{"id":35840,"date":"2021-12-29T06:21:34","date_gmt":"2021-12-29T06:21:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/?p=35840"},"modified":"2025-09-09T08:49:44","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T13:49:44","slug":"donna-b-mcnicol-success-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/donna-b-mcnicol-success-story\/","title":{"rendered":"From a Corporate Worker to a Self-Published Author: The Success Story of Donna B. McNicol"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Social media trends are continuously evolving and changing and gone are the days when fictional writing was considered skepticism. Of course, it&#8217;s pretty challenging to put your all efforts in writing, editing and reviewing, it&#8217;s frustrating to receive negative comments.<br \/>\nSome writers have given up but still, there are some amazing fiction writers who have been working hard to achieve their goals.<\/p>\n<p>And among the list of successful fictional writers, we are glad to have Donna B McNicol as our customer. Donna is a self-published author and she owns a blog \u2018Donna B. McNicol\u2019. After retiring from her IT career, she tried her hands on fiction writing and that&#8217;s where it all started.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Social Champ asked her about her entire journey and this is what she has to say and how Social Champ helps her to skyrocket her blog.<\/p>\n<h4>HOW DID YOU GET STARTED AS A SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR, AND WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE GENRE? SHARE SOME OF YOUR WORK WITH OUR AUDIENCE.<\/h4>\n<p>I retired from a career in IT at age 50 and continued my non-fiction writing for print and websites. Soon after that, I decided to dabble with fiction writing. I started with children&#8217;s stories and sweet romance. Then my husband was diagnosed with cancer, and it all got put on the back burner.<\/p>\n<p>Fast forward to 2007, my husband had succumbed to his cancer three years earlier; I had sold our home and hit the road as a full-time RVer. In 2008, I met my now-husband at an RV rally in Wyoming. In his 41&#8242; toy hauler fifth-wheel trailer, we continued to travel the country and ride our Harley-Davidson motorcycles.<\/p>\n<p>In 2012, after a friend and fellow RVer had successfully self-published his first fiction book, I decided to give it a try. I self-published three books that year:<em> Home Again (a sweet romance) <\/em>and the first two books in my Klondike Mystery series, <em>Not a Whisper <\/em>and<em> Barely a Spark.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Since then, I have written and published several more books in the Klondike series, four books in the C&#8217;Mon Inn Mystery series, and started two new series in the cozy mystery genre. I also have short stories published in several anthologies.<\/p>\n<p>While I have always loved reading Sci-Fi and Fantasy books, I also read mystery\/thrillers. My current favorite genre is the one I am writing, cozy mysteries.<\/p>\n<p>You can see all my books from this link. Stay up to date, sign up for my newsletter and follow my blog.<\/p>\n<h4>AS AN INDEPENDENT AUTHOR, HOW DOES SOCIAL CHAMP HELP YOU IN SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT AND AUTOMATION?<\/h4>\n<p>In the early days of self-publishing, Twitter was the champ of social media. I still have many friends from those days. As it grew, it got harder to handle, and the impact of Facebook grew rapidly.<\/p>\n<p>I tried several free resources to schedule posts on both Twitter and Facebook. It took several resources to do everything I wanted and needed. That became quite unwieldy. In addition, they might stop working, go to pay mode, or even disappear.<\/p>\n<p>I heard about Social Champ on AppSumo and was intrigued. I thought it might be the all-in-one solution I needed. By now, I had three websites, several Facebook pages, a Facebook group, along with two Twitter and two Instagram accounts.<\/p>\n<p>Guess what? It was! Social Champ works flawlessly and continues to improve its interface. They have saved me countless hours. I can now schedule a whole month of posts in advance!<\/p>\n<h4>TELL US A BIT ABOUT THE COMMUNITY YOU HAVE BUILT, WHAT PLANNING AND EXECUTION STRATEGIES DO YOU USE, AND TOOLS THAT ASSIST YOU?<\/h4>\n<p>I manage a group of readers and fans on Facebook &#8211; my community. I post twice daily. The morning post is on a daily theme, and the afternoon is some type of question or game to play. Social Champ lets me get them scheduled in advance, saving me a lot of worry about whether I have done it or not. Yeah, for the calendar page!<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how long I will continue writing; I have enough stories in the backlog for another 4-5 years. I do know I will continue to use Social Champ.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>We at Social Champ look forward to serving you and many others for the years to come. Thank you for taking out the time to respond to us.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social media trends are continuously evolving and changing and gone are the days when fictional writing was considered skepticism. Of course, it&#8217;s pretty challenging to put your all efforts in writing, editing and reviewing, it&#8217;s frustrating to receive negative comments. Some writers have given up but still, there are some amazing fiction writers who have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":267833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[341],"tags":[489],"class_list":["post-35840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-champs","tag-donna-b-mcnicol"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35840"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328805,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35840\/revisions\/328805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.socialchamp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}