Category: Internet

wishing I hadn’t renamed my blog, right now

Calming down.

I’m calming down.

I get too upset, too easily.  Little problems sometimes feel very big.  Little frustrations, little failures, sometimes feel very big.  I can get very emotional.  A little while ago, a few words, a realization, a revelation, a simple email, got me so upset, so angry, that my vision literally went blurry.  A few words.  A small mistake.  A communication failure.  And anger.

I’m trying to calm down, though.  I’m calming down.  Nothing can be done.  Anger can do no good.  Emotional turmoil can not help, here.  Nothing can.  Too late.

Here we are: It’s May 1st, it’s supposed to be the deadline for my contest.  You remember the one, where I ask people to tell me what Forget What You Can’t Remember is about, and the winners get free books & maybe their name in my next novel?  Timed to coincide with the Podiobook’s completion two weeks ago, when hundreds of people would suddenly be able to consider and answer the question.  Plus, by using a mid-roll ad, I could have a quick announcement of the contest inserted into the Intro of every episode of FWYCR downloaded from Podiobooks.com.  Starting three weeks ago, a couple of chapters before the final chapter was posted, the ads were supposed to be started.  This would have let everyone who was partially done with the book know about the contest, and the ad would have continued after it was complete -which is a trigger for a lot of people to go dl the rest of the book, and for many who like to listen to an entire book at once to begin- for the two weeks leading up to today.  I had also hoped that this would spur people who might not be keeping up with new episodes to try to get through the rest of the book in time to enter the contest, and that if people started thinking about answering the question 3 weeks ago they might have a better chance of coming up with a good answer by today.  In addition, my contest was announced over at Podioracket (I recorded an audio insert for them, similar to the one that was to be inserted mid-roll at podiobooks.com), and I blogged about it and tweeted it and talked about it with friends.

Yet I’ve only received two responses so far.  Two.  Two?  Dozens of people have bought the paperback.  At least 176 people have downloaded all 31 episodes from Podiobooks.com (and over a thousand have at least got the first chapter).  Something like three thousand chapters should have had a reminder of the contest in them.  Is my work so seriously a failure to engage an audience that only two people were willing to send an email to try to get a free book?

It’s hard to say.

See, the email that got me so upset was one that let me know that the person over at Podiobooks.com that I trusted to turn on the ad-insert … never turned it on.  Maybe it was my fault for not being clear enough, or for putting too many thoughts/words into a single email.  Maybe it was my fault for not checking sooner to be sure that they’d followed through.  Maybe it was their fault for not doing it.  Turns out it doesn’t matter whose fault it is – as is generally true, placing blame can’t alter the outcome of events.  Deciding whose fault we think an error is doesn’t go back and run the ad in three thousand episodes.  Nothing does.  Nothing can go back and make the hundred and fifty plus people -who were actually engaged enough with my book to keep current with the episodes and/or to get the whole book as soon as it completed- aware of the contest.

I could extend the contest.  2/3 of the people who have at least downloaded two chapters haven’t finished downloading the rest of the book.  I could extend the contest, make up a new version of the mid-roll ad, and hope that some of the people still listening will bother to answer.  That’s certainly a possibility.

Instead, I’ll probably just send books to the two people who entered, put both their names in my next novel, and say ‘fuck all’ to running contests.  And to relying on other people to do what they say they’ll do.  And to the thought that I could ever build a fucking fan base.  I’m pretty sure I could name all my fans, right now, and count them up without running out of fingers.  I’ve been putting out books for five years, podcasting books for nearly a year, and I can’t get three people to send me an email to win a free book?

fuck all

Swine Flu Sale – Pandemic Prices!

In light of the WHO raising the Pandemic Alert Level to Phase 5 (on a scale where Phase 6 is a “Global Pandemic” characterized by “widespread human infection”), I’m starting a Swine Flu Sale – Save 20% off any purchase.  This is a special offer for 1) People who read my blog or follow me on Twitter 2) People willing to ignore WHO’s recommendations to stay away from large congregations of people in public places.

Details for those afraid of Swine Flu (or not in the Phoenix area):
Browse my books at modernevil.com and my art at wretchedcreature.com.  Email me at teel@modernevil.com and mention the “Swine Flu Sale” along with whatever books and/or art you want to order, and I’ll take 20% off the full price of your order (before any sales tax & shipping costs, if applicable).  Offer not available via the shopping cart on modernevil.com – I’ll have to manually invoice you to give you this discount.

Details for brave Phoenix residents:
Come out to the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk May 1st – you can find me among the vendors in the street closure one block South of Roosevelt between 4th & 6th Streets, usually just south of the corner of 5th & Garfield.  Mention the “Swine Flu Sale” and receive 20% off your entire purchase.  Plus, by showing up in person there’s no possibility of shipping cost, and I won’t charge you sales tax if you pay cash.

The sale lasts as long as the WHO Pandemic Alert Level for Swine Flu is Phase 5 or Phase 6.  I’m still happy to deliver purchases to people in the Phoenix area free of charge, myself.  If I think of anything else, I’ll edit this post later.  Stay healthy, everyone!

Failure to Follow Through

I was working on another idea I’ve got (it can wait – it doesn’t require any action until 2013, so posting about it here a few days later won’t make a difference), and I went back and was reading my blog posts from Fall of 2003 and I re-discovered something I’d forgotten. Now, if you go back and try to look at the original posts for yourself, please keep in mind that there were some problems converting the site from MoveableType to WordPress last year that I haven’t taken the 100+ (estimated) hours it will take to go through and fix, yet. So, some posts are just a mess, right now, and some are almost entirely missing. Still, from what’s there, I was able to piece this together:

I started recording and posting my first Podiobook online 16 months before the word “Podiobook” was coined.  Heck, it was two months before the word “Podcast” was suggested, according to Wikipedia.  (Consequently, I wasn’t trying to podcast it at that point – I was simply blogging about it & trying to sell it through my blog.)  I had even found a way to monetize it from day one, with a now-defunct micro-payments system called BitPass – at 25cents per chunk or about $1/half-hour (ie: about the same price for the whole thing whether you buy it all at once or a little at a time).  My plan, according to this post from September, 2003, was to simultaneously release the book in paperback, electronic format, and as MP3s (and possibly CDs).  By the first week of December, 2003 I had the first four files recorded and available for purchase, right from this post (broken links now removed).

I was testing the waters, trying to see if anyone was interested in an audio version (trying to see if anyone was willing to give micropayments a try, too).  The plan, as of December 11, 2003, looks like it was to post the rest of the audiobook serially, for micropayments, but also to offer options to buy the whole book as MP3s together, an MP3 CD, and possibly a set of audio CDs (since the MP3 Audiobook was unheard of at that point, I thought I should at least offer it in the old way).  Unfortunately, no one bit.  No one even commented to say they were interested.  According to my posts about stats, my blog was getting between 10k and 30k “unique visitors” per month (in the months I mentioned stats) from September 2003 through February 2004, and had fewer than a dozen regular commenters.  By March 2004, thinking there was no interest and it was taking WAY too much work to not be heard, I’d given up on the audio version of Lost and Not Found.

I didn’t persist.  Well, I did keep working, I kept writing, I kept creating, I just didn’t try to do audio again until 2008.  And by 2007-2008, when I looked into it, I discovered that what I’d thought of doing 4-5 years earlier had taken off and now I’m late to the party.  In the intervening time, I’d never given up on the idea of someday recording audio versions of my own books in my own voice, but in the insulated world I lived in I didn’t know anyone else was doing it.  And since I was working full time and splitting my off hours between having a life, writing, painting, and more, there wasn’t time to be doing the audio versions.

“If only, if only…” If only I’d followed through on my idea.  If only I’d finished recording it, despite an apparent lack of interest from my audience.  If only I’d heard of Creative Commons (founded in 2001?  Who knew?  Not me!), or thought to give away my content instead of insisting on trying to sell every copy in every format.  If only I’d somehow thought of podcasting prior to its adoption and…  umm.. yeah.  ((I was SO reading RSS specifications in 2003/2004, and was only thinking of enclosing files for my online comics and my occasional “audioblog” posts, not for books.)) So.  I have a long history of thinking of things a couple of years before anyone else, and then losing interest in them and setting them aside long before they suddenly hit it big.  I need to work on my follow-through, and I need to work on persistence, even in the face of adversity.

I have good ideas, I even often know what to do with them, and I need to get myself to actually follow through.  To carry my ideas to fruition.  So that the next time I invent the next big thing, maybe I’ll be at the center of it instead of on the outside, looking in.

Silly new comments options

I’ve spent some time working on this, today, some of which means that future upgrades of the two plugins involved will be a little harder (I had to go in and manually change the code in order to get dates to display correctly) but the result is that now comments from both Twitter and FriendFeed are added to the comments on my blog posts. So, if you link to the blog post on Twitter or comment on the blog when it gets posted to friendfeed (or if you want your comment to go to friendfeed from the blog), it all shows up nicely in the comments area of the post.

You know, so that that conversation no one is having about my blog posts all gets combined and returned to the blog post it’s about.  Well, except for livejournal comments.  I cross-post most of my stuff to LJ, and sometimes people comment there, but as far as I know there’s no way to get those comments to come over here, too.  I’ll look into it.  But except for that, now conversations on this blog, on Twitter, and on friendfeed related to my posts are all integrated here.  You can see what it might, theoretically look like, where I was testing it and getting it set up, on my last post.

Tim O’Reilly on Open Publishing

This is a great little video on why publishing should be open (variously: DRM-free, cost-free, copyright-free, using open standards) and how that doesn’t have to mean you can’t make it a business.  One of the best videos I’ve seen come out of Tools of Change so far, and well produced. Definitely worth your four minutes:


Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.