Movin’ on up

Maintaining a blog for any length of time requires dedication, time and determination. When Sarah and Dave started MGC years ago, it was with an entirely different cast of bloggers than we have now. Over the years, bloggers have come and gone until we settled into the crew we’ve got now. I think it’s a wonderful group of men and women and I’ve loved working with each of them. And no, this isn’t a goodbye post. Far from it. But it is a post about change. In this case, change for the blog. Changes we believe will be for the good.

The main change that you, our readers, will see will be to our “theme”. If you aren’t familiar with WordPress, it allows bloggers to choose from a number of different themes that determine what a blog page looks like, what additional information can be displayed, etc. For the first time in years, we will be moving to a new theme. This one will be a bit cleaner than our current theme. There will also be things like a blogroll, links to recent posts, etc. It is all meant to make it easier for those reading the blog to find previous articles, articles related to the one they are reading, that sort of thing.

The pages of the blog will be undergoing some changes as well. We will still have the page for the Path to Publication. We’re adding a page (or pages) that will help you get to know our bloggers better. From these pages, we’ll link back to the authors’ blogs or websites. We will also have a link to their Amazon author pages and at least some “featured” titles by each blogger.

But the changes go further than that. Those of you who have read MGC for long, know that we would much rather be writing than promoting. When Sarah and I started looking long and hard at the blog and what needed to be done to improve it, promotion was at the top of the list. So, MGC will be getting its own FB page and — gag — probably its own Twitter account. This is one area where you guys can really help us. Once these go live, I’ll announce it on the blog. We need you to help by “liking” the pages and sharing the posts. That is the sort of “word of mouth” that helps writers more than any paid promotion ever could.

The content of the blog isn’t going to change. This is still a blog by writers about issues we think are important to writers and readers. However, there is going to be one big change. It will take time to implement because it means we are having to retrain ourselves, but the blog will no longer be static to a single post a day. That’s another reason for wanting to increase our social media presence. This way, if one of us sees news from the industry we think needs to be shared right away, it will be. The post of the day will still be there, still ready to be read in the morning. But there very well may be second or third post during the day. It won’t happen every day but it will happen whenever one of us feels there’s something we need to share. These supplemental posts may also be reviews of books we’ve read or new book announcements.

In other words, we are going to try to be better about letting you know when we have something new coming.

That means you will be seeing more in the way of snippets. We’re still working on the details about how we’re going to do it. As more details on this are figured out, we’ll let you know.

Sometime during the week, possibly Tuesday but more likely toward the end of the week, you will see the WP theme change. It may take a day or two to get all the glitches out and this is where you can help us. When the new theme goes live. along with leaving your regular comments about the post, let us know if you have any problems with the theme. In particular, we need to know if there is any issue scrolling (yes, I had this happen when I changed the theme for my personal blog) or if the theme runs off the page, is hard to read, etc. We have been testing it using a number of different OS and browsers, but it is easy to miss something.

I’ve rambled on long enough. We’re excited about the changes coming to the blog and hope you are as well. We will always be the Mad Genius Club, sometimes a bit more mad than others. Here’s hoping you and yours have a Merry Christmas and a safe and happy holiday season.