Owen Jones
Wales Loses, But We Don’t Have To
and 404 Error Messages
I awoke this morning to discover that Wales had lost to England at the annual Six Nations rugby internationals, or is it Seven Nations now?. I’m not a sports person but I would have watched that game, if the alarm had gone off.
It was on at three a.m. here.
I went to bed at one and put four beers in the fridge before I did so, two for me and two for Neem, my wife. She is very keen on sports, especially football and rugby, but neither of us watched the defeat and the beers remain undrunk.
So, with my usual breakfast of black coffee and cake, I started my daily routine of listening to the Radio 4 news, while checking and answering my email.
No, that’s not completely true, I only wish it were and that I possessed sufficient sangfroid to be able to accomplish it. I always check my overnight book sales first, but it was average, nothing to write home about. Then I did my email, followed by a short burst of advertising on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
I have read with utter astonishment other authors writing that they sell lots of books on Facebook.
I don’t, I put nearly all my sales down to word of mouth, my web sites and Twitter in that order. Perhaps Facebook comes fourth in my scheme of things.
I try to split my promotional activities into three sections, morning, afternoon and evening, because I often do six or more hours a day, and although I can handle that, it does become tedious and when working on automatic pilot, I find that more errors creep in. After all, there’s no point spending hours promoting an address that will produce a 404, is there?
Yet I have done it before.
If you are prone to making errors like this, or are scared that you might be but don’t know it yet, it is worth copying the code of your best page, the page that you want every visitor to read, even if they read nothing else, and pasting it into a custom 404 on your web site, with a link back to your home page. There are other error pages you can copy it to as well, but 404 is the most important by far.
You may need access to your control panel for this, but I’m sure I’ve seen a widget for WordPress called something like 404 Redirect.
It sounds right anyway.
I am writing this blog diary post on a Kindle Fire in a shop around the corner from my home in the village. It’s the nearest thing to a pub for miles around, but I’m the only one who uses it, as there are no other foreigners for miles either. I do a large proportion of my writing in ‘Jem’s Shop’ over a beer. I find that being outside is far more stimulating than my office, where I tend to do my promo, boring routine work.
I’ve spent three hours here drinking three beers, not a very competitive rate, I grant you, but I finished another chapter of my latest book, ‘Dead Centre 2’, unless I can come up with a better title for it, and I have written this post to you, dear reader, so now I am going home for something to eat and a bit more promo.
Until tomorrow,
Iechyd da,
Owen.
http://owencerijones.com
