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Thursday, July 12, 2012

Intro to MyRWA-Part Two-by Elizabeth Schechter

Okay, if you followed alone with Part One of Intro to MyRWA, you are now signed up for MyRWA, and subscribed to all the chapter mailing lists (remember, they're not forums!) This week, we'll be exploring what else you can do on the MyRWA site.
Once you sign in to MyRWA, you will need to go to the Connect menu. It is the same thing you did to find your chapter information. Pick Communities off that menu.

The Communities Home page will have a list of gray buttons on the left side -- what you see will depend on your status. My page looks like this:

You may not have all those buttons. At the very least, you will have RWA Community Forums, RWA University, and RWR. Some of you will have PRO Community as well. If you are a member of more than one chapter that is currently on MyRWA, you will have the Chapters button. And if you are a chapter officer or webmaster, you will have the Private Committees and Boards button. We're not going to worry about those last two -- they're pretty self-explanatory.
We'll start with the PRO Community. If you press that button, you will find yourself here:

I do recommend that you subscribe to the PRO.org list if you are eligible to do so. In addition to industry information, there are free classes offered specifically for PRO members. Free is good, right?
And in keeping with the free is good thread, on the Communities page, you will also find a link to RWA University. Through RWA University, you will find more free classes that are open to any RWA member. There are also archives of past classes and a lot of resources on this page on just about any aspect of publishing you might need. I highly suggest you explore this page extensively!!!

One more free thing -- on the Communities page, you will find a link to RWR. Yes, that's the magazine that you get in your mailbox every month. Why access it online? In a word -- archives. There are electronic copies of RWR available dating back to 2008.

There is one more button -- the RWA Community Forums (again, NOT Forums. Mailing lists.) Under that heading, you'll find several optional lists that offer good information, but may not be of interest to everyone. You would subscribe to these the same way you would any other mailing list.

That brings us to the end of this part of the Intro to MyRWA series. In the next and final session, we'll go over the social networking aspects of the new platform, how to turn that OFF if you so desire, and how to do basic things like update your profile and pay your dues online.
See you next time!

Elizabeth Schechter is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Central Florida with her husband and son. Her first novel, Princes of Air,was published in 2011 by Circlet Press, and her second, a steampunk novel entitled House of the Sable Locks, is forthcoming.
Elizabeth can be found online at http://easchechter.wordpress.com/

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