A difficult week
Last week was difficult to be honest. A situation arose where I found myself defending a colleague and a company that I am very proud to be associated with. I managed to get myself all squiggly and squinky about it, but rightly so because it was important. I didn’t say everything that I wanted to, there was a stage when I realised there was no point continuing to present the facts and my opinion because it wasn’t going to have any effect. I think my age has helped me learn when to step back, so I did. The issue is temporarily resolved but it won’t last forever because it is ongoing and will only need to be re-addressed at some point.
Board Meeting
However, the week improved with a Kitchen Witch production meeting yesterday. Yes, it did involve cake and coffee and yes, we also had lunch. And a trip to the local international supermarket for a poke about at all the interesting things. But we also sat around a table with our very official looking notebooks and pens, and we even had an ‘agenda’ written out. There was much planning, plotting and scheming. Keep an eye out for hints and announcements in the future!
Social Media Rabbit Holes
Recently I took a head long dive into social media platforms and how best to use them for advertising and promotion for my books. It is a cold hard fact, if you write a book, you also need to do a fair amount of marketing so that people know you wrote a book and then hopefully are interested enough to purchase a copy. I use facebook and YouTube a lot and I dabble with Twitter and Instagram. However I am reliably informed by the ‘kids’ that TikTok is the place to be. Oh, what a mad and indecipherable place TikTok is! Then I investigated Canva, as a tool to create content for the aforementioned social media platforms. I think I lost a couple of days creating memes and video shorts and uploading them to release on various platforms. But was it all worth it? Did I just lose two whole days of book writing to create colourful pictures? I actually have no real answer. I do know that I received 250-300 views on each TikTok video and a few extra followers there and over on Instagram. Was it an effective use of my time though and how does it translate into book sales? Flip flop knows! I am pondering a plan of action moving forward, I don’t know what it is yet, but we shall see…
The Garden
The garden is really beginning to awaken, we have tulip leaves peeping through the soil and our tiny willow tree has little furry catkins on. It is cold, wet and dreary as I write this today, but you can feel the earth stirring. Whilst I love autumn and winter, there comes a point when the energy of spring is just too strong to avoid, and I can feel it now. The Cailleach is obviously unhappy and still fighting back when she can, hanging onto the cold weather with all her might. But soon she will fade into the shadows and spring will have sprung for another turn around the wheel of the year. Is it me or does time go by much faster these days?
The Podcast
I cannot stress show grateful I am to have been invited to host the Pagan Portal Podcast, I am still overwhelmed that I have been trusted with this honour. We have had some amazing guests so far and as we work a little in advance there are some that I have already recorded, and I have to say you are in for a real treat! A lot of work goes on behind the scenes for each episode. To begin with I read the book or books the guest has written (if I haven’t done so previously). Then I jot down a list of questions and subjects that I would like to know about and think the listeners/viewers will be interested in. This list gets sent to the guest, so they have some idea before we go to record. Then the recording happens and that takes about an hour/hour and a half with the fabulous tech wizard, Matty behind the scenes making sure the sound and vision are all working properly. Then my part and the part of the guest is done, this is when the real work happens. Matty spends literally hours editing the audio and visual feeds for the episode, adding in the headers, graphics, text and any bookmarks. He also separates out interesting snippets to use as video shorts. This is a LOT of work, time and effort and I am eternally grateful that he does it because if it was left with me, it would not happen!
New episodes are released into the wild every first and third Friday of the month direct to the Moon Books YouTube channel, Spotify and various other podcast platforms. We aren’t on Apple yet because it is proving to be a little tricky getting on there, but we are working on it.
Do please hop on over to the YT channel and Spotify and subscribe, then you will be notified when new episodes land.
Mooncon24
The next event coming up is Mooncon24, this year we have a different format, sleeker and more streamlined. The event will air live on Saturday 9th March on the Moon Books YouTube channel and facebook page. Starting at 6pm (GMT) it will run continuously for three hours and will include a talk from Morgan Daimler about the Irish pantheon and from Mhara Starling on the Welsh pantheon. The grand finale is a panel with both Morgan and Mhara who are then joined by Jhenah Telyndru with me as host (and fighting the English pantheon corner) to finish up. It looks to be an epic event and is free and open to all. In case you didn’t notice, there is a theme this year – Celtic pantheon.
So that about sums up this past week or so and what I have been up to.
Today I really am going to finish editing the Hedge Witch book, but I keep getting distracted…oooh look shiny things…
