5 Reasons for this Reading this Post

So, I'm surfing the great north shore break of the blogoshere, blissfully shooting the links on my keyboard, enjoying the spray of ads in my face, when it hits me! Lists! They're everywhere.  Of course, I see them all the time on the covers of magazines when I'm standing in line at the grocery checkout: 10 Methods to Sew Coconuts together, 8 Ways to Financial Insanity, 12 Reasons Hemorrhoid Suffers Prefer to Stand ... but I've never noticed how prevalent they were in blogs. I probably would have noticed this sooner if I was prone to notice things ... but, as my wife will tell you, I'm not ... so when this phenomenon finally registered, I realized, ah ha, what a great way to attract an audience. Why? Who knows ... there must be some deep-seated psychological reason why we love lists ... but that's big-brain stuff ... not my milieu. All I know is that we love 'em. I mean, Dave Letterman practically built a career on his famous Top Ten list. Well, it's never too late to climb on the bandwagon, so here's my list for why you are here:

1. You've spent all morning (writing/avoiding writing/snorkeling) and you needed a break
2. You Googled 'lists' and this popped up
3. Your pet (cat/dog/orangutang/bandicoot) walked across your keyboard and here you are
4. You were doing research for an article on the Oil War of 1872, started idly clicking links, and wound up weaving past coconut stitching, around financial advice, and through hemorrhoid ads only to end up here
5. You won a bet that you could find the lamest post on the Internet

If you read this far, I'm either a marketing genius or you have way too much time on your hands. I'd prefer to believe the former.

Duel of the Titans

I heard a news report this morning that the big, mainstream publishing houses are going to get into the Internet book marketing business.  Now, you must remember that my exposure to news ... especially business news ...  is limited at best ... I'm much more interested in how the Tigers are doing than what's happening on Wall Street (the Tabbies took 3 out of 4 in Toronto, by the way), so please don't put much stock in anything I say. Heck, this could be old news to you, but was new to me and if it's true you know what it means ... the publishers are going big game hunting in the Amazon. What does that mean to those of us who provide content for these giant book marketers ... especially those of us who are the bottom feeders? Probably nothing ... it's kinda like the peasants who tilled their meager gardens in medieval Europe while the lords and barons fought wars over the next rise ... we just go on hoeing our potatoes, knowing we'll be obliged to somebody, but not really caring who. But, then, I suppose there is always the chance that the battle might spill over onto our little truck patch and swallow us up.

Department of Redundancy Department

When I got into this game, everyone told me (and don't make me explain who 'everyone' is) that I need a website so people can find out about my books. So I spring for a domain name and a host, then spend umpteen hours (and copious amounts of frustration) designing a site.  Next, 'everyone' tells me I have to blog ... so I register with the great Internet blog administrator, wrack my feeble brains for a blog idea, and commence to bloggin' (the good news here is that this blog thing appears to be free ... ya gotta love that part).  So now here's the question: with all these Internet marketing tools to maintain ... like Fazebook, emails, and ... God forbid ... Twitter ... do I really need a blog AND a website? I mean, don't they both do the same thing, more or less ... sit in Internet back alleys, waiting forlornly for some innocent web-surfer to stop by and 'get to know me' ... especially when one of those things is actually costing me hard currency (okay, it's credit ... but you understand)?

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 ...