New Year, New Style, New Website!!
Yep, this thing is finally up and running!
I’ve been using the word ‘finally’ a lot lately. I’ve finally published my new lesbian romance (A Card for Valentine’s), even though I’d planned to publish it about two weeks ago. I’ve finally finished this website, even though I’ve been thinking about it and low-key planning it since last October or November (around the same time as I quit my Patreon).
The last couple of months have largely existed of high-pressure writing and editing (and publishing books in a variety of genres) and trying to take down-time to keep my mental health up (something that I’m not always that good at), and during all that, I knew that I needed to do this. Last year, I tried to do something similar to this on a Patreon, create a ‘hub’ for all my publishing adventures, but that never clicked as well for me as just having a website with a blog, at least I know how to run and manage this. Though, some pages here are still a little rough, don’t look too closely yet, I’ll polish the edges in the coming months, having this ‘hub’ in place and in working condition was the most important thing.
I do have a really cool announcement though, keep reading to find out more!
Why a single ‘hub’ for all my writing works?
Simple answer? Because I get easily overwhelmed and running multiple websites, FB pages, Twitter accounts and those things was really stressing me out big time.
Long answer? Because no matter what book of mine you read, it’s still a book from my hand and it’s still a part of me. I know that there will be people who will stop reading my books because I’m not a ‘pure’ author and only write in a specific genre that they like. I know that there will be people who will look down on me because they know me as a Scifi author and they find out that I also write romances. There will be people upset because I write straight/ gay/ lesbian/ neuro-typical/ neuro-diverse and a broad range of different characters and I ‘shouldn’t’ be writing books with gay characters or I ‘shouldn’t’ be writing about transgender characters or I ‘shouldn’t’ be writing autistic characters or [fill in your own group of people that people love to shit on]. I’m me. I’m simply me, I read in a variety of genres and I write in a variety of genres. That’s not going to change.
As it was, I split off my straight romance from my gay romance from my young adult romance, from my… Well, everything was split.
I’ve started to ‘pull’ things closer together with my newest pen names. Emmy Engberts was the pen name I chose for my YA romances, and because I know that not everyone easily accepts a female pen name on a scifi book, I chose E. Engberts for my scifi, and later Emily Engberts for my Adult lesbian romances because they’re a little more ‘steamy’ than my YA romances. I wanted to keep these pen names similar enough that people would know what they’d get reading the books (neurodiverse queer characters mostly) but that I could also make clear that E. Engberts doesn’t do romance or that Emily Engberts has sex scenes in them. It keeps them separate enough that people can choose what they want to read and not accidentally fall into a book with a sex scene or read a scifi book when they’re looking for a romance.
This ‘hub’ website is an extension of that idea. This website now also pulls in my gay romance pen name and my straight romance pen name and my Youtube channel and will also start including some blog posts that I think people will enjoy (recipes, planning related posts, posts that relate to something from a book, like the pop-up cards from A Card for Valentine’s, things like that). It brings everything under one roof.
Okay, so that’s about things that already exist, what’s the purpose of this for the future?
This website will allow me to not just put all my energy on a limited numbers of ways to reach you (one Twitter, one Facebook Page, one Instagram, one Newsletter, one Blog, etc.), but it also means that if I want to experiment with something, for example a series of blog posts on a subject, I don’t have to choose what ‘brand’ of pen name would match the content best. I can just post it here for everyone to see. This also hopefully means that I’ll have more time and energy to dedicate to things I love and things that inspire me, without having to think through 20 steps on how to make something happen. Blog post? One location. Short story? One location. Cool video? One location.
In short, this will let me give you the best of me, instead of the stretched-thin version of me that people have had to deal with in the last four years.
Time for real talk! Social media, what and how and where?
I still have Twitter accounts for different pen names, but the one that’s now for all my work and my ‘hub’ is my Emmy Engberts (@EmmyEngberts) account, mostly because that’s the one I’ve been on the most in the last year and I don’t really want to start from scratch again.
There is one Facebook Page that is now my main page: Easily Distracted Media, I will cross-post to my other pages for a while, but this will become the main one to follow.
I’ve already renamed my Instagram account a while ago: Easily Distracted Media, so people who were following me there will already have seen the change in name. Not much more to say there, really.
Now to the more ‘complicated’ part of this, the newsletter will now come in two ‘flavours’, the Young Adult list and the Adult list. The Young Adult list will include updates for my Young Adult pen names (currently those are Emmy Engberts and E. Engberts) and news about YA appropriate events and promotions and things like that. The Adult list will include updates for my Adult pen names (currently Emily Engberts, Rosa Swann and Skylar Heart) and sales and releases and things like that for an Adult public. You can sign up for either or both of them, there won’t be much overlap between the two, maybe a general life update or event I’m attending here or there, but in general, these will be two separate lists. This division between the two basically for one purpose only: I don’t want to market my YA books to Adult readers or my Adult books to YA readers, that’s pretty simple (and if you do want both updates, go ahead and subscribe to them both! Really!). This is both an age thing (not marketing 18+ books to minors) and a genre thing (not mixing the marketing of the people who do like their books steamy with the people who don’t want any steam at all). I focus on this specifically with my newsletter because newsletters are very targeted marketing and could include content not appropriate for everyone, unlike general social media like FB or Twitter where the content is much more safe anyway.
After all that text, you can find the signup page for the newsletter here: Newsletter
But I didn’t write this long blog post (oops) for no reason. To celebrate this new thing I’m doing, I’m going to be running some giveaways!
This starts with a giveaway of a stack of the YA titles I published last year starting tomorrow!
The first New Year New Style giveaway will be for a paperback copy of Her Elysium, The Other Dress and BASE Status: Online!
To celebrate this new adventure I will be giving away a total of 16 (potentially 17) paperbacks over the next few months! Participating will be really easy and the giveaways will be open world wide, so there is no reason not to participate!
I’m ending this way too long post here. If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments below, or on social media.
And I’ll see you back here for the first giveaway tomorrow!
Love!
EDM (because, honestly, I have way too many names that people know me by…)