I Nuked It…

…by accident.

Allow me to give you a brief history of my blogging. I started off with a blogspot…actually, two blogspots. I had one for writing and one for 18th C studies. I have no idea what blogspot is like now, but back then, you could build your blog yourself using a stylesheet. I enjoyed the process (I kept it simple); not to mention, I don’t usually prefer premade templates. None of them are exactly the way I picture my website looking.

When I started shopping around my novel Anna and the Dragon, my husband and brother in law promised to build me a professional website. This started with purchasing me a domain name on GoDaddy, moving me to WordPress (though I don’t know why it had to be WordPress), and hosting off of GoDaddy. This was the worst possible solution to having a professional website. My advice to anyone is to stick with WordPress as a host if you’re going to choose WordPress. I have no especial love for Blogger over WordPress; they both are what they are. But hosting somewhere else is a very bad idea.

So what happened this time? I broke a line of code when I updated all my plugins at once. That’s also a very bad idea. I wish I could’ve accessed the admin on my WordPress and just deleted the offending plugin because it wasn’t in use anyway, but I was completely locked out of my admin. That left me no choice but to go to GoDaddy to fix the line of code. The problem with GoDaddy is it’s impossible to find anything. Their hosting section is nested into files and folders within folders and is not usable to the average person who doesn’t understand the system or who doesn’t have a CS degree, which I refuse to get just to keep an author website presence. Somehow, mounting frustration made me act rashly, and with the touch of a button, my eleven years of blogging had vanished….

Enough is enough. Authors can’t be their own editors, proofers, formatters, marketers, website creators, admins…but this is exactly what’s expected of authors. It’s not just necessary for self-pubbers such as myself (yes, I gave up on shopping to the trad market), but it became a necessity for trad-pubbed authors as well. Long gone are the days when publishing companies would lift a finger for an author, unless that author already happened to be a bestseller making them untold millions of dollars.

And what good has all this hassle done for me, being this jack of all trades? Well, let me see: I just lost years’ worth of my blog posts (I had only two years archived) and have sold precisely four copies of my latest book. Four. Four copies. My worst sales record yet. Because I can’t be everything. And the hardest part for me is marketing, when that should be my primary skill.*

However, writing has always been a way I could communicate with the world in a way I couldn’t otherwise. That’s why I do it. That’s the point. I want to share my vision with people. If I knew how to reach people any other way, such as selling products, I would do that instead. But the truth is I don’t know how to reach people.

I didn’t mean for this post to be a whine fest. I apologize and will cut this short. In conclusion, I don’t recommend GoDaddy for hosting services unless you know how to use their system. I still don’t understand why I had to be hosted off their service; I have no idea why I kept that hosting service just because well-meaning people in my life decided I should be there. Nothing makes sense to me anymore, though. Actually, I do know why I kept GoDaddy. It was easier to use in those early years (from what I remember), and all my priorities changed when we moved to Roswell — like keeping my head above water and not drowning or drifting away into a sea that doesn’t exist where the grassland meets the desert…. I had no space in my head for considering my site host, in other words. Life is never easy, nor should it be. When it gets very difficult, though, I find myself cheering for the little things I’ve managed, like publishing any books at all. And I’ve published two since I’ve been here. That’s at least a feat to celebrate.

*The first clue I’m not great at marketing is revealing my low sales volume. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re never supposed to be negative or denigrate your work or successes. My books are great. I believe in my books. See how I bolded and italicized that for emphasis? But honestly, it’s kind of laughable how bad my sales are this time around because it means all my sales were coming from Twitter or Facebook previously, and I refuse to be on either these days. So, in addition to being a poor marketer, I have principles I won’t budge on.