Stephen Watkins, Writer is not wholly abandonned – but for the immediate future, I probably won’t be updating much here. But never fear, dear friends. I still update regularly at my main blog, The Undiscovered Author. Click there on that link to get thee hither.
At some point in the not-to-distant-future, I’ll be reconfiguring my whole blogging schema. Right now I like the title “The Undiscovered Author”. But eventually I’m going to want to focus more on my name and creating a brand around that. And I’ve been debating, lately, what exactly that means.
It may mean, though I can’t say for certain, that “Stephen Watkins, Writer” is retired (along with “The Undiscovered Author”) in favor of something more specific to the name with which I want to brand myself. But this is, as I’ve often heard, a marathon, not a sprint, so there will be yet time to make decisions about that.
Glad to read you’re considering the branding aspect of authorship. It seems that marketing has become so much more essential the past decade as tools have become more available to writers, i.e. web sites, social media, blogging, etc.
This seems true regardless of whether you pursue corporate publishing or e-publishing…
Absolutely. Branding is especially important… The question of branding is actually why I started this second blog in addition to my main one at “The Undiscovered Author“. The problem is, I haven’t answered all the branding questions for myself. Is “Stephen Watkins, Writer” a good blog name to support my brand. What if I decide to use my middle initial as part of my branding name, or my generational suffix? (Incidentally, I registered a few other blog titles with various versions of my name, though not every possible permutation, unfortunately, just in case; but so far they’re all empty.) Those are questions that I guess I’ll have to answer long before I actually have a shot at getting a novel published…
Just discovered this site. I wasn’t reading your sidebar carefully enough, I guess.
It is the disadvantage of how easy it is to create blogs these days, that it is easy to end up with entirely too many of them. I’ve got about five, and am working to streamline the whole schema, as you say.
This wasn’t really a problem when sites had to be built from scratch. Not that I’m complaining; blogs are a great way for me to escape my dismal design skills.
Yeah, it’s pretty easy to proliferate a number of blogs very quickly in an environment like this. Honestly, I want to retract to just one main blog anyway – but I’m trying to time the switch between “The Undiscovered Author” and something a little more eponymous just right, and balance a lot of factors. My Dear Wife likes the sound of “The Undiscovered Author”, and so do I, but in the long run it doesn’t sell myself, and my name, very well. It’s a question of branding. That’s why I started this companion blog with my name in it. But now, I’m not sure I want to use this one, either – because I’ve started using my middle initial in my publishing… so I’ll be going back to the drawing board eventually.
Also, “The Undiscovered Author” only works while you’re undiscovered. Once you’re discovered, it’s not going to be so good.
Yes. Exactly. And I’m kind of hoping that the “undiscovered” part doesn’t last terribly too much longer. The hard part is – I want to be set up and going at an eponymous site in advance of that transition from “undiscovered” to “discovered”… but I also need to think about how I might transition what little audience I have on my current blog from there to the new destination… and I expect it won’t be easy.
I don’t think moving is that difficult. I have a friend who’s had an online journal for a while (since before the word “blog” was invented, as she points out) and whenever she moves she leaves the old site up with a last message saying, “Hey, go over here now: http://www.newurl.com.” It seems to work okay.
See, I’m here already, and you haven’t even moved yet.
That’s a very good point. Thanks.