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Tag: social media

Shiny New Author Page

Published by MichelV69 on March 13, 2018

Post Views: 600 Howdy, folks. I’ve given up on Facebook for trying to stay in touch with folks interested in my writing. Unless I’m willing to pony up about $100 per month, the best I can hope is that 10% of the folks following my “Sauder” facebook page will see it. Twitter, in general is very hit or miss about who of the ~550+ followers get to see my posts.  My guess is that it’s about 10%, tops. So, the first step is that I’ve rearranged my blogsite here, to have an “Author / Book Information Page” that will have info in one place about the various novels and novellas I have written or am writing.  You can find that at the “Author / Book Information Page” menu item up…

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Consulting Blues – The Expensive Customer

Published by MichelV69 on April 13, 2013

Post Views: 185 Recently I put a bid forward on a “Request For Quotation” (RFQ) as part of my telecom consulting job.  Unfortunately, the potential customer’s RFQ was essentially “go watch this YouTube video, and build something like that.  It should be easy, so I only want to pay $200”. The video was essentially someone talking about a proof-of-concept project they had done.  None of the back-end infrastructure was discussed; it was apparently Asterisk based, and used a database of some kind to hold the relevant data.  Nor did the potential customer give any indication if they even owned their own phone system or what database technology they wanted used. I sent in a “back-of-the-envelope” price tag based on the notion that I’d have to do everything from scratch, and…

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Paid Advertising For Your Book – Don’t bother, I tried that already

Published by MichelV69 on September 27, 2012

Post Views: 430 Back in February, I posted an article titled “More Thoughts on the Economics of Authorspace – It’s a business … who knew?” . In it, I ran through a few numbers based on my own very limited and new understanding of being an Independent author. Part of those numbers was an estimate of $450 in promotion/ advertising. It is that number and how I’ve spent it that I want to talk about. I’ll drop a table on you here in a moment, but the short version is that nothing worked. After about $400 in advertising for “By Any Other Name“, I can definably say that I got nine sales and two reviews as a result of my advertising. That is a cost per outcome of $44. Even…

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Lost Le Carrés

Published by MichelV69 on August 8, 2012

Post Views: 185 Again today I was treated to another “go get ’em tiger” writer-motivation tweet about how many times some famous author was rejected before finally being accepted by a publishing house and going on to fame and fortune. I’m sorry, that doesn’t make me feel motivated. It makes me feel mad. Allow me to explain. When I first considered being a writer, 20-ish years ago, I would have been leaving a word out of my job description. That word would be “starving”. This was well before Web 1.0, let alone the interactive people-published world of Web 2.0. So, if you wanted to be published, you depended on agents and publishing houses; gatekeepers. The Gatekeepers, much as today, are the ones which curate the literary world. They…

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The 80-20 Rule

Published by MichelV69 on August 2, 2012

Post Views: 144 Guest Post By Curiosity Quills Press I read an article this morning in The Guardian about “Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors.”  It makes a lot of great points and ultimately compares social media as a sales tactic to the tech bubble of the 90s and 2000s—and it hypothesizes that it will burst in the next 18 months.  It’s a fabulous post.  Go read it. As someone who has been around since the early days before the self publishing market was flooded and before all the CONSTANT tweets and blogs and Facebook messages that you have to be on social media to sell books and that social media is more important than writing, this article made me want to stand up…

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