Saturday, September 16, 2023
marketing idea
This is not so much a marketing idea as a what-to-do-with-my-life idea. It occurs to me that I have become an expert on taking the everyday life story/account, putting it in document form, getting an appropriate cover and front matter, and publishing it as a book. I can tell people how to do this and I can also walk them through the steps if they are shy or don't believe me.
Well is so happens that the world is full of stories that need to be told. Nursing homes in this town and others are full of people who lived through the wars and who still have their wits - they know what happened, and how it happened, and what people did about it. Some of the stories from the Depression are to me the most interesting because they show survival at its best, when times are incredibly bad and there just aren't any jobs. But lots of the Depression stories, sadly, are gone. I was born after WWII and I'm already an old-timer.
Nevertheless each day more of the world's fantastic supply of experience and perspective goes by the wayside as nobody bothers to record it and get it onto digital books where it will last into the next generation. I should also say that even the hard-bound books are going into the dumpsters at alarming rates and that's basically even more useful information that future generations will never have. It's not so much information, as perspective. We know what happened during the Depression. What we're losing is accounts of what it was like to be there.
So what I want to do is go into nursing homes with my shtick - my pile of books, my story, my ability to put things into a book - and see if I can talk anyone into creating a book. I of course will help them. I will take any document and work with it until it's a published book.
My father-in-law had an account of what it was like to fight in WWII - it was a powerful story in part because it was written by an ordinary soldier, just a guy, him, who got wrapped up in the army's movements. I told him when I saw it, "You should publish this." The difference between it becoming a published book, on the market and available to everyone, and it just being paper stapled in somebody's records or in their attic, is what I'm talking about. How many people look at the paper and say, future generations will want to read this? I say that with almost everything. I think that in the end, so much will be lost that future generations will want any scrap they can get. This is how I feel about the Civil War times and the 1700s. A lot of it is lost. If we can get a real account, and it's genuine and authentic, that's golden. We should take advantage of it.
I feel I would be doing the future a favor. Those who publish now, go down in the history books forever, because their story is told, and so many are not.
Well is so happens that the world is full of stories that need to be told. Nursing homes in this town and others are full of people who lived through the wars and who still have their wits - they know what happened, and how it happened, and what people did about it. Some of the stories from the Depression are to me the most interesting because they show survival at its best, when times are incredibly bad and there just aren't any jobs. But lots of the Depression stories, sadly, are gone. I was born after WWII and I'm already an old-timer.
Nevertheless each day more of the world's fantastic supply of experience and perspective goes by the wayside as nobody bothers to record it and get it onto digital books where it will last into the next generation. I should also say that even the hard-bound books are going into the dumpsters at alarming rates and that's basically even more useful information that future generations will never have. It's not so much information, as perspective. We know what happened during the Depression. What we're losing is accounts of what it was like to be there.
So what I want to do is go into nursing homes with my shtick - my pile of books, my story, my ability to put things into a book - and see if I can talk anyone into creating a book. I of course will help them. I will take any document and work with it until it's a published book.
My father-in-law had an account of what it was like to fight in WWII - it was a powerful story in part because it was written by an ordinary soldier, just a guy, him, who got wrapped up in the army's movements. I told him when I saw it, "You should publish this." The difference between it becoming a published book, on the market and available to everyone, and it just being paper stapled in somebody's records or in their attic, is what I'm talking about. How many people look at the paper and say, future generations will want to read this? I say that with almost everything. I think that in the end, so much will be lost that future generations will want any scrap they can get. This is how I feel about the Civil War times and the 1700s. A lot of it is lost. If we can get a real account, and it's genuine and authentic, that's golden. We should take advantage of it.
I feel I would be doing the future a favor. Those who publish now, go down in the history books forever, because their story is told, and so many are not.
Monday, September 04, 2023
Sept. blog report
I'm a little late this month, not getting to the report until what, the fourth? Could be worse. I enjoy this report since it allows me to look at my entire marketing situation, evaluate it, decide what to change, etc.
Blog views are up, actually up considerably. People for whatever reason are all over the web this summer and dropping in on my sites. This is not translating into sales although sales are having an incremental rise too. In other words, once in a while I get a sale, and really don't know where it came from. From a blog? From being referred off a blog into one of my amazon sites? I doubt it, but maybe.
Up, yes. Some of my rolling averages (three month averages) are now over a thousand; most are over a hundred; sometimes they double from one month to the next. My pop art gets a lot of views. I made a meme about Trump and a thousand people from Singapore looked at it. Gp figure.
There is some shifting in the ranking of the blogs. My music blog, always one of my best with my movies and music on it, is going steadily downward. I just have nothing to say about music that I feel good about saying. So it goes. People like my poetry blogs and Quaker blogs. Some things are hopping. They all have a purpose, private as that is in some cases, and who knows if the purpose is being fulfilled.
The commercial blogs are doing steadily better, though I still don't have much to say on any of them. Two of them are iimportant to me: Galesburg and Best of Indie, and I don't have a lot to say on either, but the key is really that they've been around long enough now for the search engines to trust that they'll still be there the next time around, so they're moving up the search engine rankings.
I still do virtually nothing to connect most of them to my book sale pages. More urgent is logging in on all the obscure dead logins so that they don't go by the wayside. That is quite urgent if you think about it. Get to work, Tom!
Blog views are up, actually up considerably. People for whatever reason are all over the web this summer and dropping in on my sites. This is not translating into sales although sales are having an incremental rise too. In other words, once in a while I get a sale, and really don't know where it came from. From a blog? From being referred off a blog into one of my amazon sites? I doubt it, but maybe.
Up, yes. Some of my rolling averages (three month averages) are now over a thousand; most are over a hundred; sometimes they double from one month to the next. My pop art gets a lot of views. I made a meme about Trump and a thousand people from Singapore looked at it. Gp figure.
There is some shifting in the ranking of the blogs. My music blog, always one of my best with my movies and music on it, is going steadily downward. I just have nothing to say about music that I feel good about saying. So it goes. People like my poetry blogs and Quaker blogs. Some things are hopping. They all have a purpose, private as that is in some cases, and who knows if the purpose is being fulfilled.
The commercial blogs are doing steadily better, though I still don't have much to say on any of them. Two of them are iimportant to me: Galesburg and Best of Indie, and I don't have a lot to say on either, but the key is really that they've been around long enough now for the search engines to trust that they'll still be there the next time around, so they're moving up the search engine rankings.
I still do virtually nothing to connect most of them to my book sale pages. More urgent is logging in on all the obscure dead logins so that they don't go by the wayside. That is quite urgent if you think about it. Get to work, Tom!
