HOWDY AND WELCOME to my new regular feature – the End-of-Month Roundup.
First off, I’m happy to note that more people came here in March 2014 than in any other month since I started this little site of mine over four years ago, in January 2010. Thank-you, my friends, for reading, and for commenting and tweeting and subscribing. Your interest and engagement keep me going and make all the work worthwhile. I do appreciate it, and I look forward to your every visit. I try to make the site worth your time, and I know not everything I write is going to be for everyone, but that’s the gold standard I’m always reaching toward.
As you may know, I’m working on a couple of non-fiction books related to Canada’s Indian residential schools. I hope to be able to announce more details soon, including publication dates, but until everything is written in stone I’m going to hold back. In publishing, anything can change at any time, and I don’t want to put out information that’s only going to end up being incorrect.
I’m also in the early stages of my next book, and I’ll be talking more about that this summer.
Here’s a photo from my recent trip to Sault Ste Marie. My camera battery went dead, and I didn’t recharge it, so this is also my only photo of Sault Ste Marie.
Many of you have signed up to receive the newsletter, and thank-you for that. The Subscribe button is the blue button in the left-hand column of the website. It says “Subscribe,” and it looks like this:
All you need to do is click on subscribe, and then hit send when your email program opens with the email message already composed for you. Easy!
Just so you know, the newsletter hasn’t been launched yet, but the first one will go out this spring. It will be a simple and small PDF file, no more than a few pages, that will go out at the end of every month starting April 30. It will be a professional magazine-styled publication with brief updates on what I’m working on and what I’ve been up to, some interesting things I’ve come across in my travels, snippets from my many interviews, book news, and features on writers who are following my blog. The idea is to turn the spotlight on some of my readers – like you – who are also themselves writers or artists or whatever.
If you haven’t signed up for the newsletter, please consider doing so. Here’s why
1. The newsletter is going to be for you. I’ll be introducing some new things on my website like guest posting, so if you’re a writer and you’re looking for new ways and new places to get your work out there, you will be interested in this. I will also be highlighting interesting posts by my readers. If you subscribe, I’ll know you’re out there and I can check out your work. Cool, right?
2. There will be subscriber-only info. When my books finally do come out, the newsletter will have subscriber-only information on special promotions. I’m working on the technical details of how this will all work, and the newsletter is where I’ll keep you up to date.
3. I hate spam and aggressive marketing and pressure tactics, so I won’t use them. I’ll try really hard not to annoy you, and I won’t do anything I wouldn’t want done to me. Obviously I have to feed my family, and so my plan down the road will be to have things you can buy – but the newsletter will be (I hope) funny and fun and casual and behind-the-scenes, and will have value even if you don’t want to buy any of my writing. But I hope you do want to buy my writing when it’s for sale, and I’m working hard to make you want to buy it, and to make it definitely worth buying.
If for any reason you don’t like the idea of getting a monthly newsletter by email (and that’s totally understandable), please consider following my website by clicking on the follow button. Or drop by once in a while and leave a comment. I’m always interested to know what you think. Even though I pretty much write what I want to write, it’s worth knowing what you enjoy reading. And sometimes it helps knowing what you like to read when I have four different articles on the go and I’m not sure which to publish to my website.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 