Saturday, July 19, 2003

Review accepted by AllReaders.com

Yes. It's amazing news. I spoofed myself as Jack Ganzler to get the review entered. Want to see the review? It's right here.

The next thing to do is to have Jack review DISPLACED as well.

Friday, July 18, 2003

Updates to the DISPLACED site

I spent the whole day on it, but that's okay because now it's done. Or almost done. You can see what I came up with here.

The idea is this: there is no point in marketing anything until you are ready to sell it. That means your web site has to be in decent shape. Which means you might have to spend a day getting it back on track.

The funny thing is that I just started out to see if I could get the "BUY NOW" button on the site. Then, once I had accomplished that, I very quickly realized that I had a ton of work to do to make the thing useable at all. I built that site back when Netscape had instituted the tag. I was a sucker and used it all over the place, only to have it go out of favor with the standards committee. That's life on the bleeding edge, I suppose.

I also made the awful mistake of mucking with the code for the "BUY NOW" button in an attempt to make it look a little more professional - big ouch. I had to go back and undo all my changes on 4 different pages. It helps to thoroughly check your sites as they go up...

But now, I have the books out there and ready to sell. Now I can get back to the marketing side of things. Maybe on Monday. Until then...

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Updates to the Foolishness Home Page

You know, getting out there and marketing is of course an important step to take if you want to sell books. No doubt. But what if your web pages suck? Then people are going to come to see your site, see that it sucks, and go someplace else, never to return. So today I started to work on my Foolishness home page.

I think it looks pretty good. You be the judge.

I also built the redirect page for when I move the pages. You can check it out here. Although, I don't know how much good that link there will do you since you will simply be redirected.

PayPal buttons for buying my book DISPLACED

Here is the necessary HTML:














And here is the necessary text for adding the ability to buy my book to an email:

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=rick%40interport.net&undefined_quantity=1&item_name=DISPLACED+by+Rick+Pryll+from+Foolishness+Press&item_number=980605-001&amount=2.00¤cy_code=USD

Now the only problem is how to add this button to the DISPLACED web site. Which needs some work, believe you me.

I also need to creat a pretty simple home page for Foolishness Press that includes these two buttons. I should do that right now.

Danny Yee responds...

Here is the full text of his response. At least I tried.

>I'm afraid I have way, way too much to read at the moment -- my
>most likely cause of death is probably one of the piles of books
>on my desk falling on me.
>
>But good luck with the book.
>
>Danny.

Oh well. Gotta keep right on trying.

I was thinking this morning that some of these web sites have promised to "promote" my book if I write a short article on writing for them. I have some ideas about articles I could write that writers might like. Here are some of the ideas:

- Transitions
- Complicity between characters
- Flashbacks

These are just a few and I'm sure I'll think of more as the day goes on. I'll probably do some of the writing for these things here, so stay tuned.

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

I thought I was done for today...

I was wrong.

I just found another couple of interesting things. The first is a place called Writer's Manual. They give you the opportunity to submit to an "Author Interview". All you have to do is copy-and-paste a long list of questions, answer them in an email and send it back. I'm guessing that as long as the answers aren't too stupid they publish the interview. Sounds pretty okay to me.

I just went through and read one of the interviews. Lame. I guess if you are able to achieve a voice through the interview, it would be worth submitting the interview. It will just take a little work to get the voice going. You know, and not sound like a complete moron, or a complete ass. Or half an ass. Then again, I am a writer, and I should be able to write something that's catchy. Right?

It's funny how this learning process comes to me. I click on the interview to read an example, a woman called Angela Henry. I don't believe that I'll ever read one of her books (unless I fall and hit my head or get stuck in a friend's bathroom for weeks and have gone through all the Cosmos and National Geographics and her book is the last thing I have to keep me from completely losing my mind) but I followed the link back to her home page, and sure enough, there she has listed a few more book sites to check out. Right now I'm looking at BooksXYZ.

I am now registered at BooksXYZ and Wallow is listed there, but it has Wallow listed in a status of "On Hold." That can't be good. I think it is because I don't have an ISBN for Wallow yet.

The next place that says it will ist my book for free is eBooksCafe. I'll believe it when I see and I won't see it until tomorrow, because right now I am way too tired to be doing this.

Check back with me tomorrow.
And then there's Kirkus Reviews: they only do pre-press reviews. Snobs.

Just so you know, I am now using Writer's Digest to find other places that will allow me to submit my book for review. Using this resource, I just found WordThunder and they let me list my book. You can see my listing here. I also took the liberty of reviewing my book in my wife's name. I am sure she won't mind...!

Oh, here's a funny story:
I was reading somewhere that if you want to find an agent, just go to your favorite books and look in the Acknowledgements section to see who your favorite author thanks. This is a good example of what I would call just straight-forward get-it-done kind of advice that I love. So I was reading Cherry by Mary Karr at the time so I figured, what the heck. Mary Karr's agent is named Amanda Urban. I ran a google on Amanda Urban and discovered that she is probably one of the biggest and best-known agents in New York City. Ha! Nothing like going right for the jugular. But along the way, I discovered one of the best sites (in terms of writing resources) I have ever been lucky enough to find. It is called Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing by Gerard Jones and it is funny. Like the kind of advice that I like, I also like people who are straight-forward and blunt - Mr. Jones is no phony. His emails are a joy to read, and the banter back and forth between a would-be author and potential agents and editors is priceless. Aside from being immensely entertaining, Mr. Jones's site is also very informative. From it, I learned that 1) you can and should say exactly what you want to say to people in the publishing business (I have the unfortunate tendency to get very formal, as if I was immediately being inducted into the Literary Hall of Fame or something) and 2) that it is possible to accept donations through PayPal. I use PayPal whenever I buy anything from eBay, but I did not know that I could accept donations this way. Well, that changed everything.

In fact, I wouldn't be here right now. See, the first thing you need to be able to do is sell you books. Up until just a few days ago, I had no way, other than people handing me money or checks, to accept money in exchange for my books. At one point I was able to sell books through Amazon, but that's a long time ago and a long story, and I can't sell books through Amazon right now. So. I discovered I could do it through PayPal. Now that I have a way to sell my books, I need to get some press, some advertizing, some links. That's why I started this blog right here. To keep track of all my efforts in this regard, and to leave something behind that might be helpful to writers and self-publishers in the future.




I just took a look at the BookReporter and no, it is not a place to have your third grader go so he can buy a book report instead of actually reading the book and writing a report. But it doesn't seem to me like a place where an independent book publisher can get his book reviewed either.

I also found Danny Yee's Reviews. This one looks a little more promising. I sent Danny a query email to see if he'll agree to review my book.
Allreaders. com

This place is pretty cool. I was able to review my own book, and hoopefully the editor of the site will approve my review and post it.

The neat thing about this site is that is helps to break down what it is that makes plots and characters. The whole time I was writing my book, I didn't think, for example, about who the main adversary was, or of the different kinds of sex that I might include. I simply wrote the story. It would be good to try and pick out what kind of book you want to write simply by defining it first. I guess some people already probably do that, don't they? Nonetheless, it seems to me that this is a great place for writers to find readers... I'll let you know how it goes.

Okay, here it is. Day One.

So, you want to know what book I am trying to sell? Find out about it here.

The first thing I want to do is to follow up on some leads for places that might want to review my book. They are Allreaders.com and the Book Report Network. Let me give those places a look and I'll get right back to you.