It Ain't Rocket Science!

I read a blog this morning about the benefit of tags and it offered some useful tips and hashtag suggestions. 

"Oh yeah," I thought to myself, "that's a bit like that one I read last week. That had some good ones in too - now what the heck were they?"

Now ain't that the problem?

I read heaps of stuff online and off it. If someone says, "I found this helpful..." then I'm there like a bee round a donut, desperate to learn anything that will get me ahead of the game. I mean, obviously it's not always like that, sometimes I have to go to work, do other stuff like maybe sleep.

In my other life, I write everything down. At work, I have a diary and literally everything goes into it, appointments, jobs in hand, notes to self. Basically, anything that I'm likely to forget. I could do it on my computer, but we aren’t flash enough to have hand-held devices and I can’t see my boss being amused when I wheel in my base unit on a trolley, dragging my monitor under my arm and asking where the power socket is. Nobody likes that person. I do just fine with a diary/notebook.

So why, in my author life do I think that I’m going to mentally absorb 400 different hashtags, which categories I put whichever novel into and web addresses that could be hazardous to forget?

I did have a sheet saved as a Word document on my laptop. I thought I was clever putting all my different passwords to Facebook and Goodreads and Amazon and lots more. My ever patient technical specialist raised his eyebrows and suggested that perhaps I passworded it, seeing as everything to do with the laptop was being stored in a file on the laptop. He's clever like that. Now, I'm blowed if I can remember the damn password that I used to protect my passwords. Not funny.

Anyhow, in a light bulb moment this morning, I did it.

I solved my problem.

I got myself a bloomin' notebook for all that stuff about hashtags and categories and things like that. I might not be able to remember a password but in 45 years of life, I have never lost a single notebook!

So much as it might sound like traversing the great ether back to the Dark Ages of Ye Olde Worlde, I'm happy. I've already filled 3 pages with great hashtags that I’m going to use on my posts and lists of the categories that my novels are already in. That way, when someone says to me, "Have you tried putting your book in this category?" I don't have to scratch my head and go to Amazon.com and scroll down to the bottom to see where they're ranking, just because I don't want to go through the hassle of logging onto KDP and getting distracted and fiddling with something else, like a blurb or a cover.

So there you go.

Notebook.

It ain’t rocket science but then I, somewhat disappointingly am not Wonder Woman either.

Carry a notebook. Lose the frown.