Ravelry is a social media platform with 8 million members of the knitting and crochet community. It’s a place for knitters, crocheters, designers, spinners, felters, and dyers to keep track of their yarn, tools, and patterns, and share ideas and inspiration. Knitting has always been a part of my life. Grandma Swenson knit me Barbie Doll outfits out of fine sock yarn. I learned to crochet from Grandma Kling. During college and graduate school, I knit through most of my lecture classes. My best friend from college, Amy E. Anderson, is a designer whose patterns for sweaters, hats, slippers, mittens, and bags I’ve knit and felted over the years. During several winters in the oughts, I taught knitting classes at the Finger Lakes Fiber Arts yarn shop in Watkins Glen, NY. I’ve taken dyeing classes and been a member of the Black Sheep Fiber Guild. I still spin. It is a form of meditation, a discipline. Craft for many, art for some. For pattern designers who author knitting books, Ravelry is a key platform in their business plan. It’s a quick way to find your target audience. It’s a marketplace of goods and services for the fiber arts and crafts community and free to the user. It’s not a place where you’d expect to find a lot of hate speech. But on Sunday, June 23rd, Ravelry implemented a new policy. “Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration.” They aren’t endorsing Democrats or banning Republicans. The incivility in…

Everyday my email is flooded with a rush of correspondence. There’s a seemingly endless stream of messages all day, every day. Yours, too? Do you sometimes wonder whether your message disappeared into cyberspace because you did not receive a response? Did they end up in a spam folder? Is no response a “no”? How are the email messages you send handled by recipients who are professionals in the publishing industry? Is it your email address that could be the problem?  If your email is hosted by a company with servers used by spammers there is a possibility your email address is blacklisted by the recipient. If you have never sent an email to a particular address before, there is a chance you will receive a delivery failure notification, or end up in a spam folder. Unsolicited email (a message from someone who has no previous electronic email contact) runs the risk of refusal by the recipient. Once you have been whitelisted by the recipient (by using the reply button to a message they have sent you), you can rest assured your email is being delivered. But how do you know where you email goes? You can take steps to make sure your email messages get delivered. Gmail is the most reliable method for business correspondence. Google Business Mail is worth the monthly $10 per user to insure your professional email correspondence works for you. If you’re not sure your message was sent you can always blindcopy yourself when you send…

What should be in your digital toolkit for the business of being an author? Google Suite for your email. Do you wonder why your emails don’t get a reply? It may be they were never delivered. If your account is with AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo, there is a strong likelihood if you send someone you don’t already have a connection with they will never receive it. And while it is neat to have an email address tied to your website domain, if your webhosting company is one of the bigger ones, it’s likely they also host spammers and scammers which means your address may be blacklisted without you knowing it. In this era when email security is the order of the day, the account of your recipient may filter your email straight to the spam folder. Even with a free Gmail account there is a good chance it won’t be delivered. For professional and business email, I recommend the Google Suite which is $5/month. WordPress for your website and blog. I strongly recommend WordPress.org because it is open source code, can be installed easily with one click on most webhosting platforms, and works best for blogging if you want your work to get found. It is not to be confused with WordPress.com, a site that gives you free webhosting, but you’re renting and don’t own your real estate on the internet and they can place their ads on your site. WordPress is used by professional website designers for its versatility…