Changes to TWAS

You may have noticed some changes here at TWAS over the past few weeks. Visible changes are that my blogging has been irregular and that the free TWAS writing course has disappeared.

The reasons are two-fold.

1. I’d built the site and the course on the hope of making some money at affiliate marketing, at least enough to pay the newsletter service for the course and some pocket change. This didn’t happen. I’m apparently not a very good salesperson!

2. My newsletter service provider had several lengthy glitches in service in April just before my annual fee was due. This drew my attention to the amount I was spending on supporting the course and the hassles that occur when a service has interruptions.

I had less than 24 hours to decide what to do. Renew and hope things improved, or pull the plug on the course and focus my attention on my writing career, which was facing significant changes at the same time. Details here.

I decided I needed to pour my time and money into my (suddenly) indie career, so I compiled my lessons into one PDF, emailed it to everyone who’d signed up for the course no matter where in the lessons they were, and canceled my newsletter service.

I’ll be honest. I’m at a bit of a quandary about what to do with this site. It’s costing me very little to keep the URL, so I don’t expect to delete it any minute soon. However, without the hope of compensation, I can’t spend hours a week as I had been on the blog posts. Frankly, that’s a chapter or two a week I could be writing on my own fiction.

Currently, my plan is to blog here irregularly, when I or a guest have something to say. I’m also planning to flesh out the TWAS course somewhat, adding in some of the relevant blog posts and other material, and creating an e-book to sell through Amazon, etc. However, this is not at the top of my list. I have a detailed production schedule for the next year with fiction.

The indie mantra is that it takes Quality Plus Quantity to make a reasonable income. So that is my primary goal for the foreseeable future—which is probably a week, but I have to go on something!

I’m not looking for commiseration but, if you have anything to say, I’d love to hear it in comments. Especially if you think I should push the TWAS e-book further forward on my schedule. If you’d like to offer a guest post on any specific topic that fits the TWAS profile, please use the contact form. Let’s talk.

Oh, one more thing. Eventually, when I have time, I’ll be moving most of the @towritestory tweets to my personal profile, @valeriecomer. I’d love a follow and will follow back most who seem like real people instead of businesses or bots.