Migrating for the second (and last?) time

Welcome home! Thank you for following me to yet another platform. Wordpress wasn't doing it for me, and then Blogger just didn't feel like enough, but now I feel like I've made a good home on Weebly. Everything looks so nice and professional. What do you think?

I'm a big kid now...

---

I've been unhappy with my website for a while now. When I was younger, I thought blog-websites were so cool, so I formatted my author website as a blog. After all, I planned on doing lots of blogging and making the blog the centerpiece of the website. However, as time went on, I realized that most serious authors don't make their blog the first page you see. It's usually only a tab on the home row. I felt like my website looked unprofessional and childish, but didn't know what I could do - until now.

My old Blogger website...not bad...but also not good.

The grand opening of my online store

---

 With COVID-19 making book signings impossible (where most authors make the most money), I knew I had to adapt or stagnate. The logical solution was to create some way for me to sell my books online. I also, preferably, wanted to have my own online store. I didn't want to just sell on Amazon or Ebay, but wanted to have my own exclusive website that only sold my content. 

Then, Square emailed me the solution, advertising their free online store. I already use Square readers for credit card sales in person, so having another outlet to sell using Square seemed like a logical choice. ​It also turned out to be the right choice!

Check out my online store now and get signed copies of The Un-Life and merch!

I made my online store through Weebly, and fell in love with the ease and beauty of it's design. The drag-and-drop feature made designing a breeze, and within two days I had a fully fledged online store. 

So I took it a step further, and decided to make an entirely new website using Weebly. This time, it wasn't quite as easy, as I had to call upon my old web design knowledge from college to change the color of unchangeable elements, but it was all worth it. I'm ridiculously happy with the end result. I now feel like I have a professional-grade website I can be truly proud of. I may still yet make some font changes in the future, but she's more or less done.

So what else is new...

---

I haven't been blogging all that much because there's honestly not much to report. I'm still querying my baby, The Blood Knight, but haven't heard anything from agents or publishers yet. I have gotten back all my beta-reader feedback, though, and so far so good! 

However, with the announced release of Midnight Sun, an entry in the Twilight Saga, I'm not sure what the future holds for BK right now. It's either going to be really good if the market wants to publish vampire stories again, or it's going to be really bad if no one wants to publish a competing book. Time will tell if this is the perfect time for BK to be picked up, or the worst time.

In other news, things are personally looking up for me financially. My beautiful PC Divinity has been down for months, but I'm going to be able to buy a brand new beast of a machine within a few weeks. That means I'll have the power to do more live streams, only this time in ultra high quality!

---

In the meantime...

---

I'll wrack my brain for more blog topics other than essential-updates in the near future. I'm going to be figuring out what I want to talk about, and what I need to talk about. They say you should blog about things related to the books you write, but I don't want to just prattle on about the undead all the time. I like sharing my knowledge and experience in writing, but the audience for my books are more likely to be readers than writers.

It's something I'll have to work out before I start blogging regularly again. Let me know what you want me to blog about in the comments! I'm open to suggestions.

I will be making my previous website available to view so you can check out my old blog posts, but I'm fighting with Google to make that happen because it's currently bugged out. If all else fails, I'll just re-post my most popular blog posts here, eventually.

Until next time..


-Dana Lockhart