Algorithms, and How to Get One Million Hits On Your Blog. Louis Shalako.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stuff them keywords...

Louis Shalako

A recent story (BBC I think), noted that Google had diddled the algorithms and killed a lot of traffic to established websites. My latest story has a grand total of 25 reads or hits.

Over fourteen years, the site has garnered 961 k hits. My first blog post wasn't very good.

It took a week to get a handful of hits, some of which might have been indexing bots or even my own reads, which can be managed through the site. But this is why I think people quit blogging. They have a dozen or so stories up, and they don't keep it up because it looks like it isn't working. Looking at the big spikes in the graph: someone adjusted their algorithms and I got 60,000 hits from France in a few months. (Page bottom). The next big spike, came out of nowhere, and traffic was unusually high at a time when I really wasn't doing much with the blog, although I routinely repost old stories. I routinely repost online serial content, including Heaven Is Too Far Away.

I'm the only guy I know who does online serial fiction. I was probably the first, and possibly the last, to serialize a manuscript before the book was even finished...

Once you have the content, (and my blog is close to 1,200 posts), you can recycle it in various ways. You can also update the links, fix a typo, add photos, etc. I hope to have one million hits sooner rather than later—I had hoped by summer, but things have definitely slowed down, for whatever reason.

When I get a million hits, I'm going to call up the newspaper—

I have scraped my own blog for a new ebook or short story. An example would be One Million Words of Crap, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play. 

Lately, I am replacing Smashwords links with sites that are still up and running as ebook aggregators, yes; I have paperbacks and audiobooks as well. I found out about Smashwords on Facebook. As I said, when I repost a story, I can update as well. I can take out dead links and add in a new one.

Smashwords and Draft2Digital have merged and the books will surface over there in a month or two.

Scary shit for beginners.

When you go to edit an old story on Blogger, the interface might show the code. People take one look at that and it’s “…fuck. I can’t do that—”

Well, just so you know, for the first six months, I didn’t even know what a tag was. The site can be a bit glitchy at times, but just keep hacking away and you will get it. When formatting, it's hack, hack, hack, then preview. Save, then hack some more...confidence is everything, and patience is everything else.

On the upper left, click on ‘compose mode’ and its back to the old familiar interface. Just a quick pro tip, I compose in a Word doc and that way I can control the font size. There are just a lot more tools in the doc format. I prefer 13-pt Times New Roman. I copy and paste from the doc file.

It was at Genrecon, held at the Sarnia Library in 2009 where I met Douglas Smith. I cornered him for a minute and introduced myself and all of that. He is the one who suggested a couple of things. One was to join Facebook. The other was to try a free blog from Blogger. And we all know how that went.

When I signed up for Facebook, one of the first things I said was: “Whoever invented this is a genius.”

And I was right, too.

The blog is fairly flexible. You can change themes, change colours and fonts. Click around on all the buttons in order to figure out what to do. The widgets are handy, as you can see from the right-hand column. I had to fight for quite some time to get Google to take ads off of the blog. They were telling me that I had some kind of problem with the blog, and they weren’t paying me for blog hits. I said, if you’re not paying for blog hits, please take the ads off of my blog. I will never see a penny of it anyways. In fourteen years of blogging, they owe me $25.88 and the threshold for payment is $100.00. If you’re in this for the money, you might want to prepare for a little disappointment…and a few spammers in the comment section.

'Compose mode' is a lot more civilized.

Their help pages are impenetrable. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they wanted me to do, and I did provide feedback, more than once, to exactly no response whatsoever.

You can stuff keywords into your posts, but a handful of tags will do nicely.

You might read Active Versus Passive Blogging.

The best thing you can do is to produce regular, interesting, helpful and informative content. Entertain the people. Sing for your supper. As for myself, I do enjoy the work, and that is always something.

Right. And if I die, and if Google gets to keep my $25.88, then I guess that’s what the service was worth. In other words, not much, but the actual blog is what you make of it. My most popular story is Ghost Planet, with over twelve thousand reads...over ten or twelve years. I won't stick in a link for that one. If you would like to take a look at it...you will have to Google it.

(Tricky, Louis. - ed.)

(Yes, but it might also work.)

And, in the meantime, it is a useful promotional tool.

#Louis

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Click on the image to enlarge.

From the BBC: Google's New Algorithm.

The website of Douglas Smith.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

See his works on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

My Story Anna Published in German. Louis Shalako.

Anna. The perfect woman.

Louis Shalako

My science fiction story Anna has been published in German translation. The print edition of Nova 29 can be found on Amazon.

In addition to English, I have been published in seven other languages, including Estonian, Dutch, Greek, Catalan and Galician, (two mainstream Spanish dialects), and in Portuguese.

For the most part, the only pay is a couple of copies, (and sometimes not even that), but the Greek version of the same story paid one hundred and forty euros. With a twenty percent tax withholding, not really worth filing a Greek tax return in order to get that back, but I am the only guy I know who has paid taxes in Greece…I’ve paid some in the U.S. as well, which is why you want to get an ITIN with the revenue folks. U.S. tax withholding is thirty percent. If you’re selling any books or stories at all, and you don’t actually live there, why pay tax when you don't have to?

When I first started submitting to foreign markets, it involved breaking one or two unwritten rules. I was just some guy, trying to write the craziest possible stories, and submitting them to the greatest number of markets. Essentially, a newcomer in a field that is already crowded enough, and if you really want to succeed, you’re going up against long-term professionals. 

Their basic rule is to sell the story in English first. Their concern is to hang onto 'first-rights' in English, but I couldn't sell a story in English to save my life. To go straight to the foreign markets was unconventional, to say the least. And those guys, the foreign editors know the rules too. In that sense, I kind of got lucky. They might have thought I was more successful in English than I really was.

At that point, you don’t want to worry too much about what the real pros think of you.

(It’s probably not so good, so why torment yourself.)

In the fiction market, I had never been published in a professional or even semi-professional magazine. I had six manuscripts for full-length books, and I had submitted them around. Yes, I had worked for a newspaper and written for some small industrial magazines. A few months, less than one year, of actual employment did not seem to account for much. It didn’t buy any respect, I can assure the reader of that. If nothing else, I figured I could write on some level of basic proficiency.

Back then, this involved printing out chapters, writing letters and sticking an inordinate number of stamps on large buff envelopes. Even then, I probably had a few rejection slips. 

Okay, so Aurora Award winning writer Douglas Smith was at Genrecon, in 2009, along with some other successful authors.

He talked about earning money from writing short fiction. I wanted to write books, and so I had never really considered short fiction. I cornered him—literally, in the men’s room, and he was kind enough to tell me a little bit more about it before we went back into the authors panel discussion.

Okay, so how do I do it?

There are market lists. The first time I tried to market my book projects, I went to the library, and the book in question could not be loaned out—it had to stay in the building, (under the watchful eye of resource librarian Jeffery Alan Beeler, who recently retired), and so, I laboriously copied out publishers and addresses and whatever was available in terms of submission guidelines.

Nowadays we can get all of that online. We submit via email, using a simple .doc file.

Douglas has a website, the website has a page ‘for writers’, and if you click on that, you will find his Foreign Market List.

Once you’ve gotten over the first few rejections in the general sense, the ones from foreign markets are no different. It’s just one more rejection slip. I currently have eleven hundred plus rejections, and the success rate is what? One or two percent. Three percent at the most.

I have been offered at least four contracts. On examination, they didn’t look all that professional and there were some elements of vanity publishing. A lot of department store mom-and-pop pics and one title per author sort of thing. The more professional authors tend to leave the spouse and the dog and the grand-kids out of their profile pics...

A much more reputable publisher of science fiction and fantasy once asked for a ‘partial’, in other words chapters four to seven of a book. They already had the first three chapters on their desk. That book, The Shape-Shifters, was ultimately rejected. They were also interested in Time Storm for an ebook, and I didn’t even know what an ebook was at that point. That deal never happened for various reasons which aren’t that important some years later.

And that’s about it—not that I haven’t had some fun along the way, and made some money by publishing it all myself, in the end.

So, if it’s not so much about the money, what is the point? For one thing, an editor liked the story well enough to put the work into the translation. For another, when some troll reviewer on Amazon makes a point of mentioning that they didn’t even read the story but it’s full of typos, missing words and plot holes, it’s pretty obviously just bullshit—

And not everyone can say they’ve been published in their own language, let alone a foreign market.

What’s interesting about the story Anna, is that Michael Iwoleit had accepted the story, and then the magazine discontinued accepting foreign submissions. Mike had some health problems and the whole thing seemed dead. Three or four years later, and all of sudden it has come to life again.

***

Here’s one market list, Ralan.com.

Readers can get a free English copy of Anna in ebook form from Smashwords and other fine retailers. Here is the blurb, which I wrote myself. I also do all of my own covers:

Anna changed my life. Anna was the perfect woman for an emotional cripple, and really brought me out of my shell. I'd been on the inside for a long time. Now I'm retired, just some scholarly old gentleman with his young wife. I even ditched the .45 Colt for Anna. So what if she's electronic and I ordered her out of a catalogue. And if you have to ask the price, you can't afford one. A short story.

Here is the link to a recent story about the release of my first audiobook, Speak Softly My Love. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery.

Check out my drawings on Fine Art America.

Illustration by Louis.

Thank you for reading.

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What Is the Value of a Free Ebook? Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Last year I gave away probably ten thousand ebooks. In my opinion, any business may promote itself, and any business might claim this expense as a legitimate business deduction.

Yet I have a funny feeling the ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program) won’t see it that way at all.

I regularly sell ebooks for $0.99, $1.99, or $2.99. I’ve had them priced higher and sold a few books. The reason I don’t do this all the time is that volume suffers, and pretty quickly—and rankings are determined by an algorithm. Lower volume, lower the ranking.

Sales and net earnings drop. This is why I resist the urge, and the overwhelming advice to raise prices. The fact is, they don’t know anything and some of them are also full of shit.

That’s just my opinion after seven or eight years of study—such algorithms are proprietary and rightly so. Otherwise it would be too easy to game the algorithms for the average person, although I do a bit of it myself.

Let’s take a baseline figure of $0.99/ebook, rounded off to the dollar to keep the math simple. 

I gave away 10,000 ebooks, that’s a promotional expense for the calendar year 2016.

Ebooks have perceived and intrinsic value. That’s why people pay money for them and they take them in impressive numbers when they’re free.

It takes effort to produce them, I have to have the internet, a phone, a camera, I have to purchase stock photos for the covers. I have to put the hours in and my time is valuable if not exactly precious sometimes. There are all kinds of expenses involved. Some people spend a lot more than I do, but then, I do all the work around here.

That’s how I learned how—that’s how I trained myself.

That’s how I got all the wonderful skills, ladies and gentlemen.

And yet the ODSP will deny the validity, or more accurately, the monetary value, of an ebook—just as I kind of did myself, over the last seven or eight years. I say that because while I know I’ve given away over 120,000 ebooks since Sept. 2010, I’ve never reported that to the ODSP.

At an estimated royalty of $0.35/per book, mostly for the sake of completing our little math exercise, that would add up to $3,5000.00 CDN in promotion.

At one time, there were a lot of book commentators, traditionally published authors for the most part, blogging and bleating on the subject of ‘devaluing’ literature and especially ebooks by setting them at free or $0.99 or whatever. By the very nature of the product, this is possible. A free print book is much more expensive to produce, I will grant you that.

I saw it for what it was at the time. It was just polemic. They were just trying to destroy all the credibility and all the legitimacy of independent publishing. They were trying to destroy ebooks, ladies and gentlemen. Their own position was threatened by this revolutionary technology.

They had an interest in sapping the confidence not just of the writers, but also of the readers.

They wanted to control the situation. They wanted to keep us out of the market, didn’t they?

The government of the Province of Ontario, not very popular at the moment, has an interest in controlling costs too. They want to control the situation too.

The way they do that with the 750,000 disabled clients of the Ontario Disability Support Program is to make us think that we are stupid. That we can’t do the math. That we are somehow the enemy, and that for whatever imaginary reason, we must be punished.

We live in such fear of our benefits being cut and not being able to pay the rent that we tend to take the easy way out and go with the flow. We don’t ask too many questions, We tend to avoid our social worker rather than seeking them out.

We tend to keep our mouths shut and our heads down. We tend to keep moving.

Well.

Fuck that.

No more.

No more.

Nothing great was ever achieved without risk, without thought, effort, and ultimately, sacrifice.

Hopefully that’s not going to be me, but this government would do well to lower the rate of claw-back on earnings for ODSP clients who work or operate a business to $0.35/dollar rather than the current rate of fifty percent. They would do well to raise the allowable earnings limit, bearing in mind the poverty line in this province and across the country is estimated by this very government to be $22,000.00/year for a single adult.

Your pension pays a bare $13,000.00 or so and that is simply not good enough, ladies and gentlemen.

Not good enough.

This government would be doing the right thing by putting a line for ‘promotional expense’ on the reporting form for business and expenses. Not to do so would appear disingenuous, especially so now that this government has been duly notified of the moral repercussions.

I might have a few other ideas as well, as time goes along.

Naturally, these are suggestions rather than demands, which would presuppose a rather different power relationship than that which presently exists between the disabled and the government of this province.

Thank you for reading.

Oh, and don't be afraid to grab a free ebook once in a while. You might be surprised by how helpful that can be sometimes.

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