The SPARREW Newsletter Now Has Its Own Site!

 

 

When I started the SPARREW Newsletter in 2022, I had no idea or expectation that it would grow as large as it has today. I thought it would just be a simple little monthly newsletter that would exist only in a subscriber’s inbox.

 

But now, almost four years later, the SPARREW Newsletter has grown so big that not only did I need to set up an archive of past issues somewhere (which you can read here), but I realized that this mighty newsletter needed its own website.

 

In fact, I have known this for several months.

 

Lots of other newsletters have their own website. FundsforWriters. WritersWeekly. Authors Publish.

 

I realized the SPARREW Newsletter needed one too. But how was I going to make that happen?

 

I spent those months mulling over my options. I also reached out to the Tricky Edits contributor, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, to see if she had any ideas.

 

I thought about using Substack, because of the ease of organization, but I didn’t like the idea of my newsletter being posted on a site that I didn’t own.

 

No, I had to put it on a site that I owned. So I just stuck to the “dmcwriter” site I already had set up.

 

But even on there, the newsletter was growing too! It became part newsletter site, part writing portfolio site.

 

Meanwhile, I wasn’t sure how everyone I interviewed on there felt about that. Mostly, how they felt about the domain name not matching the newsletter’s name.

 

And ever since someone turned down being interviewed for the newsletter after I showed him the site the newsletter is posted on, I have always wondered if it’s because of that. (Or because my little newsletter is not so popular.)

 

That idea lingered in my brain. While I understood that the newsletter should be on a site with a matching domain name, I couldn’t figure out how to separate the newsletter from the writer.

 

Well, Life figured that out for me! It’s like Life said, “For goodness sake, if you can’t figure out how to do it, I’ll show you!”

 

So, recently, something messed up the DNS connection I had between the dmcwriter domain name and the site I had set up on another hosting platform. I am not very tech savvy, so I had a hard time figuring out what was going on AND how to fix it. And because I was using two different sites for the domain name and the hosting, I kept going back and forth between Customer Support for both sites, as well as the help guide links they sent to me, as I attempted to fix this problem and get the site I created back online. It went on for several days and I was increasingly frustrated that I kept running into dead ends, that I decided, screw it, I’ll just purchase a domain name on the hosting site and connect it with the site I created on there.

 

Plus, it was getting confusing going back and forth between two different websites just to fix ONE website!

 

So I purchased a domain name that I felt was a good fit for not only the SPARREW Newsletter but all things SPARREW, since there’s going to be some merch as well: SPARREW Site.

 

And at first, I was thinking of removing ALL of my credits as both a freelance writer and as a book reviewer, but then I realized something: What if visitors to the site want to know just who this Dawn Colclasure person is? I say on the About page that I started the newsletter in 2022. Okay, who am I to be publishing such a newsletter? I talk the talk, but do I walk the walk?

 

I certainly do!

 

I took a break from self-publishing books for a while there, but now I self-publish a title every once in a while.

 

I am an author, and the link to my books is on the About page.

 

I am certainly a reader (booklover), as my friends and followers on Facebook and BlueSky have seen when I have shared pages from my reading log.

 

I am a book reviewer, and the link to my book reviews can be found on that site, in the navigation bar.

 

I have experience working as an editor, and I share this information on the About page.

 

And, of course, I’m a writer. Proof is on the portfolio page that is also included on the navigation bar.

 

So, if people want to know if I’m the right person to be publishing a newsletter for self-published authors, authors, readers, reviewers, editors and writers, the proof is all there.

 

And you know what? I am going to leave it all there, too.

 

I don’t know what I’ll do with the dmcwriter domain name in the meantime. As it stands, while I own it, I can’t do anything with it. I tried, but so far, no luck. And that’s the next problem that I have to fix! At least I can work on it in my free time.