You've Got to Break a Few Eggs

I was channel surfing over the weekend and stumbled onto the movie Julie and Julia ... about the woman who challenged herself to make all of Julia Child's French recipes in a year and blog about the experience along the way. Ordinarily, this might not have been a stopping point for me, but the blogging thing caught my attention ... since, in a way, it's what I'm trying do ... not make Julia Child's recipes, but marketing my books on the Internet and blogging about that. So, I checked it out for a while (Meryl Streep was boffo as Julia Childs, by the way). At first Julie is writing to ether ... much as I do ... but slowly folks started picking up on the blog and, it seems, she eventually garnered a sizable audience. How so, asks I? Because she was writing about something people were interested in? Because she has a lot of friends? Because she was lucky? Maybe it was all of the above, but I'm not sure ... I have to admit that I didn't stick around for the entire movie ... The Lawman, staring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan was on a competing channel, and the Oater won out.

Table for One, Please

I've been studying Fazebook for a while now, and I think I might have figured out what is going on ... my friends write a comment which appears on my page and then their friends write replies which also appear ... I THINK that's what's going on. So I write a comment, like, "I just fed my goldfish and OMG I remembered that I had already fed them this morning, LOL." I wait patiently for the replies, which never come and suddenly I feel like the geek who just sat at the cool kids' lunch table ... one or two heads gaze in my direction and I overhear, "What's he doing here?" Then they go back to their own conversations.

Make Mine a Sarsaparilla

I keep reading stories about these indie authors who are having phenomenal success marketing their books while I labor fruitlessly in obscurity ... I suppose it should be inspirational, but honestly, it's kinda depressing .... it's like they're a group of high-society swells having a madcap evening of fun and frivolity in Manhatten, swilling champagne, dancing, dining and laughing in glamorous nightclubs ... while I'm a lone horseman entering a sleepy western village, clip-clopping along a dusty street, past tumbleweed and sleeping dogs, pushing through creaking saloon doors, spurs jangling with slow footsteps through an empty room, the only other person, a watchful bartender stops drying glasses, leans over the bar and asks, "What'll it be, stranger?"

Nobody Knows Anything

I just read Amanda Hocking's Blog entry "Some Things That Need to Be Said" (http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2011/03/some-things-that-need-to-be-said.html) and I'm trying to process what I read. I had never heard of Ms. Hocking before this morning, but evidently she's a 26-year old author and self-publishing phenom ... apparently she sold so many ebooks she attracted the attention of a mainstream publisher and a two-million dollar deal ... 2 mil ... yikes! Oddly, her blog post kinda sounded like a rambling apology of her sudden success ... I thought about leaving a comment, but I couldn't really wrap my head around what she was trying to say ... I couldn't really sum it up. I think what I really took away from this information was the randomness of success in the publishing world ... I don't mean to demean anything Amanda has accomplished ... I'm sure she works hard and I think she is to be congratulated ... it's just that, as she herself said (in reference to author J. L. Bryan):

"By all accounts, he has done the same things I did, even writing in the same genre and pricing the books low. And he's even a better writer than I am. So why am I selling more books than he is?  I don't know."


Well, there you go ...