by Louis Bertrand Shalako
c2011
All Rights Reserved
Without going too nuts for promotion, I have been using Tweetdeck to schedule about four tweets per night. Last night I gave away one book, which seems worth the effort. I posted one link on Facebook this afternoon and gave away ten books in the space of five minutes.
On the bottom of each Smashwords book page, down in the right-hand corner, there is a list of social media links. These include the usual Fb and Twitter, but also Google Buzz, Reddit, Delicious, Stumble, etc. When I post something to Google Buzz, I have no idea where that goes or who sees it. On Stumbleupon, I have maybe twenty followers. Yet by clicking on things and trying things, including MySpace, and a couple of others, I have given away almost eighty e-books in six days.
Honestly, I can't even remember stuff I did Monday or Tuesday, except talk it up all over the place. I posted a blog entry on Wednesday, (I think.) Someone made a donation, which must have been a copy of 'Core Values.' For some reason that book is marked as, 'Set your own price,' and it was worth a buck and a half to someone! Thank you.
I would have been delighted to give away a thousand books. It's important to set a goal, after all. As to how this will translate into eventual sales down the road, or if it will result in any positive reviews, is something only time will tell.
On Twitter, I lost at least one follower...and gained about five more for whatever reason. (Free stuff? Marketing savvy? My boyish good looks?)
On LinkedIn, I posted a link and only later noticed the statement, 'No ads please in discussions!" The funny thing is that someone took a book or two...I'm almost sure of it. Anyway, I hope you like them.
I need a shave and I lost a couple of pounds. But the marketing data is priceless, and I have no regrets about that. Simply put, jam out a link and the books move out the door. Stop promoting, and page views drop to zero.
It can't be that simple...can it?
Friday, March 11, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The Big Challenge(s)
by Louis Bertrand Shalako
c2011
All Rights Reserved
With three novels in the can, the big challenge is time and patience. What feels like a hold-up can be a blessing in disguise.
I say this because my next three titles absolutely must have killer covers. While some ideas on that subject are afloat in the simmering fluid that is my brain-bucket, plans remain secret.
All will be revealed soon enough, or when I know it, or whichever comes first.
All three books must be re-written ten or twelve times each. When you’re talking your fourth novel release, you had better be hitting some basic minimum standards of literacy, that’s for sure.
During the formatting process, I’m pretty analytical, and keep spell-check and grammar-check turned on until the last minute. Uploading revisions doesn’t take much time, but all platforms have different time delays before the new one turns up for sale. All of them provide your previous version in the meantime, but it is ‘red-face time’ if someone spots an error.
You might run into some person who wrote their doctorate on your subject matter or something, and the scary thing is that they might not tell you! They will get a laugh out of it, though. They’ll tell all their friends, too.
***
Speaking of fact-checking and stuff like that, my working titles, which I must have simply for filing purposes, are, ‘Time-storm,’ and ‘Shape-Shifters,’ and then I have ‘Horse-catcher.’
Googling around reveals that one of my favourite SF authors, Gordon R. Dickson, has a book called ‘Time Storm.’ (1971.) He wrote the Dorsai books.
(I recommend ‘Tactics of Mistake,’ 1977. He also wrote ‘Time to Teleport,’ 1960.)
Gordon Dickson passed on in 2001. I don’t know about the Dragon books so much, but I wouldn’t mind a few dog-eared old SF paperbacks at the right price!
It’s a good idea to check all the titles, and figure out something different that still captures the essence of the idea. You really can’t copyright ‘shape-shifters,’ but I’ll bet there are a few movies and books out there. At Christmas, my nephew was playing with a toy—you guessed it, some kind of plastic ‘shape-shifters.’ It’s on the box, and kind of a service mark, which can be registered. It is an asset to its owner and they hate when you steal it. I’m not a copyright lawyer, but the words ‘shape-shifter’ are public domain and anyone can use them!
***
For a whole host of reasons my ‘schedule’ is pretty loose right now, and it might be time to set some kind of a deadline. Pick a project and just do it.
I’ve been shopping for cover art. I don’t know that much about art, but I know what I like—and I’ll know it when I see it. That Art Fundamentals course in community college might pay off after all! Just one of the benefits of a liberal, (and fairly cheap,) education.
***
My first novel, ‘Heaven Is Too Far Away’ would have been about 230,000 words without cutting, and it ended up about 180,000. This would not have been publishable by conventional standards without coming up with a trilogy or something, and I felt unable to cut it by 70,000 words. To come up with three logical endings for three volumes of 76,000+ words each, was and still is beyond my capacity to imagine. The book starts at the beginning and ends at the end. I must have read 150 books, mostly from the library, in order to write that book. At some point, I knew there was a possibility that a military historian or an enthusiast would read it.
If nothing else, I felt I could compete. While ongoing research into WW I will become ever more refined, if not even regressive or ‘bourgeois-revisionist’ in some ways, the basic facts are verifiable. For about a million reasons I have tried to write a few stories for a younger or less sophisticated audience in terms of science fiction.
What gets me time and time again is that I am essentially a comedy writer. That has its dangers, not the least of which is that it might be perceived as ‘mockery,’ which is essentially what it is anyway.
But it also makes it a hard sell, as I am finding out. I’m not afraid of a little research, but if I use sound, (and fairly simple) scientific concepts, especially the softer sciences, a really good writer might do well with a different demographic group.
Stories for youthful rocket scientists had better be good.
***
So my Smashwords edition of ‘The Handbag’s Tale’ had the same problem I talked about before. One small section had ‘squooshy’ text. The original file looked fine. I uploaded the correct file…I scrolled through every page of ‘Case’ in Kindle for PC and it looked fine. I would like to know what causes this problem. And it looks way worse in Mobipocket reader. Incidentally, Kindle for PC definitely ‘takes over’ every Mobi-type file in your hard drive. That can be a pain when you are testing files from other sources, because you never really know which one you are looking at.
It is irksome. All I could do was to re-upload that file and check it later, and of course I re-dated the file. When that didn’t work, I went back to the ‘nuclear option.’
1.) Take the original .doc file and save it as a .txt.
2.) Copy and paste into a fresh, blank .doc file.
3.) Re-format from scratch.
4.) Turn off pilcrows, grammar and spelling.
5.) Check front matter and re-upload.
6.) Check every page when it comes live.
7.) Cross your fingers and pray.
This worked beautifully, and so far I’ve given away nine or ten of them from Smashwords for E-Book Week, (March 6-12.)
c2011
All Rights Reserved
With three novels in the can, the big challenge is time and patience. What feels like a hold-up can be a blessing in disguise.
I say this because my next three titles absolutely must have killer covers. While some ideas on that subject are afloat in the simmering fluid that is my brain-bucket, plans remain secret.
All will be revealed soon enough, or when I know it, or whichever comes first.
All three books must be re-written ten or twelve times each. When you’re talking your fourth novel release, you had better be hitting some basic minimum standards of literacy, that’s for sure.
During the formatting process, I’m pretty analytical, and keep spell-check and grammar-check turned on until the last minute. Uploading revisions doesn’t take much time, but all platforms have different time delays before the new one turns up for sale. All of them provide your previous version in the meantime, but it is ‘red-face time’ if someone spots an error.
You might run into some person who wrote their doctorate on your subject matter or something, and the scary thing is that they might not tell you! They will get a laugh out of it, though. They’ll tell all their friends, too.
***
Speaking of fact-checking and stuff like that, my working titles, which I must have simply for filing purposes, are, ‘Time-storm,’ and ‘Shape-Shifters,’ and then I have ‘Horse-catcher.’
Googling around reveals that one of my favourite SF authors, Gordon R. Dickson, has a book called ‘Time Storm.’ (1971.) He wrote the Dorsai books.
(I recommend ‘Tactics of Mistake,’ 1977. He also wrote ‘Time to Teleport,’ 1960.)
Gordon Dickson passed on in 2001. I don’t know about the Dragon books so much, but I wouldn’t mind a few dog-eared old SF paperbacks at the right price!
It’s a good idea to check all the titles, and figure out something different that still captures the essence of the idea. You really can’t copyright ‘shape-shifters,’ but I’ll bet there are a few movies and books out there. At Christmas, my nephew was playing with a toy—you guessed it, some kind of plastic ‘shape-shifters.’ It’s on the box, and kind of a service mark, which can be registered. It is an asset to its owner and they hate when you steal it. I’m not a copyright lawyer, but the words ‘shape-shifter’ are public domain and anyone can use them!
***
For a whole host of reasons my ‘schedule’ is pretty loose right now, and it might be time to set some kind of a deadline. Pick a project and just do it.
I’ve been shopping for cover art. I don’t know that much about art, but I know what I like—and I’ll know it when I see it. That Art Fundamentals course in community college might pay off after all! Just one of the benefits of a liberal, (and fairly cheap,) education.
***
My first novel, ‘Heaven Is Too Far Away’ would have been about 230,000 words without cutting, and it ended up about 180,000. This would not have been publishable by conventional standards without coming up with a trilogy or something, and I felt unable to cut it by 70,000 words. To come up with three logical endings for three volumes of 76,000+ words each, was and still is beyond my capacity to imagine. The book starts at the beginning and ends at the end. I must have read 150 books, mostly from the library, in order to write that book. At some point, I knew there was a possibility that a military historian or an enthusiast would read it.
If nothing else, I felt I could compete. While ongoing research into WW I will become ever more refined, if not even regressive or ‘bourgeois-revisionist’ in some ways, the basic facts are verifiable. For about a million reasons I have tried to write a few stories for a younger or less sophisticated audience in terms of science fiction.
What gets me time and time again is that I am essentially a comedy writer. That has its dangers, not the least of which is that it might be perceived as ‘mockery,’ which is essentially what it is anyway.
But it also makes it a hard sell, as I am finding out. I’m not afraid of a little research, but if I use sound, (and fairly simple) scientific concepts, especially the softer sciences, a really good writer might do well with a different demographic group.
Stories for youthful rocket scientists had better be good.
***
So my Smashwords edition of ‘The Handbag’s Tale’ had the same problem I talked about before. One small section had ‘squooshy’ text. The original file looked fine. I uploaded the correct file…I scrolled through every page of ‘Case’ in Kindle for PC and it looked fine. I would like to know what causes this problem. And it looks way worse in Mobipocket reader. Incidentally, Kindle for PC definitely ‘takes over’ every Mobi-type file in your hard drive. That can be a pain when you are testing files from other sources, because you never really know which one you are looking at.
It is irksome. All I could do was to re-upload that file and check it later, and of course I re-dated the file. When that didn’t work, I went back to the ‘nuclear option.’
1.) Take the original .doc file and save it as a .txt.
2.) Copy and paste into a fresh, blank .doc file.
3.) Re-format from scratch.
4.) Turn off pilcrows, grammar and spelling.
5.) Check front matter and re-upload.
6.) Check every page when it comes live.
7.) Cross your fingers and pray.
This worked beautifully, and so far I’ve given away nine or ten of them from Smashwords for E-Book Week, (March 6-12.)
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
E-Book Week Promotion.
Our E-Book Week (March 6-12) promotion is going well.
It's pretty exciting to put out a link on Twitter or Facebook, and see that someone has actually taken a free book. I wish they would grab all of them while they're in there.
Some of the data (all of the data) is useful. For example, 'Core Values' has not been mentioned in any of my tweets, or recently on Facebook. Predictably, page views on the Smashwords site are running at about one per day. Even so, we've given away a copy of the book since the event began on Sunday.
On the other side of that coin, 'Heaven Is Too Far Away' has been getting over forty page views per day, at least today, and 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales' has similar results. As for 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' that book has had over fifty hits today so far, and it isn't even eight p.m.
Without going too 'spammy,' and bearing in mind I'm giving things away for free, the results seem pretty positive. If nothing else, customers are curious about what our product actually is, and now a few of them know. It shows that there is genuine desire for the product when I can give four or five books away in pretty short order, right?
The question is one of balance.
My early experience on Facebook is that even on the news feed, constant self-promotion can be self-defeating. At some point you have done your job, and the people deserve a rest! But honestly, on Twitter, there are people tweeting constantly about trivialities such as Charlie Sheen or whatever.
As long as I'm nice about it, and the humour isn't too outrageous, I think I can get away with it to a certain extent. A few times a day, not a few times an hour, and it seems okay so far.
Utimately it's not about me and it isn't so much about the books. It's about entertaining the reader. You can't do that if you piss them off and they go off to spend their time somewhere a little more pleasant.
It sure is interesting, though.
It's pretty exciting to put out a link on Twitter or Facebook, and see that someone has actually taken a free book. I wish they would grab all of them while they're in there.
Some of the data (all of the data) is useful. For example, 'Core Values' has not been mentioned in any of my tweets, or recently on Facebook. Predictably, page views on the Smashwords site are running at about one per day. Even so, we've given away a copy of the book since the event began on Sunday.
On the other side of that coin, 'Heaven Is Too Far Away' has been getting over forty page views per day, at least today, and 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales' has similar results. As for 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' that book has had over fifty hits today so far, and it isn't even eight p.m.
Without going too 'spammy,' and bearing in mind I'm giving things away for free, the results seem pretty positive. If nothing else, customers are curious about what our product actually is, and now a few of them know. It shows that there is genuine desire for the product when I can give four or five books away in pretty short order, right?
The question is one of balance.
My early experience on Facebook is that even on the news feed, constant self-promotion can be self-defeating. At some point you have done your job, and the people deserve a rest! But honestly, on Twitter, there are people tweeting constantly about trivialities such as Charlie Sheen or whatever.
As long as I'm nice about it, and the humour isn't too outrageous, I think I can get away with it to a certain extent. A few times a day, not a few times an hour, and it seems okay so far.
Utimately it's not about me and it isn't so much about the books. It's about entertaining the reader. You can't do that if you piss them off and they go off to spend their time somewhere a little more pleasant.
It sure is interesting, though.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The End of the Beginning of the End of the Beginning.
by Louis Bertrand Shalako
c2011
All Rights Reserved
To pick up a phone book is to reveal a rectangular bare patch surrounded by slightly-tacky black fuzz.
To look at a folder is to disturb a quarter-inch of fine gray dust. To open a kitchen drawer is to despair. To pick up some old hats, and to realize that he will never wear them again...and the hats are too dirty, too old for the Goodwill.
To open up the door and go into the room is to smell bear-smell. Sweat, old socks, dead skin, and Gold Bond, slightly fermented.
To look in a drawer is to see fifteen years of bills, all neatly bundled, in order, labeled in blue ink along the top edge. 'Paid.'
It is to wonder about an old photo, to ask what will one do with a handful of old Scout badges...should they go on E-bay? Or isn't it better to let them die with dignity?
To look at a bookshelf and wonder what will happen to all of those books. Some of them are worth keeping...but not all of them. They're just falling apart.
Who wants the couch?
'Not I,' said the cat.
An old table will burn, old bed sheets can go straight to the garbage. The Health Unit would condemn them anyway. I don't ever want to see another man wearing this coat or this shirt...
The pendulum clock on the wall hasn't worked in years, but it belonged to Uncle Ed.
Straight to the garbage.
Remember the electric organ in Uncle Ed's dining room?
He used to take me over there and he would play the thing. He never had a lesson in his life. He wasn't too bad, actually.
The basement leaks. It will affect the price, no doubt about it.
Where he is now, is clean, and tidy, and he gets three square meals a day. He has people to look after him, and someone to talk to.
I couldn't look after him any more.
They tell me I'm free now.
c2011
All Rights Reserved
To pick up a phone book is to reveal a rectangular bare patch surrounded by slightly-tacky black fuzz.
To look at a folder is to disturb a quarter-inch of fine gray dust. To open a kitchen drawer is to despair. To pick up some old hats, and to realize that he will never wear them again...and the hats are too dirty, too old for the Goodwill.
To open up the door and go into the room is to smell bear-smell. Sweat, old socks, dead skin, and Gold Bond, slightly fermented.
To look in a drawer is to see fifteen years of bills, all neatly bundled, in order, labeled in blue ink along the top edge. 'Paid.'
It is to wonder about an old photo, to ask what will one do with a handful of old Scout badges...should they go on E-bay? Or isn't it better to let them die with dignity?
To look at a bookshelf and wonder what will happen to all of those books. Some of them are worth keeping...but not all of them. They're just falling apart.
Who wants the couch?
'Not I,' said the cat.
An old table will burn, old bed sheets can go straight to the garbage. The Health Unit would condemn them anyway. I don't ever want to see another man wearing this coat or this shirt...
The pendulum clock on the wall hasn't worked in years, but it belonged to Uncle Ed.
Straight to the garbage.
Remember the electric organ in Uncle Ed's dining room?
He used to take me over there and he would play the thing. He never had a lesson in his life. He wasn't too bad, actually.
The basement leaks. It will affect the price, no doubt about it.
Where he is now, is clean, and tidy, and he gets three square meals a day. He has people to look after him, and someone to talk to.
I couldn't look after him any more.
They tell me I'm free now.
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