Discussion on Blogging, Vlogging and BookTubing

I have previously had the pleasure of featuring Marcia Clayton’s novels in our theme weeks. Marcia also responded to my invitation to this theme week with details of her blog and a couple of others that she recommends. This is what Marcia told me:

“I was born in North Devon and have always lived here, so it was a natural choice to base my books in this beautiful county. My two historical fiction books are called “The Mazzard Tree” and“The Angel Maker” and I’m currently writing the third book in the “Hartford Manor” series. Having published my books, I needed to find a way to promote them so a few months ago, I set up a website which can be accessed here: https://marciaclayton.co.uk/

I also put in place a mailing list, with the offer of a free short story to encourage people to sign up to it. The next challenge was to think of something to attract the attention of potential readers and so I started blogging. The question was, what to blog about? I decided I must choose subjects which interest me and hopefully, my readers too. Apart from writing books, my main hobbies are gardening, floral art, reading and walking and so I concentrated on these.

Fortunately, living in the countryside, finding picturesque walks is relatively easy and enjoyable. Nowadays, when my husband and I go on one of our walks, I take a lot of photos to remind me of the route in detail and then I write a blog about it. I’ve posted links to a few of these blogs on my local village Facebook page and they have attracted more people to my website and mailing list. These are a couple of photos that people enjoyed and the directions to them can be found on this blog: https://marciaclayton.co.uk/circular-walk-from-landkey…/

In the future, I plan to write more blogs about book reviews, but I’ve found that my readers like to hear about other topics too. With this in mind, I write blogs about historical facts and places which crop up in my books. For example, in the book I’m currently writing, some of the characters visit Victorian London and I’ve written a blog about “The Great Fire of London” and “The Monument” erected to commemorate it.

Other blogs include my better attempts at floral art: https://marciaclayton.co.uk/floral-art/ and a “virtual” holiday in Corfu: https://marciaclayton.co.uk/beautiful-corfu/ (I thought this might cheer us all up when we couldn’t take real holidays during lock-down). I like to keep in touch with the people on my mailing list, but I don’t want to overburden them with too many emails. With this in mind, I send out a monthly newsletter, which usually contains news of my writing, a link to a recent walk and a short review of a book I’ve recently read. I’ve had a few people contact me to say they enjoy the newsletters and my mailing list is growing steadily, so hopefully I must be doing something right. This is a link to my May Newsletter which includes a couple of lovely Devon walks and a review of a great book by Jemima Brigges, called“Counting the Cost” : https://marciaclayton.co.uk/may-newsletter/

At first, I found it difficult to write blogs, but now I quite enjoy it. Sometimes it comes as a welcome break from writing, or editing my books. I follow a couple of other authors and enjoy their newsletters and blogs. One is Chrystyna Berger, who also writes historical fiction. This is a link to her blogsite: Blog – Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger https://inktreks.com/blog/

I also enjoy reading the weekly bulletins from author, Elizabeth Ducie on her Facebook page “The Business of Writing.” Elizabeth has written six books outlining everything the new author needs to know about publishing and marketing their books, as well as several works of fiction. This is a link to her website and blogs: http://elizabethducieauthor.co.uk/ “