Ordinary Day

Tomorrow I will write a short con report for Orycon. Tonight, I will simply note that I have updated my FAQ, since I continue to get email spam from random people who say that they are with such-and-such a company and think it would be super-awesome if I posted about some random topic that has absolutely nothing to do with either my books, or the things I have a history of being personally interested in (such as Tolkien, Doctor Who, feminism, and politics).

The updated items are at bottom of my FAQ page, and I will note them here as well:

• Can I get you to run a sponsored post about topic <fill in the blank> on your site?

  No. This site has two purposes: a) to promote my books, and b) to be the master location for my blogging on topics that are of personal interest to me. The only exceptions I will make for this are for fellow authors who need a signalboost for their works, and even then, I will only do that within the context of Boosting the Signal.

• Can I talk with you about running advertising about product <fill in the blank> on your site?

  No. I have no intention of running any kinds of ads on angelahighland.com for the foreseeable future. If I were to consider doing that, the only sources for ads I would be considering would be for other authors’ books. And even then, only under strictly controlled circumstances, in which I could guarantee that any such ads would not be intrusive on a user’s browsing experience.

• I’m from commercial site <fill in the blank> and I think it’d be neat if you posted about <random topic that has absolutely nothing to do with my books or my personal interests>! Will you do that post?

  No. If you want to drum up interest in random corners of the Internet on topics pertaining to whatever you’re selling, might I suggest you put up a post on your own blog or social media, and get your readers to interact with you about that topic on your own site? Because reaching out to random authors elsewhere on the net to get them to blog on your topic of choice is useless, especially given that I would have no intention of linking back to you or indicating that this is a sponsored post in any way. See above item re: sponsored posts.

Note that anybody who actually regularly reads me and knows me, none of you are the problem. I’m mostly putting this up for reference because I HAVE started getting spam from people about this kind of thing, and it’s annoying, and I want something I can officially point at when I ask people to stop.

Also, pro tip: I’ll be much more inclined to take your email telling me what a great post I did seriously if you actually bother to point out a specific post.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Since I was just over on the WordPress.com testing its crossposting functionality via Publicize, I thought that was pretty nifty and have learned that that’s available to self-hosted sites like this one, via the Jetpack plugin.

So this is me testing that! This should be going out to my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr accounts.

(I’m a little irritated that Jetpack apparently does not let you set up to crosspost to Facebook for both your personal timeline AND a page that you manage, which, y’know, is kinda what I need to do. So even if I decide to keep Jetpack around, I will still need Social. Not to mention the older functionality I’m using to throw posts over to Livejournal and Dreamwidth.)

Y’all please let me know if you notice anything weird about site functionality while Jetpack is active. When I turned it on, I suddenly got a huge wave of backlogged comment emails that Social should have sent me and didn’t. So there may be other unexpected side effects. Apologies in advance if anything breaks!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Friend and reader technoshaman wanted to know from me today if he could give Faerie Blood and Bone Walker as gifts, and if so, where the best place to buy them would be for that. First, thanks technoshaman for the purchase! \0/ For the interested, he wound up buying the books directly from my Square store. (And if you’re not reading this post directly on angelahighland.com, that’s the link that says “Store” on the site’s main menu.)

And second, since I’ve been asked before about where the best place to buy my books from is, I just wanted to remind everybody that I do have an FAQ page. I have now updated that page with a revised version of the “Where should you buy my work from?” question. AND I have added a new question about how to give my books as gifts. Here’s the text of what I added, and you can find this as well as a bunch of other questions on my FAQ.

Is there a specific best place I should buy your work?

I get slightly higher royalties if people buy the Rebels of Adalonia books directly from Carina Press‘s own site. And certainly if you buy a book of mine from Amazon, that’ll bump my rankings up there, but that’s also true of any ebook vendor.

However, I encourage any potential readers to go ahead and buy the Rebels books via whatever channel you feel is appropriate. If you’re a Kindle user, go right ahead and buy them from Amazon. If you’re a Nook owner, from Barnes and Noble. Kobo, iBooks, Google Play–the same.

For my indie-published work, the very best way to make sure I get the most money is to just buy books from me directly–either via my Paypal.Me link, or via my Square store. In the case of Square, Square will still get a cut of the transaction, but it comes out slightly better than the cuts the ebook vendors take of transactions on those sites. But again, I encourage you to buy from wherever is most convenient for you. I make a point of deploying my indie titles out to a variety of platforms specifically so readers have a choice about where to buy them.

Trust me, I’ll be delighted that you buy them at all! As long as you buy them and enjoy the reads, that’s the important thing to me.

Is it possible to give your books as gifts?

Yes! For the print books, if you order them from me via my Square store, you can add an additional note to me if you want to purchase them as gifts, in case you want me to sign them for the recipient, or for me to send them somewhere besides your own address.

For the Rebels of Adalonia ebooks, Carina Press’s website does not have the ability to gift ebooks. But if you buy those books from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or iBooks, those vendors have the ability to give ebooks as gifts.

For the Free Court books, if you buy them directly from me, you are more than welcome to use the files you’ll receive from me as gifts. One recipient per purchased copy, please! But if you do buy a book for a friend or loved one, you are welcome to ask for multiple formats of the same book for a single recipient. For example, the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI of Faerie Blood would all count as a single purchase.

As with the Rebels books, you can also give the Free Court books as gifts on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iBooks. And, since the Free Court books are available on Smashwords, you can buy them as gifts there as well.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Well, that was certainly unpleasant!

To recap for those of you who don’t follow me directory on the social networks, or who might not have seen me reporting: this past weekend, Dara and I had to completely overhaul our web server. This was basically the same operation we had to do LAST month on the mail server: i.e., completely flatten the box and reinstall a fresh install of the operating system, and then rebuild all our data on it.

What brought this on? My trying to do a WordPress security update, and discovering that the server’s root password no longer worked. Pro tip: that’s bad.

So yeah. Cue emergency server maintenance and tearing my hair out trying to figure out the safest way to reconstruct both my WordPress sites: annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com. I THINK my sites are now both back up again, after I did a completely fresh install of WordPress AND a fresh install of necessary themes and plugins, and then restored the old tables out of the database and the old media to populate both sites.

So if y’all are reading this, do me a favor: please browse around on both annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com, and let me know if anything looks broken.

Known issues on annathepiper.org:

* Clicking on the flickr galleries on the GBS pictures I have there is borked, but that was borked before all this happened;
* The RP logs archive pages there aren’t working yet either

I am not currently aware of anything actively broken on angelahighland.com, but if you see something that looks wacky, please let me know immediately! Especially if it’s on any of the higher level pages for my various books.

If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, go talk to Dara and let her know too if anything looks wacky on crimeandtheforcesofevil.com.

Still to do: I need to reconstruct and restore the other WordPress blogs we host, most of which will be rolled together into a single WordPress install to minimize the number of access points onto our system. This impacts baconforbirds.com (which we WILL be bringing back online by Paul’s request even if he’s not actively working on the site right now), upcc.org, uplakekenmore.org, and emeraldforestfilk.org. I will also be looking into converting lexfa.org into a WordPress blog to add to the aforementioned single install.

Any questions, talk to me!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

So y’all may notice* that things look a tad different around here. This is because I’ve activated a brand new theme on the site, namely, Florence by the folks at Solo Pine Designs. There are a few reasons for this!

One, AngelaHighland.com IS my professional writing site, and I wanted to step up its game for overall appearance. So I wanted to put out a little money to buy a professional theme that matched my overall personal preferences in how my site should look: i.e., minimal, mostly white, but with the proper font choices and other little accents to give the whole thing a unified look.

Two, something I’ve learned from the day job is that Google has started penalizing the search rankings of sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. By which I mean: sites that don’t have a mobile version loading for mobile devices that visit them, or, alternately, which do not have a theme that automatically adapts to a mobile device. Dara has recently done some work in the former area, i.e., setting up a separate page to serve as the landing point for mobile devices, and she’s already seen some interesting results in her Google numbers. Me, I am opting instead for a theme that’s responsive in design–i.e., which displays itself one way on desktops and tablets, and another way when viewed on phones.

Three, the Solo Pine folks are a Seattle-based couple who do web design, and hey, since they’re local, I was all the more happy to throw them a little bit of my money. So if you’re in the market for a theme for your site, you might go check out what they have to offer. They’ve got a system set up to do tech support for you too, if you need it.

Some other notes:

I particularly liked how the Florence theme handled displaying the site menu. If you look at the site on desktop or tablet, you should see the full menu bar. If you look at it on a phone, it should condense down to a nice little icon in the upper left corner that you can tap on to get to the menu.

Plus, the theme nicely handles interacting with my various social media presences. If you look up at the right hand corner, as well as down in the footer, you should see various icons pointing off to my main social network pages. Those aren’t all of them–I’ve left off YouTube, Soundcloud, and Vimeo, for example–but those are the ones of most importance.

And I’m not done yet with the various changes. I’m still working on various rearrangings of content on various pages on my dev site, and as I get things looking better there, I’ll be porting those changes over to here. I’ve already done this to the homepage, which you can now see no longer has a sidebar, and which is a little nicer in how it presents the covers of how it presents my books to you, too. Most importantly, the homepage SHOULD look good when viewed on a phone, too.

Be on the lookout for further changes to appear on the menu as I rearrange that, maybe delete some pages and move others. And I’ll definitely be updating the layout on the official book pages as well.

If you see anything that looks problematic or confusing, even if you thought it was problematic or confusing before I installed the new theme, talk to me! I may have already addressed the problem on the dev site. And if I haven’t, I want to know what confuses people so I can work on fixing it!

Hope y’all like the new look, anyway! I sure do.

* And if you didn’t notice because you’re reading this post on LJ or Dreamwidth, click on over to the site to see what I’m talking about!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

All,

Dara had to perform some maintenance on our web server last night, and it turned out to be an unexpectedly bumpy ride–thanks to unexpected changes in the process of updating to Apache 2.4. All this work kept her up until 4:30. AUGH.

Likewise, I have also updated all blogs we host to WordPress 4.2.1.

We THINK we’ve gotten everything working, but just in case, if anyone reading this has resources we host, doublecheck your stuff and let us know if anything looks screwy. And if anybody sees anything screwy with angelahighland.com in particular, let me know and I’ll check it out.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

We’re doing a bit of server tweaking tonight to see if we can solve a problem with WordPress installations not sending us mail when comments are left on posts. This is a test post to see if I can get comment mail to show up correctly in my inbox.

If you see this, please drop a comment! (And if you’re seeing this mirrored on LJ or Dreamwidth or Facebook, can you please click over to the original post on angelahighland.com and drop a comment from there?)

I’d like to doublecheck the tweaking with comments left frome external sites as well as ones I leave myself. Thanks in advance for any help, folks!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

In honor of the shiny new anthology Defiance being released, I’ve updated the site to celebrate the new cover. Y’all should see both of my works listed on the sidebar of my site now, and the color scheme’s been flipped back to blue to go with the new banner.

Also, I’ve shifted all my works in progress off to a new In Progress subpage of Books, because I wanted to spruce up the Books page a bit now that there are two things on it!

Please to note that so far Defiance is only available via the Drollerie bookshop, but we have it in all our usual formats: PDF, ePub, Microsoft Reader, Sony, and Mobipocket, so any of these should hopefully suit your ebook-reading needs! I will of course post further link updates as the book makes its way out into the wild. I have added the book to Goodreads, but if any of you out there who are LibraryThing users want to add it on that site, please feel free!

And oh yeah–I’ve been sent my personal copy and have gotten my editor’s leave to do a promo or two. So y’all be out on the lookout for another drawing forthcoming!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

For those of you who might be paying attention, I took a little time to update most of the pages on the site tonight, to properly reflect recent developments in Faerie Blood’s purchasability (i.e., holy crap you can actually buy my book on Amazon now!). I also updated my Contact page to point off to my personal non-writing blog, annathepiper.org, and to mention the various LJ-like sites that this blog and annathepiper.org both mirror to.

And, I added in the missing June and July Drollerie Blog Tour links on the Extras page. Speaking of which, there will be no Drollerie Blog Tour this month since I do have a deadline I’m trying to hit. However, my fellow Drollerie author Rachael de Vienne, who wrote Pixie Warrior, is hosting a couple of guest posts that you might enjoy, so go check her out. She also posts lots of lovely old vintage photos as well, which are fun.

The Blog Tour will resume as normal in September, and with a topic that is of course near and dear to my heart: music. All y’all who’ve read Faerie Blood, if you have any requests for music-themed character vignettes or specific characters you’d like to see show up in same, drop a comment and let me know!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Ladies and gents, the next Drollerie Blog Tour has been confirmed. This time around we will be posting on the topic of “Origin Stories”–not only about how we all decided to become writers, but also about how our books and characters sprang to life. Be on the lookout for posts from many of last month’s participants, but this time around, Heather Ingemar and David Sklar as well!

Posts go live on February 28th. Hope you’ll come by and say hi to all of us.

Meanwhile, y’all may note that angelakorrati.com (for those of you who may be reading this on LJ or JournalFen) has switched themes, mostly because I was in the mood. Also, I’ve added a bunch more names to the sidebar, not only of fellow Drollerie authors, but also of authors who are in general Nifty, and who you should definitely be reading. Enjoy!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.