Well, I think I’ve settled on the “Journalist” theme for the blog. One could argue it’s pretty boring (and one would be right) so my hope is that the scintillating prose I splash across the page brings all the interest the blog needs. Oh, and the covers of my books “pop” the most against this stark black/white landscape, which itself is rather appropriate for a blog that covers “publishing,” among other things.
This theme also doesn’t have that annoying “tag line” to the blog name which says something like “Just another WordPress.com blog” and which I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of except by selecting a theme that didn’t say that. It must be me, because I can’t imagine a platform that prides itself on its flexibility doesn’t allow the blogger to remove that from their heading. But I couldn’t figure it out in the 2 minutes I devoted to the task, so choosing a theme without that tagline seems to work. The downside is that there isn’t a graphic heading at all. Or maybe that’s an upside — it prevents me from having to design something. Besides, this blog is supposed to be branded by yours truly, so my photograph there hopefully provides all the branding this blog platform needs.
I also can’t figure out how to change the “Name” of my blog, in spite of the promise WordPress made when I first named it that I could change it whenever I wanted. The lack of the word “of” is bothering me. When I initially named it, I just strung some keywords together, but now it’s TOO close to an actual, grammatically-correct sentence, that the absence of the word “of” looks like a mistake. <sigh> I’ll keep trying to figure it out.
This photograph I’m using along the right-hand side is the same one I use everywhere else, so it appears on the backs of my books, it appears on my book web pages, it appears on Amazon, etc. The image you choose for yourself when establishing your brand is important, so take the time to do it right. Have it professionally taken, and then acquire the rights from the photographer to use it however you want (yes, you have to acquire those rights — just having a picture taken of you doesn’t entitle you to use that image; it belongs to the photographer).
By now I’ve also added a few “widgets” to the side column of my blog, specifically three image widgets that allow me to add a photograph of myself (for blog branding purposes) and the covers to some of my books. A nice thing is that when I write and publish future books — this blog will cover that process in great detail — it will be an easy matter to add those cover images to the column, too.
President of Outskirts Press 