Author Buzz

Where Authors & Readers find each other

Yearly archives: 2019

blow your own trumpet — Possibly the most important page on an author’s blog is the about page. Yet, this vital about page is too often left out. Today I am going to take a look at the humble about page and why it is so important for establishing your platform as an author. Without […]

Why your about page matters

20th February 2019 in Blogs and blogging tagged about / Author Platform / blogging / Neil Gaiman / Sir Terry Pratchett by Matthew Brown

H G Wells — The HG Wells Short Story Competition has been announced for 2019 and the theme, this year is “time“. The HG Wells Short Story Competition closes Monday 8th July 2019. Which is the date us regular writers need to have entered by and the date those of us with a Tardis […]

HG Wells Short Story Competition 2019

14th February 2019 in Competitions tagged Competitions / H. G. Wells / short stories by Matthew Brown

books for sale — When I started researching for a post about the UK’s smaller publishers, I soon realised that it was a big topic and that others had already started to cover it really well. So, instead of copying the work of others, I want to give the credit where it is due. […]

Big lists of the UK’s independent publishers

25th January 2019 in Publishers tagged independent publishers / links / lists by Matthew Brown

Author Buzz is pleased to announce a new experiment – the Say Blog. Say is a mix of author quotes, publisher insights, and member opinion. It is open to all members to express their opinion on whatever topic they might wish as well as sharing news on interesting things UK […]

The Say Blog

18th January 2019 in Blogs and blogging tagged blog / blogging / UK / your say by Matthew Brown

Using Twitter — Would it not be amazing if you could prepare a large number of tweets and have them posted to twitter gradually – a few every day? What about if that same method improved reputation management and SEO too while allowing you to reach another audience segment. There are tools that […]

A twitter scheduling trick to increase social reach

16th January 2019 in Social Media tagged automation / reputation / social media / Tumblr / Twitter by Matthew Brown

mistake — Few authors are able to write full time and most of us consider our career a failure. Why is that and what can we do about it? I wrote in my personal blog that I was going to spend this year looking at what authors and writers do that fail. […]

Why authors fail (I think)

14th January 2019 in Becoming an author tagged Andy Weir / authors / failure / research / success by Matthew Brown

When you run a blog, maintaining a publishing schedule can seriously increase its effectiveness. The WordPress Editorial Calendar is one such way to manage this task. The editorial calendar is something we added right after the last big update. It is a tool to help you plan your posts, and […]

Use the calendar to plan your posts

11th January 2019 in Blogs and blogging tagged calendar / planning / posts by Matthew Brown

girls whisper — You may have heard of reputation management perhaps as a part of an SEO tutorial but do you know it can be an important part of self marketing for authors? When it comes to online marketing the search results for your own name or brand are your reputation. Ethically questionable […]

What authors need to know about reputation management

9th January 2019 in Social Media tagged reputation / SEO / social media by Matthew Brown

Short stories are, I feel, an underappreciated tool available to novelists. Not only can writing short form fiction offer a refreshing change of pace but they can be used to both earn money and promote yourself as an author. Here are some of the surprising applications of short stories to […]

Using short stories as a novelist

7th January 2019 in Advice tagged agent / books / income / publicity / readers / short stories by Matthew Brown

Author Buzz has a few ways you can track your writing progress on your blog. WP Progress Bar If you just want a nice progress bar for your posts, then this is the plugin for you. It creates beautiful and easily customised progress bars. If you want to represent information […]

Track writing progress on your blog

4th January 2019 in Blogs and blogging tagged NaNoWriMo / plugins / progress by Matthew Brown

We’ve doubled the file storage limit and increased the maximum files size. As Author Buzz settles into its new home, we’ve been able to expand just how much we offer you. As part of that, we have doubled the total file storage available to blogs for images and other media. […]

Bigger files and more of them

2nd January 2019 in Site News tagged files / pictures / uploads by Matthew Brown