Story featured at AlfieDog.com

My story "Spinning Wheel" is the featured story this week at AlfieDog.com. It is a newish website offering e-reader short stories for sale, usually pretty cheap. I think "Spinning Wheel" may be the longest they have at 7,500 words, so it's a little more than most. Still, less than a dollar. I'm not sure how viable this business model is, but I thought it was worth trying out with one story.

Regardless of all that, "Spinning Wheel" is about the cycles of abuse that families can go through unless and until one courageous member can break out of it. Southern Gothic writing rife with symbolism and things crawling about under the surface. It will be part of my next collection, but that won't be ready for probably another couple of years, so this is your chance to get a sneak peek.

New Marketing and Old Media I

Well, I've obviously not been around here much lately, and I doubt I will be in the future. I must not be doing this tagging thing right, because this blog does not come up very high on searches that I need it to. "Christian humor" may just be too ubiquitous on the web. Anyway, here's another review, someone who obviously didn't get it. Why do these reviews always end up on Amazon, but the insightful ones don't? One of the big hurdles I've encountered is that online reviewers say they're prepared for Christian fiction, but then don't read with that in mind. There's a real possibility that they can only handle the most obvious of Christian content. Just waiting for that next "Left Behind" story.

So, anyway, it's on to phase two. I determined long ago that blog reviewers have no influence at all, and that to get exposure to a large audience, the traditional media is still necessary. But my strategy was to collect enough minor reviews to throw myself to the traditional media wolves again, and so I have. At the beginning of this gambit, which started last Labor Day, I sent copies cold to a number of magazines and other outlets, and mostly got zero response. Today I sent out a dozen emails to some of these - Christianity Today, CCM Magazine, &c. - with links to the better online reviews. My hope is they'll do a little research and decide I'm legit. If I get anything to show from this, I'll let you know.

Back to the Old Grind

Well, this has been enlightening. As reported, a feature on DailyCheapReads.com boosted sales of "The Job" at the Kindle store, although not to the great effect that I first thought. The next day, sales went back to zero, and it's been that way ever since. So getting on a prominent website can substantially help a book, but once it's no longer at the top of the front page the effect is over. The only thing I can think of to do with this is, since these sites are mostly blogs, is every time a new feature or review is posted, leave a comment about the new post. Probably won't garner much attention, but what else is there?

In other news, the second installment of the Poncey stories is finished in first draft, and the opening story is undergoing its editing process. Don't know what I'm talking about? Stay tuned for more details!

Old Media I

When you get to the end of the story, you stop writing.

I posted only once last week, and here it is Wednesday and I'm only just getting around to it now. I'm running out of ideas already, and my news to share is paper thin. So has the blog already run its course? No, because it was never about ideas or news, it was about links. Sorry to be cynical, but let's face it, I have no illusions of attracting a big reading audience. I just want links to show up on Google searches, which I'm told begins to happen after about four months of blogging, so I'll keep plugging along. The Job.

I did have an idea about old media and where it might be going, but now I've forgotten it. Maybe it'll come to me.

Here's a feature on The Job at Indie Books Blog. A review would be better, but you take what you can get. I have gotten a handful of new offers from reviewers, but these things take time to turn around.

No Bad Publicity

If you're an author, you're probably not reading this. If you are an author reading this, you can quit now, because you've already seen it.

This is what Internet marketing is all about, in a twisted kind of way. Independent book publishers/authors are all salivating after that killer review, but this woman got more than she bargained for. Jacqueline Howett sent her book, The Greek Seaman, to Big Al's Books and Pals for a review. And that's what she got, and it wasn't particularly bad. But "Big Al" did point out technical flaws in her writing, which led to this firestorm. Now more people know about Jacqueline's book than she could ever have hoped for, and maybe some of them will even buy it.

But more will probably buy this. It's a real measure of our current media culture that you can make a fool of yourself, and someone will be making a profit off you before you can get up off the floor. Big Al is also suffering from the aftermath. Which didn't stop me from sending him a request to review "The Job," because let's face it, a lot more people know of his blog now than they did a week ago. But his sudden fame has surely brought on an onslaught of review requests, so I don't expect to hear from him. But given the size headache he no doubt has now, he might benefit from reading "The Job" anyway.

In other news, Sample Sunday is coming up again. This week I'll be featuring a chapter from "Wars of the Aoten," once again based on St. Celibart statistics, the most popular chapter. If you're on Twitter, just search for #samplesunday, and click the links that authors have tweeted. If you like their writing, then retweet their links to your followers. Help out an indie.

New Media and New Marketing XV

Time for a new post even though I've got nothing to say. I will mention my new author page at Family Fiction, an online Christian magazine that focuses on fiction, oddly enough. It's worth a mention because I broke in there through my weasely social networking.

Family Fiction is one of the groups I joined on Facebook, and then I added links to a couple of comments they posted, knowing it would show up on the news feeds of their followers. It also caught their attention too, which I hadn't counted on. Judging from their website they seem to focus on traditional publishers, and there's no way I could find to contact them directly, so this is a major breakthrough for me, at least as a moral victory. So be sure to go there lots and generate a lot of traffic.

Gearing up for Sample Sunday #3!

New Media and New Marketing XIV

Well, SampleSunday passed, and I finally learned how to see retweets, and my tweets for Feallengod were retweeted exactly once, and that by a friend I had to pay a lot of money to. JK. But only the last part. So it remains true that social networks are really useless unless your network is really behind you. That seems to be the nut remaining to crack. But I'm going to stick with it for awhile; next weekend, Wars of the Aoten.

But, in other news, I did learn how to track retweets, which proved to be quite easy. For some reason I couldn't find any instructions on how to do it on the World Wide Web. Another thing I've been struggling with is Amazon's best-seller lists based on genre. I think I've finally figured that out as well, and The Job is #68 in the Christian humor fiction category. And this after a brutal March. So tell your friends.

The final comment I'd make today is that Twitter followers are really fickle. Although I'm up by about 30% again after this weekend, that includes a number of drop-outs. I think a lot of people are just trying to set records with followers, and if they pick you up and you don't reciprocate, then you're done. But if someone has several thousand followers, they're never going to see your tweets anyway, so what's the point? So I'm happy with the handful I've got. Especially if they retweet.

Sample Sunday

Here we go again. Sample Sunday is coming up again, surprisingly enough on Sunday, and I will be participating again with an excerpt from "Feallengod: The Conflict in the Heavenlies." I will be offering Chapter 8, which according to St. Celibart stats, is the most popular chapter outside of the penultimate, which is the coup de gras, and I'm not going to offer it to anyone who can't find St. Celibart. So there.

So here's the deal: Independent authors band together on Sample Sunday to Tweet using the hashtag #samplesunday. Each tweet includes a link that leads to an excerpt from one of the author's books. Twitterers who are involved follow the links, and if they like the excerpt, they retweet the original tweet. That way the author's work gets exposure to each re-twitterer's network of followers. I'm also using the hashtags #spiritual and #literaryfiction, so you can search with those to find me if you want. It seems like an effective way to use Twitter.

Speaking of which, I've figured out a couple of the chintzy ways of manipulating social media. First a disclaimer -- there's nothing new here. First, on Twitter I'll often use one of the top hashtags, so hip people will be forced to see my tweets. Of course, the activity around these hashtags is fast and furious, otherwise they wouldn't be at the top, so I'm probably just getting lost in the fray. And then there's Facebook, where I join appropriate groups and wait for them to post something. Then I'll comment and leave a link, which will show up on the news feed of everyone in that group. So I have to say I've got it all figured out.

BTW, I've sold one copy of "The Job" this month.

New Media and New Marketing XIII

I had an interesting weekend. Did you? Spring is now upon us in all its glory, so I decided to spend a couple days inside staring at the Internet.

First, I found a few Facebook pages that seem useful: Writing Kindle Books, a closed group for, believe it or not, those who write books for Kindle. Another is called Book Worms, which is mostly for readers but has an area for authors to mention their books, and yet another is Christian Books, which apparently just helps people know what's out there. So I'm all over that. I also discovered Pixel of Ink, which highlights e-books that cost less than $1, so I'll probably be using them eventually.

The other notable event of the weekend was my first Sample Sunday, which I think may also have been the first ever. Sample Sunday is a Twitter event in which authors tweet about their book(s) and include the hashtag #samplesunday. Then followers are asked to retweet, and on and on, to gain exposure for the books. I joined in, and even though there's no way to tell if it meant anything, I'll continue on the next several Sundays. I can say that my Twitter followers grew by 50%. I'm just now figuring out Twitter, and I'll probably offer some thoughts about it later. In related news, the viewership of my video on YouTube is still going strong. But sales remain elusive.

I've got another marketing ploy up my sleeve, but I can't say anything about it now. If it develops, I'll certainly let you know.

Mediasaurus

I was literally lying around the other day, reviewing my stellar career in the news media. The reverie was brought on because I'd seen a promotion the newspaper I used to work for had posted online for its new Twitter news feed. This development had made me remember how I told a co-worker in the mid '90s that print newspapers would mostly disappear in 20 years (I thought the only survivors would be huge "newspapers of record," as they are called, and small-town weeklies.) Just call me Nostradamus. My afore-mentioned employer has been very slow to develop its Internet presence, much less apps for smart phones and touch pads. They seem to finally be dipping their toes in the social media. Meanwhile, they've been cutting positions and salaries like Johnny Depp in "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

So what's new in all this? Well, as my mind was wandering around, it occurred to me that even with all the adjustments the newsies are making to use new media, newspapers and magazines are doggedly hanging on to the printed page, even though that technology is sinking faster than the Andrea Doria (thought I was going to say Titanic, didn't you?) After salaries, ink and paper are the biggest expense a daily newspaper has. If these news outlets would jettison their printing, they'd have a windfall of money to invest in improving their staff and therefore their product. So there must be some reason they're hanging onto this deck chair, even though it's water-logged and dragging them down.

I think it's because the printed page is their last vestige of exclusivity. Anyone can blog, anyone can Tweet, anyone can become a clearing house of news links on the Internet (this essentially is what the Drudge Report is.) I have a friend who's been following the turmoil in North Africa via Twitter's news feed, and he's been better informed about the overall scene than reporters who are there. But not everyone can afford to print their product every day, or week or even month. That sets these old media outlets apart, and I think they're clinging to it as a mark of legitimacy and therefore power. But that's another thing they just don't get -- the new media has put the lie to press "objectivity" and the limits that printed pages (that is to say, space) put on news coverage. The same thing can be said about the limits (that is to say, time) put upon broadcast news. The old media is just inferior in every way. And it will die a tortured death if it doesn't recognize that soon.

Check out my page on Goodreads.

Book giveaway

And the winner is -- nobody! Because nobody entered. Which told me what I wanted to know.

Promotion through the Internet is like chasing the wind.

Posting the giveaway here, and on Kindle boards, and Barnes and Nobles' discussion boards, was viewed a number of times but raised no interest. So it remains a mystery how to engage the imagination of the market.

New Media and New Marketing XII

Well, the big experiment is over, and it's report card time. All my books were 1/2 off at Smashwords for "Read an E-book Week." The week started out with a sudden sale of both "Feallengod" and "Wars of the Aoten," neither of which I'm promoting at all, and after that -- nothing. Not a peep. So, I conclude that my sales are not being affected by my prices being too high. And I don't think they're being affected by my attempts at promotion, either. Inexplicably, the day after the sale, somebody downloaded a sample of "The Job"; that guy's timing is off.

This past week I've joined Kindle Forum, which appears to be a small attempt at a social network for everything Kindle. I've also been active lately at Barnes and Noble's bulletin board. When you look up strategies for building an "author platform," as they call it, getting on bulletin boards is pushed as essential, but I have yet to draw much of a response to any of my threads. My posts do appear to get a number of views -- in a related matter, my YouTube video has increased its views by a third in the last three weeks, after being posted a couple of times on Kindle Boards -- but I can see no way they've inspired interest in the book itself.

So, that's a lot of complaining. Should I care about all this in the first place? More on that later.

New Media and New Marketing XI

Not much to say today, but a reminder that this is Read an E-book Week. I don't know who came up with that brilliant idea, but Smashwords.com has taken it under wing, and they use it to promote themselves and their authors. All of my books are half-price this week, so check them out using this link. Good luck, 'cause as of this morning I think their server had been crashed.

Also, there's a new review, from Cynthia Hickey of Author's Choice Reviews. It's a rolling page and they update every day, so you'll have to scroll down some. This site rates books according to their "faith element" (The Job scored high), and I think is aimed at wholesalers -- bookstores or distributors who care about what message their books get across. Anyway, it's another link on the innernational inter webs.

New Media and New Marketing X

My animated video excerpt has broken through the 200-view level on YouTube. It's been up for almost six months, so that's not exactly viral. It's been seen in Slovakia and Vietnam, among other random world sites. I don't know how people can find it in those places, but so few see it in the English-speaking world. I did find a link to it at World News, a web page with an unique approach.

So the big news is the podcast version is now officially available and searchable at the iTunes store. The problem is, I don't know how to steer people toward it there, either. Am I whining now? What do you mean 'now'? Yeah, I'm whining, and I will until I figure this out.

Don't forget the giveaway!

New Media and New Marketing IX

I mentioned the KindleBoards here last week, but here's more detail about them. They seem like a great resource for people looking for independent authors for their Kindle, but it is a real mess there. I've been promoting "The Job" there for several months. But if you're looking for a particular kind of book, it's like being lost in a tangle of roots underwater.

I've tried to help myself (and others) in this regard by starting a couple of discussion threads, Writing for the Spirit and Kindle-ing the Flames of Wit. Their themes are, hopefully obviously, spiritual writing (avoiding the red flag word "Christian") and humor writing. My hope is that visitors who like these genres will find the threads and see books there that interest them. The advantage to authors of threads like these is collusion -- get all the authors in a genre to work together posting regularly, and the thread will stay near the top of the list where visitors to KindleBoards can easily see them. Every author who posts there gets exposure for his or her book without flat-out promotion. That hasn't been the case the "The Job"'s  thread, because nobody posts there but me, and I can do that only once a week.

So this is another angle on Internet marketing. If you are interested in either genre, I invite you to visit the threads and participate in the conversation.

Comics are Serious Business

All through my childhood and well into my adult years, my dream job was to draw a newspaper comic strip. "Mac Quack: Corporate Duck" was my last attempt at this, and like all others, was universally hated by syndicates. But, like everything else, the electronic media has made newspaper comics an anachronism, and anyone can reach the world with their comics electronically now, if the world can find it. Also, if you are willing to take up the daily grind for no reward whatsoever.

So who cares? Nobody. I only bring it up because I recently bought another original of "Pogo" by Walt Kelly. The remarkable thing about this particular strip is the larger character inside the bag is Simple J. Malarkey, Kelly's caricature of Sen. Joe McCarthy during the height of McCarthyism. Kelly stood among only a handful in the media to publicly challenge McCarthy's innuendo and bullying. Communism was a real threat hanging over the country domestically and internationally during the '50s, but McCarthy's tactics were self-serving, unconstitutional and in the end served only to de-legitimize more measured efforts to protect the nation.

So this drawing is a part of certainly the most significant sequence Kelly did in more than 20 years of drawing the celebrated strip. I can't be sure, but it seems like this character appeared in only about 30 strips. Of course, here you can't see the character per se, but there's even a funny story behind that. There was another character, a chicken, who already had been established as a Rhode Island Red from Providence. When the caricature of McCarthy reappeared in mid-1954 (he had first appeared in 1953), the newspaper in Providence had declared that if his face showed up again they would drop "Pogo." So Kelly, who must have been working on a very short deadline, had Malarkey say "No one from Providence can see me" as the chicken approached, and put a bag over his head. The newspaper got the joke, but indeed Malarkey's face never appeared again.

This strip was relatively cheap, particularly for an example from the '50s. I think maybe the seller didn't know what she had. This feels like a piece of history to me.

The Was that Will Be

First, kudos to Walt Kelly and the fact that I could steal and pretty much destroy his title for this very important blog post.

Once upon a time, the publishing business didn't really exist. After Gutenberg's invention of the press, authors would pay printers to print and bind their works, and then they would deliver them to local bookstores for sale. There wasn't that much reading material available, so stores were happy to take whatever books they could get, and readers as well. So what came to be known as publishers were just a hired service, and authors made only what they could get stores to pay them for books. If the author couldn't afford printing costs, well, that was just too bad.

Somewhere along the way printers found that they could take on the costs of publishing, thereby attracting popular authors and make a tidy profit. I don't know how this came about, but I do know that Charles Dickens became widely popular by having his stories serialized in magazines, then afterwards published as full books when the audience was well established. This was the mid-1800s.

So who cares? Nobody. But it appears we're back at square one, as traditional publishers struggle to squeeze out a profit while thousands of would-be authors pay self-publishers to print and bind their books for a fee. The catch again is whether these authors can get bookstores to carry their books, now in a culture where not only is there no lack of reading material, but also the broad audience would rather watch Hulu than read anyway. The growth of e-readers will only increase this cacophony of information. This is where I am with "The Job", although I add the twist of being my own printer. How to get notice remains the greatest challenge.

New Media and New Marketing VII

I love Roman numerals.


Well, the Facebook ad campaign is over, after four months. Did you see it? More than 2,100,000 pairs of eyes supposedly saw it in the English-speaking world, targeting Christians and readers. More than 270 clicked on the ad, which directed them to the Facebook fan page. Of those, it's hard to say but I think fewer than five "liked" the page. So who knows if it really had any effect.


So why then? Well, back in the day during the advertising class I had to take in college, I learned that direct mail is the most effective advertising there is. Electronic social networking ads are basically the same thing, but a lot cheaper. Judging from clicks, I had a .013% response rate. That doesn't seem like a very good return, but who's to say about advertising? In broadcast all an advertiser really knows is an estimate of how many people see an ad based on how many are watching a show. My real goal was just to get "The Job" and its cover in the subconscious of my target audience so if it does show up in book stores, they'll remember they've seen it before.


It's just another shot in the dark.

New Media and New Marketing VI

Here's an interesting story on the new world of self publishing. It shows well what authors face just getting their work into print. For myself, I learned long ago that the only way to get a trade publisher's attention is to know someone (rant coming on "Eragon") or to have an established name that will guarantee sales. Next time you're in a bookstore check out the number of book covers on which the author's name is in bigger type than the title. And you can't really fault publishers for this, because traditional publishing has extremely small profit margins, and publishers do have to stay in business.


Here's an apocryphal tale about Eric Metaxis' recent biography about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His original publishing deal was with Harper Collins, but once they saw the manuscript they decided it could make money at only half that length, presumably simply because of production costs. So Metaxis took it to Thomas Nelson, who published it untruncated, and it has become a best-seller. So there you have it. But it does illustrate the pressures and worries of the traditional publishing world.


So what's the point? Really it is that the article mentions marketing issues, but doesn't offer any ideas that a self-published author can use to market his book. As I've said here before, my approach is to have only enough hard copies to have a token existence of "The Job," and to send them out to reviewers and contests. Also, hit internet networking as hard as possible. Beyond that, what else can an author do? I was hoping for some other ideas from the article, but there were none.

New Media and New Marketing V

Here's a new review, posted by Joanne Bayles at Figuring Out The Small Stuff. Joanne won her copy from the giveaway at Kathy Habel's I Am a Reader, Not a Writer. I'm still waiting on a review from her.


Which begs the question, why this blog? Don't I know that nobody blogs anymore? Well, yes, I do know that, except that book reviewers seem to be an exception. People who like to read all fancy themselves reviewers, even if they can't get the traditional media to pay them, so blogging is an effective outlet for this. Also, as with all reviewers, if a consumer of books finds someone with the same tastes as him, it makes sense to follow that reviewer and check out books that he (or more likely she) likes. Blogs fill this point of contact nicely.


Still, why this blog? Well, I was reading this other blog (he didn't get the memo either), and that blogger is promoting a book online. His advice was to sign up on as many web directories as possible, using meta words and tags that would make your book rank high in Google searches. I had to ask around about what a web directory was, so archaic is that idea, and I'm not sure it's worth it to pursue that strategy. But he also said to blog a lot, getting those links and meta words out there in cyberspace, so here I am.