My lensography Books Make Great Gifts

Lensographies (lists of Squidoo lenses) are usually not very interesting although they can be useful. This is more likely if you do lensographies on individual niche subjects.  It is also possible to make them interesting and attractive to visitors looking for information on the topic of your niche too.

First of all, don’t use the word lensography in the title or text because this means nothing to anybody outside Squidoo. Think of a good title using relevant keywords and that is going to sound attractive to someone searching on Google.

Similarly, it’s important that the first paragraph of your introduction contains keywords and is likely to capture the attention of someone searching on Google.

I use two ways of trying to make lists of lenses interesting and attractive. The first can be seen on a page I did to gather my book reviews together to which I gave the title Books Make Great Gifts. I took the ‘give a book as a gift’ angle using my book reviews as suggestions. I wrote about why books make good gifts and the importance of matching the book with the recipient. I divided the lens up into different sections according to genre, eg Mysteries and Thrillers, Books for Children, Classic Books, and wrote a bit about each genre followed by a list of reviews of books of that type. I followed each list with an Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list of books in the hope of making some sales.

The other type of lensography I’ve done can be seen on England’s Seaside Towns. I wrote a little about individual lenses on individual seaside towns (one of them made by another lensmaster but it fitted in well) but mostly I’ve written about different types of seaside town with a link to more information from tourist information sites. There are maps for each place I wrote about on this page so people can see exactly where it is in England with pictures and a video of one place. Towards the end, I included a list of my lenses about seaside resorts. This seems to work quite well as it gets a few hundred visits a week – not earth shattering numbers but better than many lensographies. I used a similar style on a list of lenses about historic towns called Historic England.

Books Make Great Gifts

I write book reviews of fairly obscure books – never those in the top 100 best sellers, probably not even the top 10,000! This week I decided to publicise them a bit with a Squidoo mini lensography called Books Make Great Gifts.

I’m using a Christmas theme for now but, in the New Year, I’ll change it.

I’ve made the point that books make great gifts for birthdays and Christmas as I don’t want it to be seasonal. I wrote about why they make good gifts and the importance of matching the type of book to the recipient. I’ve done separate modules for different genres: Mysteries and Thrillers, Historical Novels, Classics, used Featured Lens modules for my book review lens links, Amazon Spotlight and Amazon list modules for newly published books in the hope of making some sales. I also put in a couple of polls. I want to make the page more than just a list of my lenses, I want to make it interesting in its own right too.

Making this kind of mini-lensography gives me a new lens and it might draw in traffic to existing book reviews I’ve written. If I make a few sales from it, that will be a bonus.

When you really don’t know what to write about next, take a look at the lenses you’ve done so far. Hopefully, you will have written some on a similar subject so that you too can make a mini lensography. You can always add new lenses to it as you publish them.

This week I’ve written two new Squidoo lenses (web pages). The first one was in response to a suggestion on Get Cracking With Bonnie and Robin to write about a specific fear so I wrote about my dental phobia. As I explain, it started when I was a child in response to something a dentist said to me and it continued for many years. It was desperation that finally led me to conquering it with the help of a very understanding, patient and sensitive dentist. You can read more about it on Fear of the Dentist.

Other pages on this topic featured on the Get Cracking page are:

• Overcoming the Fear of Poverty
• Fear of Insects
• The Fear of Bees
• Needle Phobia

I’d recommend visiting the Get Cracking page if you are stuck for a subject to write about. Even if you haven’t got writer’s block, you might fancy a change of topic from the ones you usually tackle. Another good reason for checking the page regularly is that the suggestions are usually for very niche subjects. Most of us are convinced that we can’t compete with the big sites on the most popular topics so the more niche the subject matter of our own pages, the more likely they are to come up high in search results particularly if we make several pages dealing with different aspects of the same niche subject and link between them.

The second page I did this week was a book review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, the latest novel by this author. I’d never read anything by David Mitchell before and was a bit worried that I wouldn’t like the book as Mitchell has the reputation for writing very ‘literary’ books which I interpret as difficult to read and sometimes just plain boring. Nothing could have been further from the truth. This book gripped me from the first page and, as soon as I finished it, I wanted to share it with as many people as possible so I wrote the review. Now I can’t wait to read more of Mitchell’s work.

Reviews of books, movies, music, etc, are all good topics for a web page. If you have written several pages about a particular niche, you can usually find something to review that fits the niche to expand your coverage.

Now all I’ve got to do is keep up the writing.

I guess many of us have periods when we really can’t start writing. I know I do. In fact, I’m going through that kind of period right now. I want to write on Squidoo, here on my blog and other places but can I think of anything to write about? No, I can’t.

At least recognising writer’s block finally gives me something to write about!

I’m checking out “Get Cracking” with Bonnie & Robin on Squidoo on Facebook everyday, in the hope that a suggestion there will inspire me. Yesterday, I thought the suggestion of writing about a favourite gadget was a good one for me. After spending an hour thinking about the gadgets I use, I decided to write about my bread maker. BIG mistake. I started the new lens, wrote the introduction and put in a picture. Wrote another module and a couple more pictures…then I ran out of both steam and enthusiasm. Part of the reason was the model of bread maker that I have is not available in the USA and I really don’t know much about the most recent models of bread makers.

Did I struggle on? Persevere? Succeed in making a new lens in spite of the difficulty? Well, actually, no. I gave up and deleted the lens. How pathetic!

In spite of thinking it’s pathetic, I believe I did the right thing. My boredom would have shone through. I know my least successful pages are those where I have struggled to remain interested. I shall probably still write about a favourite gadget but it will be something smaller and cheaper than a bread maker. I already have an idea for the new page.

I’m also going to take my own advice and try thinking laterally on some general subjects as I’ve done in the past. For example, I’ve written a lot about antiques and collectables. When I was a little bored with the subject, after some lateral thinking I wrote My Own Collectibles and Art which consists of photos of pictures and other things that enhance my life that I have collected over a number of years together with stories of how I came to have them and what they mean to me.

Above all, I know that the cure for writer’s block is just to start writing which is what I’ve done here. I hope it’s not too boring.

Books for Research

Research of some kind is usually essential for all writers. I know that is a sweeping statement but, in my experience, it’s true.

No matter how well I know a subject, there are almost always facts that I need to check to ensure I’ve remembered them accurately. If a reader notices just one wrong fact then the rest of what you’ve written loses credibility.

Sometimes you might be commissioned to write an article about something you have no knowledge of at all. This happened to me some years ago. I’d contacted the editor of a monthly antiques magazine in the hope of being commissioned to write for it. She arranged to meet me and we had a very amicable chat. Then she dropped her bombshell. She said, “I’d like to commission you to write about the Aesthetic Movement. You are familiar with it, aren’t you?” I tried not to look blank and replied that I did know about it, lying through my teeth. I’d vaguely heard of it but couldn’t have said any more than that. The editor then told me the deadline was three weeks away.

I went home and panicked for an hour before I calmed down and started some heavy, intensive research. I looked online, of course, and bookmarked a number of relevant pages. I also went to the library and borrowed books on the subject. I spent about a week reading the references and making notes before starting to write. This story has a happy outcome. I had my article finished before the deadline, written almost exactly to the required number of words and it was used with almost no sub-editing. I also went on to be commissioned to write monthly articles for that magazine for several years.

If I hadn’t been prepared to put in the work researching the subject, I would have lost out on becoming a regular writer for that publication.

Usually, though, I know something, even quite a lot on occasions, about the subject of an article, Squidoo lens or web page I intend to write. Even so I find that preliminary research will throw up facts that I don’t know. Sometimes they are quirky or unusual things that add colour and depth to the article. Caution is needed, though. When I find a fact that I didn’t know, I always check it out from different sources. I don’t want to repeat somebody else’s mistake.

This is something I am very cautious about when doing any research. I never take my notes from just one source even when it’s the leading authority on the subject. There is always a danger of misunderstanding something and getting it wrong in my own writing. There is also the chance that I could subconsciously plagiarise text from my research source. By reading several different sources of information, I get different points of view, different opinions and sometimes a more complete overview. This can allow me to come to my own point of view so that I can write my own article on the subject from the standpoint of what I’ve learned about it. I don’t want to just regurgitate what I’ve read. I want to have an opinion or at least my own slant on the topic.

If you want to see one of my Squidoo pages that I had to do from research with little prior knowledge, take a look at Local Time and Railway Time.

Picture above: Copyright © Twice25 – Creative Commons License

Called “…And the Ladies of the Club”, the story revolves around the members of the Waynesboro Women’s Club and their families and friends covering a period from 1868 to 1932.

Yesterday I finished a review of this book on a Squidoo lens. Because the book is so long, my copy is almost 1200 pages, I found it very hard to give a good synopsis of the story.  So much happens to the characters during that period, it’s just not possible or even desirable to include specific events in a review.

Even so, the lens has already been well received with good comments, many saying they like the sound of the book and might read it. As I’ve read this book twice with an interval of nearly 30 years between the two readings, I hope people do read it. I think it repays the effort of getting through so many pages. In fact, I was so captivated by the characters and their lives that the book never felt too long.

Susanna Duffy, Squid Angel

I’ve known Australian Susanna Duffy online for several years and she has always made great web pages. It’s a talent she’s transferred to Squidoo and now makes great lenses too.

She was made a Squid Angel a few months ago and she has carried out her Angel duties assiduously – I wouldn’t expect anything else from her.

How does she find time for all her many activities and enterprises? I have no idea except I suspect she works long hours and doesn’t waste too long sleeping.

Read more about her in this interview.

When did you join Squidoo?
There are really 2 dates which mark my entrance into squidoo. The first was September 2006 when I joined and made a lens as a backlink to a website. After that I went off about my other business leaving that lens to sit alone, unattended, without a backwards glance from me for exactly two years.

I didn’t return until September 2008, a date which marks my ‘real’ Squidoo start. Things looked different – squidoo had changed! More to the point, I had also changed and from that day last year I embraced Squidoo with passion.

Would you call yourself a Squidoo addict?
One third of my time online is spent on Squidoo, I’m more addicted to my online business if addiction is a word which can be used for online work. I make 70% of my income online. The business is called Virtual PA.

What do you like best about Squidoo?
Squidoo is fabulous and fast! And where else do you find such a friendly community? Like all communities, there are ups and downs and the occasional pest, but the wealth of supportive lensmasters far outweighs the complainers. SquidU Forums are a source of answers, advice and tips for everyone of all levels.

What annoys or irritates you about it?
The abuse of Squidoo is more than irritating, it’s quite sickening. Cheats, liars and scammers have to be hunted down to clean it up for the rest of the world. They give us all a bad name.

Which was your first lens and why did you write it?
My original foray into Squidoo was about my first love, mythology. I’ve since turned that first lens into a lensography which lists some of my lenses on the topic. It’s still not what could be called a ‘good’ lens, it needs work, but I’m attached to it now and read the few comments with fondness.

I now have a much better understanding of what makes an interesting lens but it’s hard to say goodbye to my first shaky attempt.

What is your favourite lens of your own and why?
I’m particularly fond of my Roman recipes. I’ve been trying lots more too so I’m planning a second (or third) lens on this topic.

The fascinating part about ancient Roman recipes is that they have no measurement of ingredients, no explanation of many of those ingredients – and no instructions! You have to guess it, cook it, taste it and then make a judgement for modern palates. It’s like solving a mystery, a two thousand year old mystery.

I have a small restaurant, Cafe Porridge, and specialise in ancient foods so I’m always experimenting with something new – or ‘old’.

Have you enjoyed your time as a Squidoo Angel?

Nowadays I’m an Honorary Angel and I have truly loved my time with wings. Cleaning up the baddies in Squidoo has been a constant delight although not as delightful as blessing excellent lenses.

The Curious Town of Coober Pedy

You write about many different topics – Australia and Australians, myths and legends, recipes, to name just a few. Do you have a preference for a particular one or more subjects amongst those you’ve covered?

Mythology is my number one topic but I write on Australia as so many people really know very little about this vast continent. My favourite about Australia is The Curious Town of Coober Pedy.

Recipes? I love my kitchen.

Why are you particularly fascinated by mythology? Do you think some of them are based on real events and have just been embroidered over the centuries?

Stories told for thousands of years have an impact on us today. They don’t last because of fashion, taste or religion, they remain in our consciousness because they have an ageless message to give us. Look at the story of Demeter. As I say in the introductory module, myths can be read as symbols, and can be used as working templates for modern times. If you read past the supernatural, Demeter is relevant for women of today. Right here and now.

Have you any ambitions to fulfill on Squidoo?

I want to be in the Squidoo Hall of Fame! If we had such a thing. I should write a lens about it

Rocket Moms on Squidoo

I must be crazy joining the Squidoo group, Rocket Moms, right now when I’m so busy. It involves writing a new lens every week on some aspect of a certain subject, which is posted on Mondays. This week it was A Favourite Toy so I chose Meccano.

At the same time, I had to write a lens about Using Pictures Effectively for the Wiwon Challenge Group by next Monday.  I was only asked to do it on Wednesday so it didn’t give me a lot of time especially as I’d just started one for the Senior Squids weekly challenge on bugs. That one has had to go on the back burner. I might have time to work on it tomorrow.

The good news is that I’m not one of those retired people who is bored out of her mind. I never expected to retire. I thought, as I worked for myself, I’d just carry on working forever. I’ve always been so healthy it didn’t occur to me that my health would mean I’d have to give up.

Squidoo is so good for people like me who can’t work. It gives us a purpose, goals and even deadlines sometimes. On top of that, there’s also a great sense of community which has been enhanced by the smaller groups that have been set up over the last few months like Rocket Moms, Senior Squids and the Wiwon Challenge Team. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes writing and making web pages.

Since I made Giant with fifty lenses at the beginning of last October, I needed a break and was fresh out of ideas for new subjects for lenses. The incentive was one of my Squidoo friends, Willow, was one of the Angels who had started one of the teams for aspiring Giants or Giant 100s. It is a competition between teams so I joined hers – Willow’s Wonder Squids. Now I have a responsibility to the team to reach the 100 lens target.

Since signing up for the team I’ve done three new lenses:

1. Care for Antique & Collectible Glass
2. Antiques & Collectibles of the Future
3. Should Art & Antiques be Restored or Not?

You can follow the team’s progress because members add their new lenses to this page as they write them.

The inimitable Drifter has even done our team its own fan page – Willow and the Wonders: The Best Giant Greeter Team Ever. Just the title tells you Drifter is the master of understatement and this page doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it’s probably got some members of other teams a little riled. Never mind, it adds to the fun.

I’ve always liked poetry, even as a child. That’s why I decided to make a lens called Classic Funny Poems for Kids. I included poems like The Jumblies, Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies and A Naughty Little Comet.

From my own experience I believe that even toddlers can appreciate a poem like The Jumblies with its repetitive chorus of:

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.

This is especially true if you do actions like pat your head with your hands and then hold up your hands as you recite the third line. Very soon children will join in with the actions and eventually with the words.

I think reciting poetry, with enthusiasm, to children encourages them to appreciate it and it expands their vocabulary and understanding. The rhythm and the rhymes help the process.

This web page has proved surprisingly popular, appearing on the first page of Google results for ‘funny children’s poetry’ and ‘classic funny poetry.’ It’s also my number one lens on Squidoo, currently ranked in the top 200 out of more than 600,000 lenses. Not bad for something I did for my own amusement and which I thought would attract a tiny number of visitors.