Authors Electric

It's getting so there's no future in futurism. The future nips at our heels faster than we can predict it. Take the latest chatter about ChatGPT. Professors say it's the end of the world. Standard fare for Scici writers - warning of misuse, while speculating on our replacement by the instant proliferation of this AI phenomenon.  ChatGPT explains itself succinctly as any human: "ChatGPT is a large language model developed by  OpenAI  that can be used for natural language processing tasks such as text generation and language translation. It is based on the GPT-3.5 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3.5) model, which is one of the largest and most advanced language models currently available. All this is free of charge, mind you. (Or course, nothing is truly "free" in tech world.) Free means getting billions of users to provide content for free - content in quality and quantity promising to be worth trillions of dollars in return. Data is to Internet enterpr...

So I can tick off tip four. Those of us who blog do so for different reasons. Some just for the pleasure of it, some to increase our exposure, some to build our USP and others like myself for all of the above. Now over the last couple of months my partner and I have started a little sideline (building websites that sell product). Part of our marketing strategy is to blog about the subject and sometimes the product we're selling. As I'm the writer the blogging has fallen firmly in my lap. This has meant a steep learning curve because for the first time this SEO stuff if quite important. Now whilst I was trying to decide what to blog about this month I decided what I've learned might be of interest to fellow self-published authors. So here's what I've discovered. Tip one: sub-headings You should try and include sub-headings in your blog post. These are included by clicking on the box labelled 'normal' and choosing sub-heading. In Wordpress it's ...

How to get more people to read your blog posts using Triberr Over at Ruby Barnes my blog has been running for two and a half years. In that time I’ve had around 183,000 page views across 161 posts. After a hesitant start I found my pace with several different posts about life observations, the writing process and first experiences with social media. But my carefully crafted posts fell upon deaf internet ears. I was shouting in the wilderness, like a mad preacher. Big excitement when five people looked at my blog in one day. It seems like a lifetime ago. A man named Harvey Thomas once said “If they haven’t heard it, you haven’t said it.” (He was the guy who advised a budding politician named Margaret Thatcher to lower her voice by an octave. What if he hadn’t?) Harvey's truism was shared before the internet was widespread but it summarises what social media is all about i.e. sharing messages you consider to be worthwhile is necessary to reach your audience. At time...

According to a post on Problogger, my Undercover Soundtrack series might doom me to deepest obscurity because of new Google search algorithms. In a post titled Why Blogs that allow Guest Posts Will BePenalised in 2013 , Problogger explains that the term ‘guest’ and the use of multiple links are now likely to make Google bots condemn my content as spam.   In the Undercover Soundtrack, I host writers who use music as part of their creative process ( here’s a recent post that explains ). It’s guests galore.  Don't say 'guest' Problogger says: ‘Stop using the words “guest post,” “guest blog” etc. Oh dear. What other noun do I use to introduce a post that’s not by me? ‘Guest’ is perfect. Like ‘said’ in dialogue, it does its job and doesn’t get in the way. Anything else is absurd. Bad to link And what of the other major SEO clanger, links? They’re not all bad, says Problogger, as there’s a difference between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ links.  Her...