Author: Carol Wyer

Carol E Wyer is a Contributing Author for Indies Unlimited and an award-winning and best-selling author of humorous novels including MINI SKIRTS AND LAUGHTER LINES, SURFING IN STILETTOS, and HOW NOT TO MURDER YOUR GRUMPY. Carol has been featured on NBC News, BBC Radio, and in The Huffington Post. For more about Carol, go to her website or her Amazon author page.

#twitter #hashtags for novices

hashtag hashOnce upon a time, I believed Twitter to be a site filled with dull people reporting about their dreary days or people bombarding me with tweets asking me to buy stuff. Yes, those exist on Twitter but it is a useful social platform and as I have gradually become more au fait with it, I have discovered a good way to use it to reach a target audience and gain interest in your tweets—use a hashtag.

What is a hashtag? It’s almost anything that begins with the hashtag symbol “#”. You will find silly hashtags #eatingsweets and sensible ones #newrelease. They are a way of organising information on Twitter. So, if you want to find out about new releases, you’d type #newrelease in the search box on Twitter. This will direct you to a Twitter page with all tweets using this hashtag. Continue reading “#twitter #hashtags for novices”

How to Use Pingbacks

PINGA Pingback is not merely the sound of elastic being twanged on Cathy Speight’s catapult as she aims her ammunition at Chris James. It is, in fact, a type of comment that’s created whenever you link to another WordPress.com post (provided the blog the post appears on has pingbacks enabled). The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

  • Person 1 posts something on his blog.
  • Person 2 posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
  • Person 1’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person 2’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

How can I activate Pingbacks?
You can find the settings for pingbacks on your WordPress site.  From your Dashboard, go to Settings > Discussion. At the top you’ll see the Default articles settings section, as shown below: Continue reading “How to Use Pingbacks”

How to Make People Read Your Business Card

carol wyer business cardAuthor business cards are important (See Codebreaking For Beginners) and we often hand them or postcards of our latest novels out in the hope they will generate sales. However, how many times do you get that feeling that as soon as someone walks off with one of your cards, it’ll be forgotten? It will stay in a wallet or purse until the person empties it or worse still, it will be thrown away in the nearest bin.

Here’s a simple way to engage people, to make them read your card and hopefully hang onto it a little longer rather than throw it away without looking at it. Continue reading “How to Make People Read Your Business Card”

Attention-getting Tactics for Authors

opera singerA while back, I attended a festival of romance. It was one of those events where authors get together, mingle with publishers, sell some books, make connections and so on. There were workshops and other events where we got to meet and greet.

One of these events was a readathon. It was staged in a shopping centre. The idea was for a steady line of writers to keep an audience entertained with excerpts from our books. In reality, most of the public was more interested in shopping and ignored us. One writer, however, grabbed their attention. She belted out Jon Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer ahead of her reading. People came to a rapid halt and listened. It was a crowd stopper. Continue reading “Attention-getting Tactics for Authors”