I’ve been really excited to get things going around here again.  I’m working on creating a letter for the two books I need to send out, and trying to subdue my perfectionist tendencies which can sometimes manifest as a paralysis.  If I can’t make it perfect, sometimes I don’t make it at all.  Once the books go out, I have to have a way to track them and I’m also trying to figure that out.  Finally, I’m also working on (potentially) a new design for Velvet Verbosity, but that could take months and isn’t the highest priority.

So, the first order of business is to get the books prepped for mailing and a space for people to write in and tell us where the book is.  According to my schedule, the 100 Word Challenge starts on Wednesday and is due by Sunday, so I’ll post the “March” selections this Wednesday and present the new challenge. If you’re new here, or just didn’t do the “March” challenge, now you’ve got a few days to write your own 100 words inspired by the word march and that gives me the next few days to deal with the books and the conundrum of how best to keep track of them.  (If anyone has ideas, for heaven’s sake, share them with me!)

Since I can’t mail the books until I figure out the URL I’ll be sending people to, I have to solve that problem first.  Maybe if I share my thoughts with you, y’all can help me figure out the best plan.

Obviously, my first thought was how to incorporate the books’ travels right here on the blog.  I could create pages for each book and each book would have its own www.velvetverbosity.com/book URL for people to comment.  That seems simple enough, but I’m afraid it will be a navigation nightmare.  If anyone knows more about wordpress pages, perhaps it will turn out that this solution is just fine.

Thinking that the above option might have limitations, or turn into a navigation nightmare, I then started thinking about various social networks and creating a profile for the journey of the books.  I can’t get my head around how this would work exactly, but I know that this may offer the most creative and fun solutions.  Ning.com allows you to create your own social network so I could create one specific to the journey of the books.  The drawback here is that anyone who finds the book would then have to join the network, and I worry that might dissuade someone from helping to track the journey, and may even stop the journey.   Most people these days are online, and have no problem taking a few seconds to sign up for a social network, but there are still plenty of people who don’t do social networks, nor understand how they work.  There might be away to allow anyone to comment without joining the network, but then that opens the network to all kinds of spam crap.

Those are my two best ideas at the moment…aside from building a separate website, which would a)cost money and b)not possible right now.  To add one later would be complicated as there would already be books out there.

So, I need your help here.  Many blogger heads are better than one, I always say.  Maybe one of you is more tech savvy than I am and knows of a relatively easy solution, or maybe one of you has an idea I haven’t thought of.   Put your thinking caps on and share share share!