Well, I mentioned yesterday that I have a brand-new twitter handle, and that’s just a part of what I’ve been doing to finally ‘stake my claim’ to the name Chris Kelworth around the internet. Generally, I’ve been following the checklist laid down by Lani and Alastair on the rather staticky podcast episode Storywonk Sunday: Cuddling Afterwards. In addition to the twitter username change to @ChrisKelworth, I have:
- Registered chriskelworth.com and set it to forward to the kelworthfiles.wordpress.com address for the time being.
- Signed up to gmail as chriskelworth@gmail.com
- Opened up a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/chris.kelworth
The idea is to establish yourself in all these places where potential readers might be looking for you, before somebody else comes along and takes the same names – or if you find that one of them is already taken, you want to find that out as soon as possible so that you can make alternate plans – whether that’s changing your pen name or signing up with a variant and beginning to promote that address.
If you’re an author or a writer, have you done any of these things to claim your name? Tell me all about it in the comments.