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| A reader. |
Louis Shalako
No true adventure can ever happen without sacrifice.
Nothing good in life comes easily.
You get out of it what you put into it.
***
While we talk some, we listen as well.
Having learned quite a bit, we’ve set aside April
2014 for an overhaul of our publishing system. For one thing, not all titles appeared in all stores. Looking at that brought up other questions.
One thing that needed to be addressed was our
blurbs.
***
Time Storm (What I have now.)
Short
blurb
Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals,
which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has
a monopoly. The planet is uninhabited. Everyone has a secret. With a small
wintering party, life's pretty boring until everything goes terribly wrong. On
Althea, staying alive is half the battle.
Long
Blurb
Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals,
which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has
a monopoly, and the planet is uninhabited. McNulty dies unexpectedly and
Freddie Smith is acting strangely. Everyone has a secret and it's only a small
wintering party looking after the Complex. Life 's pretty boring, when
everything goes terribly wrong. Mickey Greenwood and his friends must race
against time to save the others, on a planet where just staying alive is half
the battle.
***
That was the first pro marketing image I ever
bought, yet another issue that needs to be addressed.
***
(Short)
If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile
Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily
fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending
manipulation of the human genome. Right now he’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one
of the toughest men who ever lived, and his sexy mutant girlfriend, Miss Kitty.
Before
(And this only part of what was probably the worst blurb ever written.)
Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands
respect. After a personal humiliation at the hands of the New York City cops,
he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse
Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's
virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome.
After
If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile
Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily
fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending
manipulation of the human genome. Right now he’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one
of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle
bouts. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are
all under his watchful evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes
an indulgent interest.
After
that, even
If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile
Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily
fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending
manipulation of the human genome. He’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the
toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts.
He's also got the hots for Jeb's girlfriend, Miss Kitty. Hope Ng, her nefarious
rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful, evil
eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest. Rife
with the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements, On the Nature of the
Gods is simply unforgettable.
***
The only rational claim we can make is that the new
blurbs are somehow better than the old blurbs. What we are trying to achieve is
‘sales copy’ rather than just giving the whole plot away in the product
description.
That’s not to say that they are good, and they are almost certainly not great. But they are
better.
All of this has to do with passive discoverability,
where a better blurb will do a better job of speaking to a customer who is
browsing one online bookstore or another. Assuming that one does tweet or post
a book link once in a while, a better blurb still does a better job with more
active marketing.
Here’s the pain-in-the-butt aspect of all this: once
we have a new blurb up on Smashwords, our job is not done. Then we get to stick
it up on Amazon, and then Createspace, assuming we have paperbacks. We must
also remember Google Books and OmniLit, and Kobo or Lulu, or any other platform
we are using. It doesn’t stop there. Assuming we have image/link type ads on
our blog, we had better update our blurbs there, and in my own case, in the past
I have forgotten or even neglected my website. All those blurbs will have to be
fixed up as well. Admittedly this is only copy/paste work but it has to be done
and it has to be done thoroughly.
Bear in mind this author has five pen-names and
seven or eight blogs. That's why I set aside a whole frickin' month.
Also, speaking in terms of continuous improvement programs, 'Kai-Zen,' a new, more professional author bio must be posted all over the
place, including at the end of each book. A newer, cleaner-looking front matter
design must go into all back titles.
If a Table of Contents is now required for iTunes,
then old stories aren’t going to make it in. If they are already in iTunes, any
kind of update can blow them out of there again as they’re one of the more
stringent retailers in terms of internal review processes.
Now, imagine if you will, a universe where some guy
has at least 73 English-language titles…plus a few French and one Spanish.
Imagine rewriting all them frickin’ blurbs and loading them up on all channels…and
going through every .doc file, trying to get them all to look nice.
In one brief note, when I clean up a file—a title, I put Apr14 in the file name,
that’s April 2014. I’m using the original .doc file as downloaded from
Smashwords.
The next time
I go looking for something in my files, I can lay my hands on the most recent one. For all intents and
purposes, virtually all other file versions can now be eliminated except POD
files and anything that’s exceptional for any other reason, say an unpublished
work/WIP.
***
Here’s my old front matter design, it’s kind of
centered and arrowhead or diamond shaped. It was also all squashed together.
The first few titles were really bad.
The Case of the
Curious Killers
by Louis Bertrand Shalako
Copyright by Louis Bertrand Shalako 2010
Cover art copyright by Louis Bertrand Shalako 2010
ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9
This Smashwords Edition is published by Shalako
Publishing
This
ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book
with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for
your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The
following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or
deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places,
settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.
***
Not very good, in some ways.
Now it looks more like this, bearing in mind the
title is black and linkless:
Louis Shalako
This
Smashwords edition copyright 2014 Louis Shalako and Long Cool One Books
Design; J.
Thornton
ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9
This
ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book
with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for
your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The
following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or
deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places,
settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.
***
My new bio
looks like this:
Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers
and industrial magazines. His stories appear in publications including
Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea,
Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern
Ontario and writes full time.
This
was the old one.
Louis Bertrand Shalako began his career writing for
community newspapers and industrial magazines, such as The Delhi News-Record,
Brant News, The Nanticoke Times, Ontario Tobacco Grower, and the Fire and
Safety Equipment Quarterly. A notable writer of darkly humourous speculative
fiction, his works have appeared in six languages. His stories appear in
publications as diverse as Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan,
Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. With a unique voice and gifted story-telling
across genres, Louis takes the reader on a magic carpet ride and a compelling
read. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.
***
Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.
Luckily, hard work is something we understand.
No honest effort is truly wasted.
A dollar earned is a dollar earned.
It’s all about showing the reader a good time.
***
Someday I really ought to consider a professional
mug shot.
Oh,
well.
Them’s the breaks.
***
See
you laters, alligators.
And there's plenty more work where that came from.
END
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