Saturday, May 27, 2017

Don’t Tinker Too Long

By
Scott D. Parker

When you’re an indie author, you have to tinker. Sometimes, you have to fix your website. Other days you’ll spend hours finding the perfect—or near perfect—piece of stock image you can use for a cover. Moreover, when new trends manifest themselves—like Amazon ads—you’ll have to spend some time learning, researching, and then implementing.

Here’s the big caveat: Don’t Tinker Too Long

After awhile, the tinkering becomes the thing you do more of rather than the activity that got you to where you are: writing. I suppose that’s true for traditionally published writers as well, but it’s a big deal for indies.

Case in point: As of 1 May, I have re-branded my westerns under the “S. D. Parker” pen name. At the first part of the month, I worked on my main website and created a separate area for the western material. Both names are present, even though the “Scott Dennis Parker” is on the masthead. The more I thought about it, however, the more I liked the idea of a completely separate entity for the western stuff. Slowly, over a period of days pondering the pros and the cons, I decided to redraft my existing blogspot blog into one that exclusively focuses on the S.D. Parker - Western Author presence on the web.

But I needed some education on how to fix it so that it resembled a traditional webpage vs. A blog page. That took some doing, I have to tell you. And lots of trial and error and google searches to determine why the site didn’t look the correct way.

But I got it done.

The thing was, during this process, I got to where I enjoyed the tinkering. Instead of completing the existing western story, I’d tinker with the website, doing first this tweak then that one.

I enjoyed it.

But I enjoy writing more.

If you are in the same boat as me, know that you have to tinker sometimes. And the tinkering time can be all-consuming. But have an end date in mind. Know when you’ve tinkered enough and set aside all the other stuff that isn’t writing.

I’ve reached that place now. The new site is nifty, and readers who discover “S. D. Parker” will now have a place to go that isn’t confusing. If you want to check out the end result, here’s the link.

Until next week…

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