Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Web marketing II
OK so here's the picture. I have nine books of short stories on sale at Amazon. There is also a volume of Quaker plays, 2 books of haiku, 8 books of e pluribus haiku, and two books of Leverett genealogy. If you look at it practically, you can't expect Leverett genealogy or haiku to sell very heavily, so I don't. I just put them up there because I like writing them and like having them there. But the short stories? I put my ninth up there the other day and got a very tepid response. The world is telling me something: either don't bother writing short stories or do something better on your marketing. I am following both advices. I'm tired of writing short stories anyway.
I am exclusively on Amazon, which could be part of the problem. Many of my friends have turned away from Amazon altogether, because Bezos is a monopolistic bastard, or whatever. I am still loyal because basically they helped me put up these 23 books up there for free. I have a copy of each in my shed, and two or three of some of them, because I love having my own books, and this represents an investment of maybe $150, almost nothing. I give them away frequently. I buy some more, $20 or #30 at a time. I have books to give for Christmas.
I'm not happy about the big picture, yes. People aren't pounding down my door, and they should be, if I were a decent writer. So I consider making a pop-art book, or going into non-fiction (I already have, with the Leverett genealogies), or maybe just giving it up like other stuff. I wasn't a great public school teacher, either, though I was quite inspired as an ESL teacher, for about thirty years. But every time I try to go back into ESL, which I do well and quite naturally, I feel this overwhelming sense of burnout. Don't do this now. Life is short. So my four ESL projects, including one weblog, are somewhat stalled. I'm just not going to pick up something now, that gives me a sense of burnout.
But this isn't about my writing, it's about my ongoing effort to put things on the web and have people see them. Recently I've gotten into statistics, both steadily crashing Amazon ratings (each of my books loses twenty or thirty thousand points in ratings every week) but also views on my weblog network. My weblog network has about forty weblogs, many of which have been around for years. This one is a good example. They are on three networks, one almost completely dormant. I can update these weblogs at any moment which would presumably improve their chances of being actually seen. As it is I get about 8,000 views a month on average, which is actually a lot of people seeing a lot of weblogs. And they are in a condition of somewhat disrepair. Look at this one. The links on the template don't work. They are set up to review weblogs that are no longer functioning. Such is true for lots of my weblogs.
But if having a history is good for a weblog, these have one. They have all those little dates on the templates that show you've been around for a few years. They have a stately sense of history. And if I clean them up a bit, they will actually be something to look at.
Here's my plan as it stands today. First, don't worry about the writing, write what I want, put it up there, let the chips fall where they may. Novels, more genealogy, pop-art book, if it flows, you'll see it. Second, take these 8,000 views and do something with them. Not all 40 can be commercial or have a commercial purpose. But they can look better and they can also show off my pop art, if I do it properly. I go to all the trouble to make this art but it sits on a computer that is about to die...what's up with that? Even putting it in Dropbox doesn't solve the problem. I want people to see it. And I feel the same way about the writing.
I need a place to talk about my progress; this is it. Right now these weblogs are a wreck, as I've said, and I get overwhelmed even thinking about the work I need to do on them. One at a time. Join me. I'll start by linking to all forty, in the template. The CESL ones, consider them history, but I'm not ready to throw out those links (because you can still find those pages in archives, if you have the URL) - so it will look like big piles of links that go dead the further down you go. No problem. That's kind of what land-a-linkin' means.
I moved up the picture of the Chicago Convention of 1968. Apparently protestors linked arms in resistance to Daley's police forces. I don't know the story, I was only fourteen that year and not in Chicago. But I took the picture and made a postcard of it at one point, and there it is: land-a-linkin'. Welcome to my page.
I am exclusively on Amazon, which could be part of the problem. Many of my friends have turned away from Amazon altogether, because Bezos is a monopolistic bastard, or whatever. I am still loyal because basically they helped me put up these 23 books up there for free. I have a copy of each in my shed, and two or three of some of them, because I love having my own books, and this represents an investment of maybe $150, almost nothing. I give them away frequently. I buy some more, $20 or #30 at a time. I have books to give for Christmas.
I'm not happy about the big picture, yes. People aren't pounding down my door, and they should be, if I were a decent writer. So I consider making a pop-art book, or going into non-fiction (I already have, with the Leverett genealogies), or maybe just giving it up like other stuff. I wasn't a great public school teacher, either, though I was quite inspired as an ESL teacher, for about thirty years. But every time I try to go back into ESL, which I do well and quite naturally, I feel this overwhelming sense of burnout. Don't do this now. Life is short. So my four ESL projects, including one weblog, are somewhat stalled. I'm just not going to pick up something now, that gives me a sense of burnout.
But this isn't about my writing, it's about my ongoing effort to put things on the web and have people see them. Recently I've gotten into statistics, both steadily crashing Amazon ratings (each of my books loses twenty or thirty thousand points in ratings every week) but also views on my weblog network. My weblog network has about forty weblogs, many of which have been around for years. This one is a good example. They are on three networks, one almost completely dormant. I can update these weblogs at any moment which would presumably improve their chances of being actually seen. As it is I get about 8,000 views a month on average, which is actually a lot of people seeing a lot of weblogs. And they are in a condition of somewhat disrepair. Look at this one. The links on the template don't work. They are set up to review weblogs that are no longer functioning. Such is true for lots of my weblogs.
But if having a history is good for a weblog, these have one. They have all those little dates on the templates that show you've been around for a few years. They have a stately sense of history. And if I clean them up a bit, they will actually be something to look at.
Here's my plan as it stands today. First, don't worry about the writing, write what I want, put it up there, let the chips fall where they may. Novels, more genealogy, pop-art book, if it flows, you'll see it. Second, take these 8,000 views and do something with them. Not all 40 can be commercial or have a commercial purpose. But they can look better and they can also show off my pop art, if I do it properly. I go to all the trouble to make this art but it sits on a computer that is about to die...what's up with that? Even putting it in Dropbox doesn't solve the problem. I want people to see it. And I feel the same way about the writing.
I need a place to talk about my progress; this is it. Right now these weblogs are a wreck, as I've said, and I get overwhelmed even thinking about the work I need to do on them. One at a time. Join me. I'll start by linking to all forty, in the template. The CESL ones, consider them history, but I'm not ready to throw out those links (because you can still find those pages in archives, if you have the URL) - so it will look like big piles of links that go dead the further down you go. No problem. That's kind of what land-a-linkin' means.
I moved up the picture of the Chicago Convention of 1968. Apparently protestors linked arms in resistance to Daley's police forces. I don't know the story, I was only fourteen that year and not in Chicago. But I took the picture and made a postcard of it at one point, and there it is: land-a-linkin'. Welcome to my page.
Sunday, September 27, 2020
Web marketing I
This site is full of rich and interesting links. It is full of mistaken links too, and disrepair in general, which I will attend to as soon as possible. But it also has some of my oldest links - namely that I was into web marketing a long time ago, and those links ended up here - and that's why I got this most recent inspiration.
It seems I'm not doing so well with my writing and marketing for it. Nothing says that more clearly than an absolute lack of sales of my new book. But it's partly because I'm just not that slick at marketing. I put the book on my sites, but who sees them? Or who cares? It may be a combination; I may be a crappy writer and a crappy marketer, but in any case I've chosen to vent my frustrations here.
I've always done all my own marketing, and my own writing, and my own publicizing. But I have one fatal flaw: I've stuck with Amazon. They made it possible for me to self-publish at no cost, and I've done that almost exclusively from the start.
I have my own pop-art campaigns. Friends of mine like my pop art so they buy my books. But they don't keep buying them, so I can't say this is a successful way of making whirlwind sales pick up. I'm a unique indie book producer, and I'm sure people recognize that, but they sure don't go out and buy my books the minute I put them out there.
So I admit, one of my problems could just be the writing. I ran out of good stories; I lost my style, or I just got too careless. Some of my books had typos and I just failed to catch them. I could have done any number of things that people just didn't like.
But on the assumption that my main problem is marketing, I will say several things. First, I recognize that being exclusive on Amazon is beginning to have its drawbacks - namely, that half the people I want have gone elsewhere. They just don't want to deal with Amazon. So I'm kind of obliged to make them available elsewhere, and I will use this page to discuss that possibility.
Second, though I have web campaigns, they aren't really great or even really consistent at this point. I need information about what works on web campaigns. I need a thousand clicks to get one sale.
This page is as good as any to talk about this stuff. Starting now.
It seems I'm not doing so well with my writing and marketing for it. Nothing says that more clearly than an absolute lack of sales of my new book. But it's partly because I'm just not that slick at marketing. I put the book on my sites, but who sees them? Or who cares? It may be a combination; I may be a crappy writer and a crappy marketer, but in any case I've chosen to vent my frustrations here.
I've always done all my own marketing, and my own writing, and my own publicizing. But I have one fatal flaw: I've stuck with Amazon. They made it possible for me to self-publish at no cost, and I've done that almost exclusively from the start.
I have my own pop-art campaigns. Friends of mine like my pop art so they buy my books. But they don't keep buying them, so I can't say this is a successful way of making whirlwind sales pick up. I'm a unique indie book producer, and I'm sure people recognize that, but they sure don't go out and buy my books the minute I put them out there.
So I admit, one of my problems could just be the writing. I ran out of good stories; I lost my style, or I just got too careless. Some of my books had typos and I just failed to catch them. I could have done any number of things that people just didn't like.
But on the assumption that my main problem is marketing, I will say several things. First, I recognize that being exclusive on Amazon is beginning to have its drawbacks - namely, that half the people I want have gone elsewhere. They just don't want to deal with Amazon. So I'm kind of obliged to make them available elsewhere, and I will use this page to discuss that possibility.
Second, though I have web campaigns, they aren't really great or even really consistent at this point. I need information about what works on web campaigns. I need a thousand clicks to get one sale.
This page is as good as any to talk about this stuff. Starting now.
