I went to post something to Haunt Jaunts Facebook page last night and happened to notice the fans had increased to 39. And best of all it wasn’t even people I knew!

My dear friends didn’t leave me out there hanging with no fans in the beginning. Tracie and her mom and aunt, then Brenda, Kim Smith, and even Wayne signed up.

Then I ran the Halloween Blog Contest and got more fans that way. (FB has since revised their policies on such practices, so I won’t be doing that again!)

However, I think I got up to 17 then.

I’ve been growing slowly ever since. Which is pretty cool. (And I didn’t even know it! I think I was at 20 something, like 22, last I knew.)

Twitter took off all of a sudden in December. I went from 400 to 500, 600, 700 to 850 followers in a month! But Facebook was just sort of stagnate.

Until recently. 39 fans? Okay, so it’s no 850, but it might as well be. People actually took the time to check me out. (At least long enough to hit the fan button.) Sweet!

Slowly, slowly, I’m growing more visitors. It’s all very exciting. And fun. I love living in the Internet Era! What a blast!

Well, I’m going to do something else I’ve long been wanting to do. Last year I launched Haunt Jaunts, this year I’m resurrecting Press Scribe. Except, there’ll be some changes:

1. I’m renaming it to The Sociable Scribe
2. Instead of a website, I’m going to use Wordpress to create a blog-style website
3. I’m not going to sell myself short and offer ridiculously priced packages like I did with Press Scribe
4. I’m not limiting myself to just press releases like I did with Press Scribe

Now I just have to come up with a killer tag. Press Scribe was easy. “Your PRescription for success!”

Press releases to garner PR for companies…the subliminal undertones were there. I liked that.

But now I’m branching out into social media marketing overall. It’s not just press releases, though I’ll still offer packages which include that too.

There are other companies who do what I want to do:

• PRechnology (probably the closest to what I hope to offer as far as packages and such)
• Media Associates
• Social Media Marketing

But none of them have a super snazzy tag. I was thinking something like “Advice on using social media marketing to create buzz, bandy and ballyhoo for you.”

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but…I kind of like it. That’s me.

We’ll see what other ideas I come up with. Once my mind starts going, there’s no telling where it’ll lead!

I bought the domain yesterday afternoon. I’ll work on getting everything going today.

There’s a lot of possibilities with this. Ever since Press Scribe, I knew this was something I could FINALLY combine my B.A. from UofA (Communications degree) with my love for the Internet and writing. It satisfies my entrepreneurial itch.

But with the Sociable Scribe, I can even take it further and combine my love of blogging into a platform to showcase all my ideas and perhaps snag clients that way.

But if not, maybe I’ll become a go-to blog for social media marketing. (And of course I plan to have my blog set up to earn revenue.)

Either way, it’s a new adventure and I’m really excited for the challenge.

Ever since I got better and decided to go after Haunt Jaunts hot and heavy, I had it in mind I was going to make money with it. I’ve read of others bloggers doing it. A lot of the ones I’ve seen interviewed are making anywhere from $30,000 to $75,000!

I sure wasn’t making that at Families.com, but I was making something. And I knew they had to be making something because they were paying 20+ of us bloggers monthly, plus our quarterly bonuses.

I learned a lot at Families.com about the importance of including pictures with posts, SEO,  linking, and writing entertaining, informative posts frequently. I went from 1,200 hits my first month to between 40,000 and 50,000 hits/month when I left two years later.

Which was impressive to me, but the Superstars (as I liked to think of them) snagged 100,000+ hits a month. And since our bonuses were based on hits, well…it behooved us to get as many hits as possible!

Some people knew how to work it. Plus, they wrote about timely topics that naturally generated tons of hits. (Think Britney Spears, weight loss, etc.)

Then during my brief stint with Examiner.com I learned about embedding videos and polls, the importance of links/lists to Google rankings, and a little more about Digg.

When I started to really put all that together with Haunt Jaunts, I noticed I did okay with hits on the blog.

But let me back up a sec. I had BIG ideas about having a Haunt Jaunts website that listed haunted places. I planned on having affiliate links, like Travelocity, Amazon, plus Google AdSense that would help me earn money.

However, that was a LOT of work to compile the lists. I also quickly realized my blog was (a) more fun and (b)  getting more hits. Also, there were other sites similar to mine, most with better graphics and set ups. But none of them really had a blog.

Hmmm…here was my niche. But could I earn money with just a blog?

Naively I thought you just throw up an AdSense link and that’s that. The bucks will come rolling in.

Not so. There’s a lot of tricks to it. The ones I’ve found to make the most difference so far include:

1. Having “above the page/above the fold” ads. (Ads near the top of your page/post.)
2. Ad size. The bigger the better.
3. As many ads as possible. (Google currently allows 3 per page.)
4. Color. Ads that blend in with a site’s color scheme do better.
5. HITS! This is the most important. More hits translate into more page impressions which translates into increased page per hit percentages. Oh, and if people click on those ads, BINGO! You can score big!

Amazon hasn’t worked for me at all. Problogger and my friend Chris V. say they’ve had luck with that. That hasn’t generated any funds for me –yet. I did recently redesign my Amazon ads so we’ll see what happens with those.

The biggest revenue-generator last year was from a company who wanted me to write about a link and include it in a post. That’s all I had to do! It was a fun assignment and easy money. I’d like to snag more of those gigs!

I also signed up with a new company, ReadySite, that I put on HJ today. As well as I revamped some of my Google AdSense ads and shuffled around some of my widgets to give HJ what I hope is a more pleasing visual feel. (In my efforts at the very end of last year to retool some things I felt I was getting too commercially-feeling. I wasn’t liking it.)

Because yes, I want to make money and entice clicks, but I also want to have a nice site with good info. If it’s all cluttered and visually distracting, who’s going to (a) notice the links to click, or (b) and most important, visit in the first place?!

So, we’ll see how I do going forward. The great thing is, nothing’s written in stone. Things can be changed any time.

It’ll be fun to see what happens from here on out. If I learn some new tricks or anything that works spectacularly (or fails spectacularly) I’ll post here to try and help others avoid my mistakes!

I’ve been moaning to my writing gal pals (specifically Chris of Candid Canine and Jan of the newly launched Your Space and Time) how I’ve been on this awful rejection streak. It’s lasted like six months! (But it feels like a freaking lifetime!)

Last year, even with starting it off one-handed, sick from the chemo, and battling for my life, I somehow managed to write. It actually inspired me to keep going.

It was also one of my most productive fiction submission years since 2007. (I submitted 46 stories then. I did 29 last year, compared to only 10 in 2008! However, I did have some major life upheaval in 2008, so I do have to take that into consideration. Yet overall I was still down. In 2005 and 2006 I was submitting 50 and 60 pieces a year. In 2004 I did 80!)

Anyway, when I got the news I had cancer I did some soul searching and decided, as much as Wayne hates it and thinks I’m wasting my time and tries to discourage me with his pessimism, writing is my passion and not pursuing it denies my authentic self happiness. Which is just no longer acceptable.

So…I set out on a quest to write, write, write and submit, submit, submit during my good weeks. (Meaning, my non-chemo, wretching into my pukey bucket every five seconds weeks.)

I was on a roll until mid-August. With the exception of one flash at Flashes in the Dark, everything else was getting rejected. Or the publishers were going out of business. Or they flat just never responded period.

I got discouraged and decided to instead focus all of my energy on Haunt Jaunts.

I told myself I’d also work on Shadyside, my horror novel, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was suddenly gripped with not being able to handle the rejections.

Which has never happened to me. Rejections usually inspire me to try harder. Not this time. They were paralyzing me from acting. Both writing fiction and submitting.

But by the end of last year, I had that itch again. (And it wasn’t just from the case of Shingles I got! It was that itch to write.)

I’m never short on story ideas. I was getting more and more every day. The red book I store them all in was growing and growing.

I know Life can be cruel, but no way would my Muse be sending all these ideas if I wasn’t supposed to do something with them.

So, I resolved to get back on the horse. It throws me off again? Tough. Wipe off the dirt and get back on again. And keep repeating that process until I’m able to stay on that darn horse!

Well, what do you know?

Sylvia from Bylines, which I’d been featured in twice before, wrote with an acceptance congratulating me on my essay being included in this year’s calendar too! I had given up hope on that one because I usually hear back from her way before December. She’d had some Life challenges too which had caused a delay, but the calendar would still be released.

Woohoo! That was my first streak-breaker!

Then this morning I checked emails and had one from Lori at Flashes in the Dark. She was writing to tell me that my submission “Between the Wolf and the Dog” (my first one not just for 2010, but as part of my “Ride That Horse No Matter What!” campaign) would go live on January 18th.

SWEET!

Streak broken! Confidence reboosted. For now I have a grip on the reigns.

But if the darn horse bucks me off down the path, which I know it will, woo doggie, I’ll be ready to brush myself off, tend any bruises, and get back on it again. Yee haw!

Yep, that’s me. Cowgirl Courtie, saddled up and ready to ride in 2010!

This morning I saw an email from an old writing friend waiting for me in my inbox. It was from Jan Christensen. Who I also know as Ant Jan. (It goes back to when we were both more active on the Short Mystery Fiction Yahoo!Group.)

Anyway, in addition to dishing a little bit about writing, she was also dropping me a line to let me know she had finally launched her blog, Your Space and Time. (Which, I went to check out and was instantly impressed by. Lots of good stuff there. I highly recommend it.)

It was as I was replying back to Ant Jan that I started thinking about my many pen names.

See, she knows me as “Courts.” I started using Courts Mroch as a writing moniker back in 1999 when I first started writing mystery shorts. But I’d had the name before that.

I’d gotten it when I played on the women’s club lacrosse team at the University of Arizona. I’d forgotten about it, though, until several years later when I took a job at the law firm Snell & Wilmer.

My attorney was also a UofA grad, as well as an alum Lax Cat himself. He couldn’t believe I’d played goalie, so I brought him in the proof: a pic of me with my team. Our coach had given us all nicknames and had printed them on our copies. He saw the “Courts” and said, “What a perfect name for someone working in the legal field. And if you ever do write those mysteries, that’d be a catchy pen name.”

So, a few years later when I did start writing, I remembered that and now many who first met me back when I was starting out know me as Courts.

While I never did get my mystery career in gear (or at least not yet; I guess there’s always still hope), I’ve since acquired a couple other pen names.

• C. Le Mroch – I use this one for my horror stories. I’ve had a couple stories published under it. I’m hoping to truly finish Shadyside, my first horror novel, this year and take a stab at getting that published.
• Mackenzie Pryor – This is my romance nom de plume. I haven’t actually completed any of the romances I’ve started, but I have some so far underway it’s a crime they’re not done yet. All it will take is a good couple weeks being disciplined about writing every day, but do you think I do it? Of course not. Because I know that’s all it will take and think, “Oh, I can easily get to that.”
• Courts Mroch – I already covered it, but I do have 3 ideas for mystery series. I never thought I’d be a mystery series kind of writer. I sure didn’t start off thinking along those lines. (I started off more suspense and usually seem to gravitate that way.) However, as I’ve gotten older the ideas for series have come so…one day I hope to actually pursue them!

When I first signed on with PublishAmerica back in 2004, I did so with my eyes wide open. I read all the chatter about how bad they were. How they were a POD/vanity publisher. How they didn’t have much in the way of submission standards and would take any old author, just look at the experiment those sci fi authors did. (Supposedly well established sci fi authors got together and threw together a crap book that PA accepted for publicatlion, even though it was ripe with all kinds of errors.)

I agreed they were POD…as in Print on Demand in the form of using that for their publishing method. But they never charged me a dime to produce my book, so they weren’t vanity. But, as people still do, they associate POD automatically with vanity.

However, I decided to take my chances. I looked at it as a learning experience.

Here’s what I learned:

1. The importance of editing. PA had a sort of editing process, but, no, it was neither very good nor very elaborate. I was assigned an editor, but they didn’t do much in the way of editing my work. When Beneath the Morvan Moon was released, there were at least five errors of various proportions (mostly typos or left out words) that readers pointed out to me. One or two I see even in the big New York publisher books. Five was too many.
2. The importance of price point. The price was too high. Upon release PA offered special pricing, $18.95. For a trade paperback book that was 80,000 words long (250 pages), that was about $4 higher than what most trade paperbacks were going for. But the $18.95 was a special price. It was a new release discounted price from the real price of $21.95. Well, that’s just ridiculous but…
3. I’m my own worst enemy. I learned I could talk myself into believing my book would be different. Somehow it’d become a hit, I could negotiate with them to lower the price, and I’d work my butt off to sell, sell, sell. Well, that all sounds nice, but what it boiled down to was I wasn’t being realistic. I talked myself into believing something other than the facts that were at hand. Which was PA’s pricing stunk and…
4. Publisher’s have reps –some better than others. If a publisher isn’t listed with Ingram or Baker & Taylor, or they don’t accept returns, booksellers don’t take the author seriously. When I first published PA didn’t accept returns. It’s hard enough for a first time author with an independent press to get bookstores to agree to a signing, but PA made it even harder.Which leads to my next revelation…
5. Promotion! The harder an author has to work doing promotion, the less time it leaves for the writing. I fully understand that I have to do some face time when marketing and promoting my own book. But when I have to spin my wheels finding all sorts of other avenues to do that because regular avenues are closed down to me…it wastes a lot of valuable time.
6. Back to the importance of price point. But the number one thing truly is the book’s price point. Not only did PA’s stink, but their pricing methodolgy didn’t make an iota of sense. Instead of lowering my book’s price after 4 years and way slow (okay, void) sales, PA ended up raising my book’s price from the ridiculous amount of $21.95 to the completely ludicrous amount of $27.95. Come on, for a trade paperback? Who the hell is going to buy that?
7. Integrity with royalities. Not that I’d made much in the way of royalties (thanks in part to their crap pricing), I’d had no trouble with receiving royalties statements. Even when I’d sold no books, I got my statements on time telling me as much. But last year I attended Southern Festival of Books and the organizers ordered a bunch of copies. I never saw a royalty check from that. However, almost a year later I received a royalty statement saying I owed $30 for the return of my books. I called PA immediately to cry foul. “How can you ding me when you never paid me to begin with?” No response. I emailed and asked the same thing, “Hey, you’re trying to say I owe you $30 but you never paid me that to start with! What’s up?” Again, no response. So I learned that, yes, PA is pretty shitty about screwing authors out of royalties if they find a way to do it.
8. A lesson in desperation. The number one thing I learned is I’ll never get desperate enough to use PA ever again. Their products are way too overpriced for the marketplace. They know how much they expect each author to sell to friends and relatives to make a profit. And if you happen to sell beyond that and have a hit on your hands, great! They’ll do even better. But overall their concept plays on author emotions and on the kindheartedness and support of friends and loved ones to buy an author’s book.

Overall it was an excellent learning process. However, I hope to find a different publisher for one of my next books and have a better, more positive learning experience!

The past few years I’ve really toyed with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo. Lots of writers I either know or follow do it.

Take for instance Lisa Logan (whose blog is Writing in My Wildest Dreams.) One of her recent posts is about how she’s participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. It’s her fourth year. The projects she did in the previous three years all have been published or are under contract. (She shares some great tips for how to successfully cross the finish-line, btw.)

Her post was really inspiring and motivating. I’d love to do it and be like Lisa, but November sucks for me to dedicate time to just my fiction. Not with Thanksgiving in there. But this year I thought, “Even with Thanksgiving I can do it! Or at least I can try. I’ve been wanting to for so long now!”

Last year I vowed to…but that’s when I was starting to go downhill from what I’d later learn was the cancer ravaging me. I was lucky to accomplish much of anything back then.

The November before (2007) Wayne was in the process of moving home after a five month separation. (We were separated because he’d taken a job in Florida and we were planning to move. I’d stayed behind to sell the house.) The last thing I wanted to do was take any more time away from my marriage. I was too happy to have him home and not have the stress of constantly keeping the house clean weighing me down!

But this year, ever since September, I’ve been thinking about NaNoWriMo. Which of the many book ideas I have would I pick to be my NaNoWriMo project?

That was part of the problem. I couldn’t decide. And then Wayne informed me he has two weeks off and he’s going to be taking vacation, where do I want to go? Plus there’s Thanksgiving, and I have to get my port out…well, that cinched it. I know what happens when I’m interrupted too much. I meltdown and don’t write. The last thing I need is to start another book and get pulled away from it and leave it hanging.

So, I’ve decided while I’m officially not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I am going to use the time I do have to finish one of the books I have started.

Here it is November 3rd though and I’m still trying to figure out which book to concentrate on! Shadyside (a horror), The Girl of His Dreams (a romance), The Dungeness Curse (a paranormal romance), Dot’s Girls (women’s fiction), The Painting Circle (women’s fiction), or A Past Life Love Story (romance/women’s fiction)…decisions, decisions.

Maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow!

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, I wish you speedy fingers and strong cups of coffee or tea!