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…

Whether you are preparing to launch your new book, still writing the manuscript, or marketing your book a year after its release, you can’t ignore the importance of your author platform for your success as an author. Today you need to demonstrate to a publisher you have built a big enough platform to sell a sufficient number of books before they’ll offer you a contract. And if you pursue self-publishing, it is even more important. How else will readers find your book? An author platform isn’t measured by the number of followers on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, but on the size and scope of readers who know you already and are interested in what you have to say. Taking stock of your efforts to attract readers will help you determine where to put your efforts into growing your customer base. Building your author platform requires a consistent, focused effort to make incremental improvements in extending your reach through expanding your social networks. Whether you use an Excel or Google spreadsheet, or a whiteboard on your wall, create a grid for assessing your current author platform. Channels: Make a list of all the ways you communicate with (potential) readers and places where you can be reached by someone who is trying to connect with you   Mailing address Email address Agent’s contact information Publisher’s contact information Publicist’s contact information Website Blog Newsletter Amazon profile Goodreads profile LinkedIn profile Facebook Page and/or personal profile Twitter profile Instagram profile Pinterest profile Previous publications…