Author Archives: Running from Hell with El

Writing Tips: How A Pantseur Wrote an Outline

  I am a confirmed pantseur, or a writer who disdains imposition of rules, order or God save us all, outlines on my fly-by-the seat of my pants style. Damnit, I’m a pantseur and I won’t change for anyone. F*** rules! And f*** outlining! Gah! Yeah. That’s how my inner child, now a childish but still charming adult, thinks about the writing process. I wrote my first two novels without even the tiniest thread of an outline written on paper.  [...]

How do you add a PayPal button to your WordPress Blog? I first came across this question a few months ago, and it bedeviled me. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to add any arbitrary text, whether it was a pretty Amazon link or a PayPal link, to my blog.

What was the problem? My WordPress blog was not self-hosted, and I couldn’t add PayPal or any links to other websites to my sidebar area as a WordPress Blog. If you don’t know if your blog is self-hosted or not, chances are, it’s not, because becoming self-hosting requires signing up with BlueHost  or HostGator, among other options.

I strongly recommend you become self-hosted if you’re not already. As an author or wanna-be author, you absolutely must have easy-to-click through links prominently positioned on your blogs so that readers can buy your books. The same principle holds true if you’re selling any other products and services on your website.

What companies sell the most dependable, easiest to install self-hosting options that are compatible with WordPress? Please feel free to research self-hosting companies, such as HostPapa or GoDaddy.com. Personally, I use Hostgator and can also strongly recommend BlueHost, based in part on Michael Hyatt’s Blog post and in part on some painstaking albeit seemingly incompetent research of my own.

I think I always feel like incompetent when I’m researching technical issues online. I guess I’m every woman in that respect.

Let me save you hours of messing around and please trust me on this: unless you’re self-hosted, you cannot add “arbitrary HTML text.” If someone reading this please knows a workaround, I’d love to hear it, but I spent hours surfing down this particular “Arb Text” rabbit hole. And without the ability to add arbitrary HTML text, you can’t install those pretty PayPal buttons folks can click on in order to buy your books or services.

Once you have bought self-hosting and installed it, your next step is to go to PayPal. Assuming you already have an account with PayPal (and if you don’t, make it so), then go to Merchant Services. Once you click there, click on the Create Payment Buttons for your Website.  Then click on the Blue Button that says, Create a Button.

Just this morning, I wanted to create a button so that folks could buy writing coach  services from me, so I followed the instructions, and clicked on the yellow Create Button and came up with the following text:

<form action=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” method=”post” target=”_top”>

 

<input type=”hidden” name=”cmd” value=”_s-xclick”>

 

<input type=”hidden” name=”hosted_button_id” value=”PKGQF2HGM2HCS”>

 

<table> [etc]

 

 I copied that text down.

Then I went over to my self-hosted Dashboard on my blog. On the far left side, I scrolled down to Appearance. Under that menu, I clicked on Widgets. I searched for the word Text, and underneath it appeared the words, Arbitrary Text.

I click-dragged that box, the one titled Text, over to my right sidebar widget area, which is where I have all my other widgets, like my Subscriptions JetPack, my Facebook Like JetPack, my links to my books on Amazon . . . and my MailChimp Widget, and I found a comfortable home for where I wanted my new PayPal button to appear. I let go of the mouse, and Voila: the Text box appeared underneath and mixed among all those widgets.

Then I typed Writing Coach-TeleCon in the Title, and in the big blank open rectangle under the Title, I pasted the arbitrary text I’d copied from PayPal. After hitting the blue Save Button, I smiled, held my breath, and tapped on the name of my blog, Running from Hell with El on the top left of my browser.  Underneath it appeared the words, Visit Site, which I clicked on.

And here’s what I saw:

  Screen Shot 2013-06-14 at 3.58.43 PM

 Good luck, and happy monetizing your WordPress site! Please feel free to drop me a line with any questions! And in case anyone’s looking for some coaching work, I’m accepting new clients now.

Writer Tips: Skipping Boring Scenes

As a self-published author, or author-to-be, how do you handle the mundane and the everyday aspects of your characters’ lives? When I was crafting my first novel, I hurried the pace of the action by stripping scenes to their most dramatic words and actions. Usually, I skipped right over the boring, day-to-day dialogue. As my critique partner Renée A. Schuls-Jacobson once explained, “Your characters don’t need to carry on goodbye parties at the end of each scene.” I laughed when she [...]

Self-Publishing and How to Become Amazon Bestseller

Do you want to be able to honestly say you’re a best-selling author? Whoa, you perked up didn’t you? Grinning. I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned, so please grab your coffee cup. One of the secrets to landing on the Amazon bestseller list is to place your book in the correct category. As a newbie self-published author, I am learning as I go, and I like sharing my lessons learned. This week, I experimented with trying a few [...]

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Should You Use CreateSpace or Lightning Source for Printing?

Should you use CreateSpace or Lightning Source to print your self-published books? The short answer for me is both. In the case of other writers, the answer depends on whether you want to break into bookstores and libraries.  If you do, then your only viable choice is to publish your book through Lightning Source (LS), but you can also use CreateSpace (CS) for Amazon and direct sales only. If you don’t want to crack into bookstores or libraries, then the [...]

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