More than 1.7 billion people are active on Facebook. Fifty-three percent of them are female. The average Facebook user in the U.S. was 40.5 years old. These statistics help explain why it is one of the most popular social media platforms used by authors to engage with readers. But what happens when Facebook explodes with news about political scandals, natural disasters, celebrity deaths, or sports? Cutting through the noise with a status update about your new book isn’t easy. And sometimes you need to recognize it isn’t the time to even try. Knowing when it’s the wrong time is as important as knowing when is the right time to use Facebook for building your audience platform. Having a strategy for your social media efforts as an author will get you a greater return on your investment of time and energy. When is the best time to post a status update on Facebook? It’s helpful to know 50% of the U.S. population is in the Eastern Time Zone. Eastern and Central time zones combined represent almost 80% of the U.S. population. It might surprise you, but you will find most people online during business hours, 9 am – 7 pm ET. The best time to post is Saturday and Sunday at the noon hour. You will get 32% higher engagement than any other time online, according to 16 studies. Thursday and Friday afternoons are the next best time with 18% higher engagement. And Friday afternoons post funny or upbeat content for…

Do we need quotation marks? Who needs punctuation? Times are a-changing. One of the signs punctuation marks are in flux is the air quotations people make with their fingers when using words ironically. In print, we’ve seen the rise of single quotation marks around sarcastic words or phrases, even though the standard rule for single quotation marks are for use inside double quotation marks to indicate someone speaking is quoting someone else. Another sign of the changing times is the omission of periods at the end of text messages. Where did all the Oxford commas go? I notice the subtitles on my TV rarely have punctuation and never use quotes. Poets and playwrights are notorious for their disregard of style rules regarding punctuation, especially quotation marks. With instant messaging, even letters are omitted, words shortened: r u, lol, rotfl, omg. Historically, quotation marks were one of the last types of punctuation to appear, according to David Crystal in his book, Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). In the beginning of the written word, the only spaces between letters came when space ran out at the end of the line. Written words were used to record information, not to be read aloud. Religious and philosophic communities were the first to want stable texts that could be read, and read in a particular way that would indicate authority and knowledge. Spaces appeared between words, often to indicate reading cadence, breathing and tonal guidelines. Punctuation was…

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…