Back from hols and some website suggestions

It has been a busy couple of weeks chez nous. We've been away in Europe (France and Italy) for three weeks and as usual I've been blogging our adventures with photos taken by me. Okay, sometimes I steal his because he takes pictures of things that I don't. Anyway, should you be interested in what we did, take yourself over here. Apart from that we came home to find an electrical fault had shut off our fridges (with freezers full of mainly meat) about a week after we left. We tossed out several hundred dollars worth of no longer frozen food and replaced the fridges. Trust me, it's impossible to get that smell out. The stink permeates everything. I even tossed out the plastic containers in the fridge. They absorbed the odour and nothing would shift it.

Our joyous return not withstanding, I won't say it was the greatest trip we've ever been on, more like a roller-coaster ride. Hey ho. A few more things have been ticked off the bucket list. I've seen the statue of David and The Cinque Terre, and I've been on a budget airline. That wasn't actually on the bucket list. It was something we had to do because there was no reasonable alternative. I don't think we'll be doing THAT again. I also don't think we'll be going to Europe in high season again. I'm not good with crowds.

I haven't been writing any fiction lately. One lives in hope that the urge will return. But I did read an interesting article by Jane Friedman entitled 10 ways to build traffic to your website.

I'm fortunate that my name is unusual enough to get me to the top of the page if you type it into Google, but I don't actually get many visitors apart from the few who read my travel blogs, so anything is going to help. After all, like most small time authors, I don't have an advertising budget - or not one to speak of. I already do a number of the things Jane suggests - but instead of a page per book, I've had a page per series.

Sigh.

I kinda sorta knew I ought to have a page per book. I've done that now. I still have a page per series, but when you click on a cover, you get a new page with the details. It certainly does give greater flexibility on social media, because (of course) I can send people right to my book page instead of expecting them to trawl through a series.

The series page

The book page

I'm hoping the new structure will give me a better SEO. I've taken Jane's advice and added a few key words to the text. We'll see how it goes.

A question: I have a number of short stories (10-15k) that I sell as stand alones. Do you think I should do a page for them, too, or keep them together on the series page?

I can't sign off without making reference to 11th September. It is a date etched in most older people's minds. I'm sure we can all remember in detail what we were doing when we heard the news - even in far away Australia. It was a sad, dreadful time. My sympathies go out to victims, friends, and families.

To my American friends, if you're in the path of a hurricane, I wish you all the very best.