Hand-advertising; posting flyers

So, as I mentioned the other day, I designed a flyer to advertise modernevil.com – This weekend, Mandy and I selected a paper color (goldenrod, not too yellow, not too bright, eye-catching but also differentiated from the fluorescent yellow and orange flyers everyone else is posting), found some cheap copies (2c/copy at the UPS store at Dunlap & Central in Phoenix, if you pre-pay for 1k), and spent several hours cutting the little tear-off strips at the bottom of 250 pages.  In the unlikely event that every strip gets torn off every flyer and all those strips convert to new readers, that’s 3,000 new readers.  If some of them actually buy books – hooray!

Of course, that’s all dependent upon finding 250 places to post the flyers.  (I’ll ignore for a moment the hundreds or thousands of people who will walk by each posted flyer without even seeing it, the dozens who will see it but not be interested, and the few who will be interested but lose the tiny strip of goldenrod paper they shoved in their pocket.  First it has to be somewhere, and only then can it become ineffective!)

Yesterday, after stopping by the bank and Discount Tire (to pay for the tires I ordered – I get to go back Thursday afternoon and wait for them to actually get put on (ooh – I won’t really have internet access there to distract me, maybe if I take my laptop (or a pad of paper) I can get some work done!)), I started driving around a few places to see if they’d let me post the flyers.  And to stop in to any independent book stores I saw, to see if they’d carry my books. Continue reading Hand-advertising; posting flyers

First real day of MEP full time

So, today was my first real, full day of running Modern Evil Press full-time. Mandy had last week off for Spring Break (she teaches High School, remember), so I worked on and off and tried to use the week and half between leaving ICE and today to transition myself mentally and emotionally for this. I worked on putting together a semblance of plans and goals and … I don’t know, action-item lists… Is that what they call To Do Lists these days? Trying to have some idea of how to go from where I’m at to making money from my books and my art, so I’m not merely floundering. The general day-to-day plan, for time-management sake, is to get up with Mandy and work (at least) as long as she’s working. So, M-F, 6:30AM to 4:30PM.

Art in progress, 3/23/08So to get off to a good start, I started with a painting. I’ve been meaning to document my “process” better, so I also took a quick shot of the first coat of paint with my iPhone and threw it up on flickr (thumbnail at right). It’s a sort of a landscape right now. The image I’m planning for this background, which I will now describe as a “…monster with a robot head…” is not what it sounds like. Maybe I’ll post some more images tomorrow, when I’m working (digitally, of course) on adapting the sketch for the canvas. I sortof jumped the gun on the composition of the background without doing proper previsualization, but it’s no problem to work the elements together on the computer screen before I apply any more paint.

Ooh, thinking of it, I actually took a photo of another painting first, while the sun was still quite low. It’s one of four paintings I finished last year that I’ve only just put on wretched creature: ‘what… and why?’ was today’s photo, and I’ve been working on getting ‘it’s the internet…’, ‘without you’, and a (currently) untitled one with a face … Okay, admittedly, when I finished it I had a name for it, and I didn’t write it down or put it on the site right away, so … I can’t remember it right now. I’ll update it later, in the event I can recall the full name.

Continue reading First real day of MEP full time

plaintext can suck it

Okay, so I figured out this weekend how to get plaintext files to function properly and across both Macs and PCs and even survive uploads. The most frustrating part of the process (which is quite complicated and frustrating, overall) was discovering that if I upload my plaintext txt files via FTP in txt mode, they turn into browser-crashing garbage and if I upload them via FTP in (forced) binary mode, they transmit correctly. Hooray for the internet!

Also of note: the Amazon Kindle can suck it.

Anyway, plaintext versions of Lost and Not Found and of Dragons’ Truth are now available at the “new” version of the site which, since it isn’t yet at the primary URL, we’ll call … beta. yeah, it’s in beta. prose.modernevil.com