog, I can link to several blogs each time I post. It costs me almost nothing in time and it has the potential to really help the bloggers I’m reading. It doesn’t matter that my blog readership is dinky. The reason for posting the links is not to send my handful of readers to the blogs I read. It’s primarily to give the blogs I read incoming links.

So when you come over here you will see links under my blog posts. The links have to be in the blog posts, not in a blog roll in the sidebar, to count. And they are reset every month, I believe. I’m not clear on all the rules of the various search engines. If I link to the home page of the blog once a month and then link to individual posts, too, will the blog get credited for more than one link? I may refine that as I go. For now I’m just going to start linking.

 Link Love

• edited to remove links from my front page because I learned more about links and how they hurt my search engine rankings. See the links here. And read more about “link juice” in following articles.

You Might Also Like