The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Ever noticed that your teenagers can’t even conceive of anything so outlandish as the idea that you and your spouse might be…oh, know…in love? Then you get what it’s like to travel to Granma and Grand-dad’s house with the über-kewl offspring in the back seat.
Some situations call for desperate measures…
They say you should start your work day with the chore you like least. Then you have the worst done and the rest of the day is, as it were, smooth sailing. Thus if you’re in sales, you should start with cold calls. If you’re a lawn man, maybe you should pull out weeds by their roots first thing in the morning.
By that theory, I should be over at Amazon right now, X-ing out my existence as the author of six books and creating a new existence as Roberta Stuart, pornographer par excellence. This is how I should start my day: get the most obnoxious, difficult, hair-tearing, time-sucking job out of the way first.
But as you can see…I’m not there. I’m here. Doing this.
It just makes me cringe.
What an ineffable waste of time. Amazon has decreed that you can’t have more than three pseudonyms, and it has further decreed that any variant of your name is NOT your name but is a “pseuodnym.” (I have three, because my dear parents gifted me with an unpronounceable, weird, and insufferably snooty first name.) So in order to build an “Author Page” to peddle my little company’s Racy Books, I have to sign out as myself and sign in with a new email and create a new persona. Then I have to persuade Amazon that the new persona is me. Then I have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop, presumably, to get revenues for Camptown Races books directed to the corporate bank account. It is going to be a freaking nightmare and I don’t wanna do it!
I don’t want to do it, because it soaks up time. Needlessly. And time is my only asset with any value!
The only element of my life that’s worth anything is my time. And as the seconds and the minutes pass, I have less and less of it. Every time the sun rises, every time the sun sets, I have less time in my spiritual bank account.
The older you get, the more conscious you grow of that particular little reality.
Hence: digital aversion. NOTHING consumes time more voraciously than these wondrous computer devices, programs, and platforms we all have to deal with, day in and day-a-wasting out.
Every day I have to learn some new program, jump through some new digital hoop, contend with some new hassle. Every hour is at least partly consumed by watching a computer grind away and grind away and grind away. Some part of every day is absorbed by getting around yet another error message, yet another digital roadblock.
As we speak, I’m hassling with WordPress because it’s decided to hang over the upload of a freaking THUMBNAIL, goddamnit, needed to update the Camptown Races Press site. It’s not like this was a gigantic TIFF here. No. This is a tiny little JPEG. Now I’ve had to crash out of the program, my coffee has gone cold while I’ve wrestled with that sh!t, the page is not updated and for all I know may never BE updated and for the life of me I can NOT figure out how to make control the amount of air between those damn thumbnail images.
I personally have come to hate it.
Yeah, digital technology has done wondrous things for our ability to communicate and to cope with vast quantities of (largely irrelevant) information. But folks…
Life was better without it.
Speaking of Roberta, that wily and prolific author has emitted another new book:
And she would be forever in your debt if you would grab it from Amazon and post a fine review of the thing.
So I set up a Goodreads Authors page today. Now as activities go, THAT one defines frustration.
Yea, verily, it would suffice to define any number of English words:
aggravation
confusion
mess
crazy-making
incomprehensible
pointlessness
arrogance
annoyance
time-suck
Well, I’m hoping that Twitter and Facebook (where I should have been setting up a new page instead) will generate buyers. I kind of doubt it, but…damn, this stuff is frustrating.
It sucked up my entire afternoon, and I didn’t get anything else done. And since I very much doubt that a Goodreads Authors page that no one reads is going to go far by way of marketing, as far as I’m concerned I didn’t get anything done, period.
LOL! What I did just now — try to create one of their Goodreads widgets — is a case in point, and typical of what happened every. step. along. the. way. It asks you to enter the ISBN of your book. In response, I copied and pasted the ISBN that I copied into my spreadsheet direct from Bowker. Click enter. And what excuse do I get for the FAIL?
“Enter a valid isbn to see a example and widget code.”
Folks, it can’t get much more valid than electronically copying and pasting it from the electronic horse’s mouth.
Should’ve used my afternoon to build a new Twitter page for Fire-Rider. What a waste of energy.
Think I’ll do a) a Twitter page for Fire-Rider and then b) a Facebook page for P&S press, which can then comprise the porn, I suppose, after all the FR bookoids are online. So that will produce three sites:
Twitter for Camptown Races (Racy Books for Racy Readers)
Twitter for Fire-Rider (not a racy book, by any means)
Facebook for both FR and the racy books.
So once again, another day went by in which I did exactly NO writing. That would be OK (marginally) if my time had been spent productively. But when the whole goddamn day is wasted…jeez.
Interestingly, most of the Internet chatter about GoodReads is overwhelmingly positive. One suspects the Power That Is Amazon behind the page after page of cheery burbling that comes up in a Google search for user reviews of the platform, but maybe it really is the be-all and end-all of indie author marketing. We have this interesting post questioning the Received Wisdom about Amazon give-aways, though it seems to be of most concern for people who have to ship off hard copies to customers who “win” one of these give-away contests. It’s as verbose and complex as the Goodreads Author site itself. Possibly those characteristics are contagious. Overall, though, the gist seems to be do it but tweak it. But then, deep in the comments section, the blogger responds to a reader with this: “You can’t give away e-books on Goodreads, so you must produce something in print to run a giveaway.”
This was the case in 2014. Whether it’s still so, I don’t know. When I looked at the form for the giveaway, NARY A WORD to that effect appeared. However, given the program’s consistently cryptic nature, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised but what she’s dead right.
Not a problem for any of mine, because I used a template that converts nicely to PoD page layout, and I have a PoD printer who does an excellent, quick job. If I were forced to do a giveaway through Amazon, then I easily could have two or three copies printed and shipped directly from the printer…assuming I could get Amazon to send me the winners’ names and addresses. A big assumption, I’ll bet.
We have this grutch, about some issue SO arcane that I can’t even follow what the guy’s talking about. A commenter here remarks, in March 2015, that Amazon/GoodReads (six of one, half-a-dozen of the ‘tother) was “considering” including e-books in the give-away scheme. Possibly by September 2, that has come to pass.
Apparently by late 2013, trolling and harassment had become so extreme at GoodReads the situation was becoming disruptive and truly nasty. Unclear whether this situation has been resolved. By September 2013 Amazon had taken steps to deal with it — possibly in a Draconian manner — but evidently the bullying was ongoing at the start of 2014,. In April 2015 people were still bellyaching about trolling at the site, though in June a more temperate observer that Amazon/Goodreads is earnestly trying to get a grip on the problem.
Doesn’t bode well, IMHO.
Every new publication at Amazon is another learning experience. Fire-Rider Book 7 — The Battle of Loma Alda — is online. Click on the link to the right and take a look at it!
It’s taken SIX efforts at publishing these damn serials to figure out how to force Amazon to publish them in a way that distinguishes them from each other more clearly. I’ve tried every which way from Sunday, and every goddamn time they publish the thing as “Fire-Rider,” in one iteration or another.
Even though Amazon claims it will number serials and post them in the order of the serial number, that does not happen consistently. Sometimes they appear in order, sometimes not. But most of them do not have the whole title or the correct title.
I’m kind of literal-minded, clearly too much so to survive in the Digital Age. I tend to think that if you have a series that has a number of bookoids, any given bookoid’s title should be SERIES TITLE: Bookoid’s Title. The series is not a subtitle. The book’s title is not a subtitle. But there’s no easy way to indicate to Amazon that thus-and-such a book is part of a series until you’re well after the fact: you have to have already submitted the title & subtitle before you can tell Amazon’s endless form that the thing is part of a series, and here’s the damn series title.
Today it dawned on me that instead of telling Amazon the title is Fire-Rider: The Battle of Loma Alda, I should go the other way around and say it’s The Battle of Loma Alda: Fire-Rider.
The problem is much worse at Bowker, where you can NOT convince the software that anything coming after a colon is part of the book’s title. The result of that is, as we speak, 13 ISBN’s for books titled “Fire-Rider.” Over there, too, a colon signifies a subtitle, even if it’s punctuation in a series of words typed into the “Title” slot. Extremely annoying.
Oh well.
Book VII is lively stuff! You should read it. I really need people to review these things, and so if you’d like to do so, please let me know and I’ll arrange (if I can figure out how) to put one or two installments up as freebies. Sooner or later I’ll need to do that anyway, but will move the task forward if one of you indicates you’d like a peek.
Just put up a pretty erotic image (speaking of lively stuff) at Camptown Ladies Talk — a famous and very lush painting by Gustav Courbet. The occasion: a nifty poem that appears in today’s NY Times Magazine.