The first illustration is here!

I've taken a step into the pool of illustrators who are available on Fiverr.com and now have the first illustration for one of my stories! The first story to be illustrated is How the Flowers Became and I've always thought that the mice in the story would make a great image, so after searching through the various styles on Fiverr, I liked the ones by Asmita Kaushal. https://www.fiverr.com/inbox/asmitakaushal She has made a great image of the first mouse for me. The one thing I'm really conscious of is to not make the book file too big or to make the book too expensive, so I am going to add around 10 illustrations in total.

How Did I Add A Poll to My Blog?

Every part of this process needs to be transparent so that anyone can follow it.

I don't know what the success rate will be, or even whether I will have to rename my success rate later on to reflect the actual acheivement - little statistical joke there, but because this is the very beginning, it is easy to catalogue all the elements.
How I added a poll to my blog post was as follows:
I wanted my poll to appear in the form of the different themes that I had thought about for my blog background.

* So first I set each theme and used print screen to paste each image into a word document.
* Right clicking each image let me 'save as picture'

Then I found a website called www.poll-maker.com*

It was really easy to upload my images and add a question. Then I had to select a background.
To get it into my blog post, I clicked 'Share' and then 'Embed' and just pasted the whole thing into my blog.
The amount of html was a little bit daunting, but there you are! It worked!

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*No affiliate links, no connection to this blog apart from using it to make a poll.

The Paradox of Choice

Fisrt thing to do is set up this blog so that it looks nice. Regular visitors will notice that this blog now has a new direction. The updated look will make it a good central location - like a central headquarters from which to do all the marketing, planning and diarising. A great place for me and my visitors to find out the progress of the new book marketing strategy and for me to keep all my thoughts in one place to formulate and plan.

I realised I need a new theme, but how do I make it sing so that visitors will be instantly enamoured by it's elegance?

After spending nearly a whole day playing around with only a minute fraction of the available themes, colour palettes, images, fonts and layouts, it occurred to me that what I have is the paradox of choice. Or, as Barry Schwarz called it in his book of the same name, the tyranny of choice. Here is his talk about it:

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret the option that you choose! Adding choices increases the expectations that one of them should be perfect and so incrementally increases anxiety levels - what if I choose the wrong one? When I thought of the title for this blog post, it was as a half-hearted joke that, man, I had a hard time picking a theme I liked, I had no idea that it was a major psychological research topic in it's own right.

So, anyway, after a lot of fiddling around, I've stuck with this theme with this background.
I hope you love it!
Does it really matter? :)

Let me know what you think - here's a poll about it!

Which background do you prefer?

Created with QuizMaker

The Beginning

This is the start of the journey.
I have been writing these short stories for nearly 10 years and have decided to bring them all together into a short story collection. The stories were written for various writing competitions, so there is an eclectic mix of genres and styles. But rather than sending them off on their own into the world to see if they could get published in magazines or websites, I wanted to keep them together as my stories - in a collection.
That is how Prompted was born.

The book is written completely and here begins its journey through finishing and polishing, publishing and marketing.