This isn’t hot off the presses news anymore, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget to announce it. Since this is my personal blog, I want to write something more than a simple promo for our latest issue, but honestly, I’m a bit burned out. I’ve been doing full time data entry this month, which has meant I’ve thrown all my evenings and weekends into the magazine so I could publish in time. I always underestimate the headache of formatting the stories–when will someone make it possible to use “Tab” for indentations in online text fields? For some reason, when I copy/paste from Microsoft Word, the indents always get lost. Some sites include an indent button (thank you WordPress), but not all. Having to add the space manually every paragraph is such a pain. And sometimes I wonder if I should scrap having author bios because while I want to promote my writers, it takes forever to manually add links and check them all.
For this issue, I put more effort into a social media blitz the week before publishing, which meant designing a bunch of graphic promos. I must say, I’m absurdly proud of my seven facebook teaser pics, which I whipped together in 1-2 evenings. I’m trying to brand T.T. as modern and urban despite our whimsical theme, so I try to stay away from the typical “Ye Olde” and glitter visuals. I prefer either an infographic style or a rough/gritty style. It seems to have worked because the average views on my Facebook posts tripled that week! Even though TT has over 650 likes, my Facebook posts have typically only gotten 20-30 views, which is disappointingly low. Since my seven teaser graphics, I’ve consistently gotten 80-120 views on each. That gives me hope for reaching new readers.
My favorite of the facebook promos I created.
I’m not quite ready to jump back into things yet, but in order to publish Issue #3 by late October, I’ll need to open submissions in early July, so looks like my break will be short lived. I am excited to see what writers do with The Twelve Dancing Princesses. It seems like a tricky fairy tale to retell.
To Reach the Unreachable Star 