CLEARING UP MALWARE
Good morning fellow writers. I know it’s confusing to know where I’ll appear next. It seems the problems I have been experiencing with this blog are clearing up. After posting a link to a popular writing site, it became infested with malware and so my blog was frozen while messages went out to the site to clean it up. They must have done so because my site seems to be back where I can post, edit blogs, add stuff. We’ll see how it goes. Still wonky and hesitant to come up sometimes.
I’m not sure about sharing links, which we all do on our sites. We’re told by the experts that sharing links we’ve found to be helpful is a good way to become more likable online, but when something like this happens it makes me wary of doing so. The site I shared is very popular, and since I was infested with malware earlier and had to clean up my computer using CCleaner, a great way to do so, by the way, I supposed I got it from my visit to that site. No, this popular cleaner doesn’t  pay me to say that. It’s just a great program to quickly clear up any computer problems that your virus scanner doesn’t catch.
How do you know you have malware? Well, I realized it when my computer first began to stutter and refuse to follow my instructions. You know, like open my email, allow me to go to familiar sites like blogger, facebook and the like. The screen would flash on and off, the mouse wouldn’t work. Once these things begin you know you’ve caught something. I ran my virus scanner first. It found nothing, which I understand isn’t unusual with malware. Then I remembered CCleaner, opened it up and it cleaned the computer up in about five to ten minutes.
So if you suspect malware try something like that. I understand there are other programs that will clean it up. I just happened to have this one on board, so to speak.
I’m still having a bit of a problem with my tool bar here on blogger. It’s covering the top where the title and publish button reside. That’s why you’ll see my title in the body of this post. I’m going to try to solve that soon.
EBOOK AND KINDLE WRITERS: Have you remembered to use Author Central and Shelfari to help promote your books? Amazon supplies these two sites for its Kindle writers and you need to take advantage of them. I understand that readers go there to learn more about our books before they make a decision to buy. Fill in all the information you can. Make sure you reveal just enough about your book(s) to hook the readers in such a way they can’t resist hitting the buy button.
Also ask readers to add a review on Amazon if they like your book. Reviews can be short and sweet and won’t take much of their time.
I have all six of my back-list books up now, thanks to some cover help from my friends. The prequel, Spurs, Saddles & Sass,  has short stories about my characters prior to the books opening. It also contains a sensual excerpt from each to prove they are romances as well as historical fiction. This book will go FREE Thursday, April 26 for five days. This is my first try at offering a book free. Somehow, it goes against my grain to give away novels I’ve devoted up to two years of my time to research, write, revise, rewrite, edit, etc. So instead I’m trying this. We’ll see how it works.
Covers will appear on my blog shortly.
Here’s a link to all my Kindle offerings to date.