I grabbed it too. It was free with Amazon’s all you can read deal.
What the heck, I’m in for a copy, too :)
Thanks! I love Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve already heard from one reader that they didn’t like the way the main character wasn’t able to power level like a video game. That’s the point of the book. I don’t care how good you are at a video game. When you’re dropped into a fantasy land and you’ve never handled a weapon in your life, it’s gonna suck.
My story Houseproud, winner of the no-ones-ever-heard-of-it “Intelligence in Fiction” prize from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute at Berkeley, is now posted to my website.
Congrats! That sounds cool, like a bunch of super-intelligent computers judged the contest!
Ha, thanks! But the super-intelligent computers failed to mention it to anyone. It got an obscure line in their newsletter, but no other announcement anywhere. Oh well, they paid well for rights anyway, and I got to host it myself for anyone to read.
Anyone here doing NaNoWriMo?
I’m trying it. I’m about 2500 words in. I need to get some done today.
@DrCrypt I can certainly believe that.
In trying to catch up with this thread, I almost didn’t click on your link, but I’m so glad I did.
Beautifully written, haunting, and tragic.
I could relate in so many small ways to your father’s troubles, that as I read it, I couldn’t help but think of how I could relate to so much, and yet I am overall nothing like him at all.
I believe that every one of us might be able to see something of ourselves in there, some more than others, but it resonated deeply within me, even though my life is so much happier than his was.
Also, I very much enjoyed the photos you included. Poignant, they really helped drive your story home. Really well-done story, and I appreciate having the honor to have read it.
Thanks for that, it was an amazing read.
Helluva year!
That is a nice year. I admire you for taking the more difficult road instead of self-publishing. Hope you hit it out of the park in '18.
Thanks! But self-publishing isn’t really easier. At least not if you want to make money at it. You have to write at least twice as much as I do for that, maybe four times as much. So traditional publishing is less work in a way, or at least less work in a given span of time.
I had a personal big deal today. I’ve been blogging for years about tech stuff over at my personal site. Like most blogs, the traffic is small but I don’t care. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about my iPad Pro.
I write something about my iPad Pro usage post MacBook Pro purchase and it got linked to by a big iPad-only blogger Ben Brooks.
The pull-quote he used made me think he didn’t read most of the rest of the piece. I talked about how a few other iPad-only people were a little frustrated with iOS 11, but the rest of the piece was about my thoughts on iOS 11.
That said, since my blog sits in relative obscurity, it was nice to get a call-out. It’s thrown my site stats for a loop. Usually I get 10s of views, but today I’ve had 316.
Always fun to get noticed. Now if you want you can use that as motivation to start advertising the blog more…
I’m not sure what I can really do to advertise it. I send out links to people I think may like them. Like a lot of writers the self-promotion thing feels weird. To this end, it’s just a vanity blog anyway about tech.
That said, I’m starting to doubt the Wordpress stats a little more. I usually get around 10 visitors a day, slightly more when I post something. Today I show 316 views to 168 visitors. But my referral log only shows 42 coming from Ben’s article, which I know isn’t correct.
Yeah, I know what you mean. But there are things you can do if your goal is more traffic
- offer to exchange articles with fellow bloggers
- create and share cute infographic images on social media
- generally spend more time on social media supporting other people in the same space
- freelance for other commercial blogs and sites
– but all that is done by people trying to make money (somehow), not people who would just idly like more blog traffic, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a casual activity. I don’t do it myself.
As for today’s traffic, there are many blog and article summary and index bots out there (for reasons I’m not entirely sure of), and some of them and their parasites may have abstracted elements like links from Ben’s article without following them directly; and then those links or databased records may motivate subsequent followup visits.
I did some freelance writing a long time ago: PC Gamer, MacLife, and Gigaom. The problem is no one, including publishers wants to pay for content. Every month I’d spend as much time chasing down promised payment as I did writing the damn article.
When Macworld had that huge layoff it threw a bunch of Mac-oriented writers out in the market. Gigaom shut down not long after that and I gave up.
I have some self-publishing stuff I’m going to work on next year that is tech-oriented.