Down Day
Today is definitely a ‘down day’. The weather is bad, the air heavy, emotions depressed. Perhaps it’s all the extra work and research that I’ve been doing recently, trying to get everything ready to launch my little project; all the extra things that have to be thought of; all the paperwork which needs to be completed.
But it is only today, despite the forecast for more bad weather to come, I am sure things will brighten up tomorrow!
Love & Kisses, Viki
Marketing Books
I mentioned yesterday that I am looking at different ways to market my publications – not just those written by me, but also those by other authors published by me – and I think I may well have found a solution. The solution, however, is considerably larger in concept that I had originally considered, but viable. It involves setting up an Internet shop – possibly with a new domain name – exclusively for small press books and then marketing books from other publishers as well, both in Europe and other countries.
Larger in concept because it means I would be working as a bookseller and not just as an author or publisher selling my own titles. Larger in concept because it means all the book-keeping and accounting problems that a business normally has would not just be for my own press, but also include several others. That is, if any other small press booksellers are interesting in taking part in the project! And there lies the crux of the problem: how many small or independent publishers would be willing to provide me – on a Sale or Return basis – with a small stock of their titles to sell to the public?
Revisiting I Knew It
After my little comment the other day on the failings of getting spam through on my blog, especially with the spammers’ delight post I Knew It, I’ve decided that enough is enough. When I came back this evening there were just under five hundred new spam comments picked up by Akismet and, after I had deleted the record, another twenty-eight appeared within about a quarter hour.
I mean, it’s all great fun and I do simply laugh at these poor fools for wasting their time, but I can’t be bothered with them any more. If they want to find another post, that’s fine by me, but that one allows no more comments. Perhaps I should close down comments on all posts after fourteen days or so: few people really read back and comment on the older stuff anyway and such a change would be put through automatically by the software on WordPress. Much better to have comments on my newer posts!
Love & Kisses, Viki.
Take A Hint
I doubt very much that any spammers will read this simply because they are concentrating on one single post at the moment, and I doubt they’ve even read that either. But, just in case:
Give it up.
I mean, yesterday I had over five hundred attempted spams on one single post here. Think about it, five hundred! And not a single one of them got through. The post in question does not have any comments on it whatsoever. Shouldn’t that be enough of a hint to the spammers that it isn’t working?
Clearly not, since the deluge continues, without any form of success whatsoever, today.
Love & Kisses, Viki.
Awaiting Publication
I finally have a first proof copy of my new short story in my hands, ready to be published in small format as a book. It is a very good feeling, much better than seeing a listing on Kindle for an eBook! There is no set date for publication of A New Beginning though, too many other things need to be sorted out first and a market needs to be found.
By market I mean a platform through which the book can be sold, along with the other two titles awaiting publication and the future titles which are forming in my mind and on my computer at home.
Tumblr Dies?
The news is out, it’s been confirmed, Yahoo! has bought out Tumblr for a cool billion dollars and change. And what is Tumblr? Well, if you read some of the comments made on various sites carrying the news it is a micro-blogging platform, exceptionally popular with its users which makes a loss. Revenue of thirteen million against capital investment of one hundred and twenty-five million. The general feeling is (aside from the usual ‘only in America’ comments) that Yahoo! will kill the platform, covering it in advertising and scaring away all the people who use it. But the over-riding opinion seems to be something else, at least if you read the article on the Daily Mail:
He seriously needs to upgrade his girlfriend. If she’s this plain in her prime, imagine her at 40!
Not that we need to expect anything else: attacks on David Karp and Marissa Mayer and, of course, President Obama and the Democrats.
Time For Change
Anyone who has been following me for the last three years (and a few days, I missed my third blogging anniversary on May 12!) will already know where many of my interests have been in the past. I have written much about erotica; about the discovery of myself and my sexuality; about life as a young woman in a strange and foreign world – not just the Internet, but here in Europe too. The many changes in my life which have taken place are, for me too, clear. I have, it can be said, grown considerably. Not, as so many women fear, in weight, but in experience and – I hope – maturity. Many of my interests are still there, a part of me that I cannot erase and which I still enjoy, would not wish to erase. This web blog contains much of that past life, much that remains over in this ‘new’ life. But I am moving on and this post, with its interesting contents, will be one of the last of its kind.
Photo Source: kindawarped
One of the last, not the last. But I shall explain that now.
Evolution?
I caught this at the start of another film. Now, normally I would skip over the adverts as soon as that little Skip button appears, except that there wasn’t one this time and so I had to suffer all the way through it. So, you may well ask, why are you making us suffer too?
Turn your sound on, sit back, and laugh over a little bit of good old man-hating!
Well, I found it amusing.
Love & Kisses, Viki
It’s Just Sad
I’d be laughing into my morning coffee if it wasn’t just so sad. I’m not talking about anything real, a sob story or anything like that, but something which appears to be real for some people and is sad simply because they really believe in it. And also a bit sad because one of the posts gaining the most attention by way of comments, but not the most clicks, really shouldn’t be.
You will undoubtedly recall that I wrote a post quite a while back on SEO and used all the most popular search words from the previous month to fill it out. An interesting experiment, I thought, but not quite what I had anticipated. The post dived. Despite the fact that pretty much the same search queries are being used and showing up on my Dashboard, this post hasn’t been the one being hit. It remains by the usual culprits: collections of beautiful women; a few of my erotic writings; popular but short-lived commentaries on recent events.
And the most popular post for comments? Well, if you look at the post (I Knew It! from May 1), you will see that there is not a single comment there. So how can this post be the most popular post for comments – there are 2114 comments on this blog at the moment – when not a single one shows up there?
The answer is simple: it is a spammer’s paradise post! Every single SEO word that spammers appear to use must be contained in that one post. Either that, or spammers use their preformatted text as a search criteria when trying to find where to send their next wave of crap. The current major promotion is clothing sites with TLDs of France and Italy, and it looks like the work of one very sad person – or automated software – which has signed into the page and is just adding comment after comment without leaving the page. And every single one of those comment is being picked up by Akismet and automatically thrown into the spam bucket for deletion. Nearly four hundred today. On this one post.
During the writing of this post, right now, there are five new ones.
Well, I guess some people have plenty of time on their hands and absolutely no life whatsoever.
Love & Kisses, Viki.
Hissy Fit?
The life of an author, no matter which genre they might write in, no matter what their print or virtual medium may be, is not an easy one. We all suffer criticism, we all – hopefully – get reviews and a certain amount of attention. How we handle this attention is another matter entirely. Take, for example, the case of Michelle Leighton. She has published a book called Until I Break, a self-published book but one which appears to have had some success, and calls herself a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author. So, you’d imagine she can handle criticism, based on previous experience.
That, however, is obviously not the case as she clearly indicates in a post on her blog. She has decided to pull the book from publication, at least as far as the eBook version is concerned.
And why?
Imaginative Radio
I am a radio fan. Fine, I’m a book fan first but I’m also a radio fan. I love listening to the radio while doing other things where a book simply isn’t possible – such as washing the dishes or ruining a good meal. Radio has almost everything that you could possibly wish for, without the graphic visuals. In fact, radio is so good that Transworld Books even recommend it for…
cookery programs.
Now, can someone explain to me how you hear a perfect trifle, even when you’ve got a television?
Love & Kisses, Viki.
Petty Annoyances
It’s all very well using a spellchecker to make sure that what you have written is correct, as far as spelling goes, but what happens when you write a word down which is correctly spelled, but the wrong word?
I must admit, I have been a little bit lazy recently. I have relied on my spellchecker a few times and, reading back over an article or post later, after it has been published, I’ve found one or two words which are completely wrong. This is not a good thing! Not the finding of the words, but the fact that I haven’t bothered to check what has been written and make sure that no errors have crept in.
We all do it: we write something quickly and try to get it out to the wide world of the Internet as quickly as possible; we make a spontaneous comment on something which is happening right now – my post on the Eurovision contest last night is one example – and concentrate more on the overall content and being the first to write, the first to make an observation. Actually, trying to be the first is something equally silly because no matter how quick you may be it is going to take time before anyone gets to see what you’ve written anyway.
And with my future plans which involve care and attention to detail, especially when it comes to spelling, grammar and layout in a short story designed for publication in print, this is deadly. When you have a story of, say, eighteen thousand words and have already committed it to print, already moved it to the next stage in the publishing process, correctly errors can be a very costly procedure.
So I guess I’ll just have to slow down a touch, have to learn a little bit more patience, practice a little more care and do the job properly the first time and, above all, not rely either on my spellchecker or those little red lines which appear under a word when the software recognizes it as false.
Love & Kisses, Viki.
Good, Bad, Eurovision
First up, so that we get this straight, I am not watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Nor am I anywhere near anyone who is as far as I know. It might be that the neighbors are zapping back and forth between something interesting and this song thing, but I suspect most people will be watching Madagascar 2 which a rival channel is airing – according to the local paper – for those who don’t have the stomach for another round of reality bites the dust. There are far too many reality shows on television in Germany – which makes me proud not to have a television at all – and all of them have very bad script writers. Not quite as bad as some of the crime shows coming out of the States, but bad all the same.
But it is running on Twitter with up-to-the-second appraisals, and almost impossible not to catch a glimpse of as a result.
WordPress And Trust
Sometimes it is fun to get into the nitty-gritty of things and see what is happening in the world, what interests people and where – to use a German saying – the shoe bites. So I was a little bit more than amused to see an article on WPTavern asking whether people trust any company which misspells WordPress – as Word Press or Word(p)ress or whatever. And, as with many articles which appear on other sites, I felt the need to make my own comment, because that’s what the Internet is for and that’s what keeps other sites alive and interesting. Good conversation, discussion and so on brings better articles and writing from a poster who has found a (small) audience.
You can check the comments from others alongside the article yourself, I shall merely make this comment: Physician, heal thyself!
The built-in WordPress spellchecker does not accept WordPress either.
[Edit: all that said, I have had to put the lowercase p in parenthesis because when published it is automatically corrected! One for you WordPress!]
Love & Kisses, Viki.
Real Live Nastiness
Apparently Twitter sells books. I know it must be true because someone posted it on Twitter. Leaving aside the snide references about proof of something being true because you read it in the book / publication / whatever being queried: the author John Niven has taken an interesting idea and put it into practice for the promotion of his new book Straight White Male. Rather than just posting all the positive comments from Twitter:
and a few people have decided to live up to expectations!
Wish List Amazon Germany
Wish List Amazon USA
