You don’t need money to toot your own horn.  You just need a horn.
—from a Citibank ad, of all things

A playwright is always his or her own first producer.

That’s an inconvenient truth.

It also applies to almost any kind of artist.

I’m extremely sorry to have to tell you this, but the chances of somebody knocking on your door to offer you a recording contract when they hear you singing in the shower are slim.

Your private journal, however steeped in literary eloquence, isn’t going to bring you a publisher if no one ever sees it.

You’ve got to get over all that early training about only speaking when you’re spoken to and acting like a lady and being modest and so forth.

Put your stuff out there.

Marketing is key.  And it’s not just for Fortune 500 companies any longer.

These days, we all have access to a relatively inexpensive marketing tool that levels the playing field.  It is easy–and important–to have your own website.

A lot of web hosts provide powerful tools to get you up and running quickly.  In order to put your own stamp on your design, however, I highly recommend that you achieve a basic understanding of HTML (main markup language for web pages).  Even if you use any or all of the various WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors that allow for drag-and-drop design and which have come a long way since the early days, understanding the underlying codes is invaluable when there’s a problem.

Being able to edit the HTML can save you hours of confusion and frustration.

And this Tuesday’s Tip is a pointer to a great online tutorial, W3Schools, and a reminder about a nifty little program that makes editing that code much easier:  Notepad++.

W3Schools is a terrific reference to all the major web design languages.  It has great interactive online tutorials and lots of examples for beginners and a searchable reference for more knowledgeable users.  I use it all the time.

And once W3Schools has helped me figure out what the code should look like on my webpage, I go to Notepad++ to help me implement the solution.

It’s possible to edit HTML in the regular old Notepad that comes with Windows.  Notepad++, however–free to download and use–provides a number of additional features that will make you wonder how you ever survived without them.

• It lets you edit multiple documents in the same window.  Great for cutting and pasting useful bits of code from one page to another.
• It allows color coding of syntax.  Comments in one color, keywords in another, etc.  So much easier to read the code that way.
• It allows collapsing and expanding of sections of code.  Just make the whole table disappear (in the code), while you work on the rest of the page, for example.
• It allows search and replace across multiple documents.  If you change the directory structure of your website, you can globally replace all references to any particular path.

There are other features I haven’t yet explored, but those alone have saved me hours of time.

We’d all like to spend all our time on creative endeavors.  But if we want those endeavors noticed, we might have to toot our own horns.