Fun fact: for years, I had always wanted to use this concept for a book cover. What I had in mind was a single figure of a woman with her back to the camera. Everything was in black and white, except for the woman’s red dress.
It’s called The Lockdown Journal. This is where I talk about what it’s like being an indie creator during the current COVID-19 pandemic. The show will be on a limited run — one hopes this pandemic doesn’t last all year — and will have a new episode every Wednesday.
So, like so many of us, I’ve been stressed out by recent events. My productivity has gone down so much it’s not even funny. So I decided to do something new instead of just staring at the laptop screen for hours.
On a recent trip to Hong Kong, my traveling companions and I found a lovely shop Japanese bookshop. As a moderate consumer of Japanese TV shows, Japanese movies and the occasional j-rock band, I felt duty-bound to check it out.
A business website is like your Facebook profile photo — you don’t want it to make you look old. And unlike getting plastic surgery for yourself, no one will judge you for giving your website a facelift. I generally think people ought to do whatever they want to their faces so long as they hire professionals who know what they’re doing. Come to think of it, I feel the same way about websites. I totally judge badly-built websites, and if you’ve read that SEO starter guide, you know Google will too.
Mailing lists continue to be an effective marketing tool for companies and websites. Yes, marketing on social media sites are quite popular (and I recommend you do that too), your reach is entirely dependent on their terms. For instance, Facebook alone decides whether or not a person sees your company page updates on their feed. So even if you have tens of thousands of likes on your page, only a fraction of them will actually see your posts. It didn’t use to be that way, but when Facebook decided that was how they were going to do things, there was nothing their users could do about it. And what happens when a social media site goes out of business? Remember Friendster?
I’ve actually done a cover for this story before. It was for the original, novella-length version of Playing Autumn, which was included in a limited-run romance anthology, and published as a limited-run print edition.
The new version is a novel, and the romance is a bit steamier. So Mina asked me to do a “spicier” cover.
Too many websites these days (including a couple of mine!) are stuck in the days before mobile devices became a thing. And by “became a thing”, I mean it became a popular choice of machine to view websites on.
