Many authors I know feel like it’s too hard to keep up-to-date on what is going on in the industry. For a long time, I found this hard to understand. I never had to go looking for industry information, I let it come to me. It’s only in the past year that I realized that was the key: I let it come to me.

What doesn’t work for me
Email

I prefer my email to only include actionable items. Things I need to respond to (personal and business emails), things I need to do (change my password, pay a bill), and important time sensitive items (the semi-annual sale at Bath and Bodyworks).

I know a lot of people prefer to follow blogs by email, but that doesn’t work for me. If my email gets too full of things I only want to read, I dread going through my email, figuring out which is a read item and which is an action item, and 1000+ emails later I nuke the whole thing and start from scratch.

There are ways to get your email client to do your sorting for you (rules and tags and folders), but why do all that work for every blog I follow when I can stick them all in a feed reader? (More on that in just a moment.)

What kind of works for me
Twitter

I can get easily overwhelmed by too much information, so Twitter and I have a cautious relationship. When I originally joined Twitter, I followed ALL THE INTERESTING PEOPLE and many of the not-so-interesting people, and was inundated with one line sales pitches and quippy retorts, and nothing connected together at all! Yet I was determined to read EVERYTHING that crossed my wire, using TweetDeck. So I nuked that account and didn’t go back for almost a year.

When I joined back up, I was very choosy about who I would follow. (I didn’t even follow my husband because he only posted about politics for his job and I knew he’d just tell me anything he posted while we were at home.) Friends and a few famous-types that were funny, made me smile, and had hilarious or interesting conversations between each other. I slowly pushed that out to some really smart people who had interesting things to say about the publishing industry, but only a few. Those folks tend to post a lot, and I don’t want to get overloaded again.

Now, when I get on Twitter once or twice a week, I’ll read back until I get bored and I don’t feel guilty about it. I’ll often pick up a few items of news that I want to share out, but mostly I go for fun things.

What absolutely works for me
RSS Feed Readers

It astounds me the number of people I meet who have no idea what I’m talking about with this. Basically, an RSS Feed Reader is a read-only email for blogs. Kinda. If you are following a blog or website via a reader, every time that blog updates, the reader will pick up that post and save it for you to read at your leisure. After you read it, it will mark as “read”, or you can star it, save it, mark it as unread if you want to remember to read more later–depending on your reader’s capabilities.

So you have a blog you love, right? Do you go to that blog every day to check if they have anything new? Do you know what that blog’s posting schedule is? Do you get their posts in your email? It’s so much easier to add them to a feed reader.

I use Feedly (because Google shut down their reader on July 1, 2013, RIP, no I am NOT bitter), so I’ll use it to walk through the steps.

Feedly is extremely user friendly in that you can often copy the URL of the blog from the address bar (say, http://www.crystalraebryant.com/blog/), plop it into Feedly’s search bar (top right-hand corner) and voila! You click add, and you are now following this blog. For Feedly, when you click add, you can also choose to organize the blog into a category, if you have several different blog types you read through and prefer to read through categories. For instance, I have Books, Travel, Friends, Food, and Nerdy.

If for some reason, Feedly can’t find the RSS feed from that URL, most sites will have a little button like this, though many will be orange:



If you click on that, it will take you to a page that has the exact address for the RSS feed. You plop that into Feedly’s search, click add, and you’re good to go.

Once you have all these lovely interesting blogs plugged into your reader, it will start to fill up. You can read your blogs whenever you want to! You’ll never miss a post! Angels will sing and money will rain–but really, it’s a low-stress way to keep up on whatever industries you’re interested in.

Now, there have been times where life has gotten away from me and I haven’t been able to get to my reader in a regular timely manner and unread items have stacked up to over 1000 in a week. And then over 2000 because I’m just too overwhelmed and scared to even start.

It’s easy to nuke it. (Have you noticed a pattern?) Real life comes before nice-to-know information. Any method that overwhelms and stresses you is not a good method for you. I go through every six months to a year and trim who I follow. If someone hasn’t posted in three months? Gone. I just don’t like your posts any more? Gone.  You may be the ultimate Twitter geek, on top of everything the moment it happens. Kudos to you, I need you people to sort through all that for me and present the pertinent pieces of information. Blessings on you.

If you’d like to kickstart your RSS blog list with some author and publishing professionals’ blogs, you can download the list of blogs I follow by right-clicking –>here

Happy reading!