EelKat Wendy C Allen - zdark Fantasy Author

2018 April/May/June Update:

As you know, most of the year I publish 2 to 3 articles a day.

However, every year during convention season, I take a break from that to go full swing CosPlay.

From early April 2018 to late June 2018, article posting schedule will be sporadic, while CosPlay Season and Convention events are going full swing.

During this time period, you can expect most, possible all new articles to be focused on costume making, CosPlay, and the characters I'm CosPlaying.

UPDATE: It's now divided into 7 pages. The primary page "Meet Avallach" is now over 20,000 words long. At this rate, it'll cross 60,000 long before the costume is finished, and that's not including the other 5 pages. The primary page has now crossed 60,000 89,000 words and counting, the whole set of Avallac'h pages are now more than 200,000 words long, and more then 500 pictures of Avallac'h and his friends have now been uploaded on these pages, plus there are now 400+ hour-long videos f the costume making process as we record live, every second of this insanely elaborate, over the top CosPlay project.

As of May 19, just 29 days to PortCon we are embroidering his blue coat in a countdown against the clock to finish in time for the event, while we pray that The Dazzling Razzberry will be re-weilded back together and drivable in time for PortCon, after it's recent vandalism by Old Orchard Beach's ever growing Ku Klux Klan problem.

There will still be daily updates, but the BULK of the daily updates will be limited to the pages linked here:

  1. The Avallac'h CosPlay: Who is Avallac'h?
  2. Obsession: Meet Avallac'h
  3. [NSFW] Avallac'h & His Nude Women | Witcher 3 Game Screenshots
  4. Historical Accuracy vs Avallac'h (to go live later this summer)
  5. The Avallac'h CosPlay Costume Making Vlogs (will go live AFTER finishing the costume)
  6. How To Make The Avallac'h CosPlay (will go live AFTER PortCon)
  7. How Much Did It Cost? ($800+ will run to around $3,000) Budgeting The Avallac'h CosPlay (eing written as the costume is being made, will go live after completion of the costume)
  8. Why do children CosPlay rapists & rape victims? & WHY Avallac'h is a M18+ character. 
  9. PortConMaine 2018
  10. On Being a Handicapped CosPlayer: A Look At Events of PortConMaine 2017 That Resulted In 3 Disabled CosPlayers Getting hurt at The Convention and How These Things Could Have Been Avoided


After PortCon Update:

PortCon 2018 is over... but the making of the Avallac'h CosPlay is not. It is not possible to make a costume as detailed as I'm making in fewer then 400 hours, and only 129 hours went into the simplified first run version you saw at PortCon'18. The complete version will not be seen until PortCon'19

If you want to see this costume in person and watch it's progression onward as I continue to expand it... I'll be wearing it at the monthly Maine Association of CosPlay Enthusiasts (M.A.C.E.) events, throughout 2018 and 2019, you are welcome to join us. The list of current events can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/293470827423558/events/ This list is updated monthly, so be sure to check back often to find all the dates, locations, and details of events.

Building Pinterest Traffic: The "Take an Interest in Pinterest" Challenge


By EelKat Wendy C Allen


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Building Pinterest Traffic: The "Take an Interest in Pinterest" Challenge

Building Pinterest Traffic: The "Take an Interest in Pinterest" Challenge

WOW... traffic from Pinterest just started flowing to my SBI site!  

I must tell you guys what happened this week...

Back in November, I think it was, I had posted here to show you guys that I had started using Canva to make my pin graphics....

I got an update on that post...

So, I started my Pin account back several years ago, but used it just to repin other people's pins. My account was maybe 5 years old and had about 30 followers and me following 1,000+ people. And never once had I created a pin. It was all me "collecting" my fave pins other people had posted. In fact the fact that I could post my own pins, never even occurred to me before this SBI thread was started!  

It wasn't until this thread started last summer, that I realized I could make my own pins. But, summer was busy for me, so I wasn't able to put into action, the things I had learned here, until October, the same month as the https change.

Now, my site is VERY text heavy and is focused on "how to write novels" articles and sample chapters of my novels. So, it doesn't lend well to pinterest, right? Which was something I had mentioned I was worried about... thinking Pinterest would never be a viable source of traffic for me, due to the lack of pictures.

Well, as a result of this thread, I ended up discovering various "quote pins" and "info graphic" pins, and one thing led to another, and I ending finding another author who had a site (hers was a Blogger blog) similar to mine. Like me she had "how to write novels" articles and sample chapters of her novels. She also had a blog post on how she used Pinterest to get traffic to her articles and showed samples of her pins.

What she did was, to make a simple pin image, that was nothing but colourful text on geometric colour blocks, made using Canva templates. They were simple, bold, and required no images. The text was simply, the title of the blog post, and the name of her blog. Nothing else.

I thought: "Hey, I can do that!" And so I did.

Since late October, Early November, I have been creating one of these images for each of my new pages, and also going back to my old pages and creating images for them as well. I now have 300 pages on my site, with pin images, slowly working towards all pages eventually having it's own image.

Here's a few so you can see what they look like:

So, now for the first time (since Oct 2017) I am using Pinterest to promote my SBI site. Every time I create a new page (or update an old page) I now send it to pinterest, via pinning the images I made for the titles. I created a board specifically for that purpose "Writing Tips For Authors".

Well, other then that. I've not paid attention to my Pinterest account. I make a page, pin it, move on, never head to my pinterest account to see what the pins are doing.

3 days ago one of my articles (an old one that never gets traffic) suddenly gets 20 views in the space of about 5 minutes. At first I assume someone tweeted it and think nothing of it. It did not occur to me that the night before, I had made a pin image for that very aticle and pinned it to my pin board.

A few hours later I'm checking my site stats and this page now has 70 views. I'm still thinking twitter at this point since most of my traffic generally comes from twitter.

I notice at this point that 2 other articles, both several years old and barely getting 1 to 2 views a month, are also fast rising in views. They too had been updated with these new text images and pinned to my board within the past few days. I still have not made the connection.

This morning my phone starts sending me notifications from Pinterest: 5 new followers, 12 saves. Then ten minutes later: 6 new followers, 30 saves.... every 10 minutes another one... then suddenly, I get one that says: 301 new followers, 1800 saves...

I'm omg! What just happened?   

I go to Pinterest... I've suddenly gone from 35 followers a few days ago, to 400+ followers this morning! And those 3 articles... each has400+ pins to other people's boards!

I head back to my SBI traffic stats... those same 3 articles each got 400+ views in the past 2 hours!

OMG! 

I've heard people talk about how Pinterest traffic starts snowballing fast, when it starts, but, I've never seen it happen before!

I've got 3 pages of my site, all of then 3+ years old and almost never getting traffic, suddenly getting hundreds of hits in a matter of hour.... BECAUSE I added a text graphic to them, and pinned them!

I don't think I've ever seen such a big boost in traffic from seemingly so little effort.

I'm definitely going to start focusing more on Pinterest now that I've seen what it can do.

Thank you for starting this thread! I don't think I ever would have started using Pinterest at all, had I not started reading this thread last summer!

    




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Where to find more info on my methods to writing Elf culture, Elf society, Elf ethics, and the Elven way of life (aka other writing related articles that started out in life as Reddit answers):

  1. What makes an Elf an Elf?
  2. Moon Elves - Albinism in The Quaraun Series.
  3. How To Write Hot Sex - Video Interview On Elf Sex Lives
  4. On Writing A Clinically Insane Character Accurately, While Avoiding The Psychopath Stereotype
  5. Wizards vs Witches vs Sorcerers: How are they different?
  6. FAQs About Quaraun
  7. Psychedelics In A 'High' High Fantasy World (High Elves Getting High)
  8. High, High Elves: Elves on Opium | Drug Use 
  9. Writing Horror That Features Violence Against Children 
  10. Spell-casting Side Effects of Magic
  11. Child Sacrifice in Fantasy Novels
  12. Meet the Characters - Who is GhoulSpawn
  13. Marriage in Moon Elf Culture 

The Complete Index To Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Moon Elf Society, But Was Afraid To Ask;

or

The Zaharam-Chapelle-Parunas  Ethnographical World Building Questionnaire