Blogwanking with numbers, just because

On June 24, 2014June 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing23 Comments

So, this post is gonna be full of graphs. I feel like people have expressed some interest when I’ve done stuff like this in the past, so a blogwanking/mathy type of post every few months might start to be a more regular thing around here.

Disclaimer: I’m not bragging and I’m not whining. Some of you will not be doing this well and some of you will be doing WAY better. I don’t know that I have useful advice, but I’m good at taking it. 🙂

First, let’s look at daily hits over the last few weeks:

The interesting thing about my traffic is that without actually feeding everything into a spreadsheet (I’m not that far gone yet, but I keep almost doing it) is that I can’t really figure out when my good days are. Good times to post seem to be roughly every three hours– around 9, around noon, around 3, and around 7-9, which sort of breaks the pattern– but I don’t seem to have a single day or couple of days where traffic is better than others. Let’s look at weekly traffic:

Note two things: one, the huge jump in December, that stuck around for a few months and then went away, the enormous (and inexplicable) spike in April (I wasn’t Freshly Pressed or anything like that; I still have no idea where those views came from or why) and the steady build in traffic since the crash after that. I’m right about at the point where I was where traffic spiked in December again; it’ll be interesting to see if it happens again.

Here’s monthly, showing the same phenomenon, basically:

This month will edge May by a few hundred hits, I think, meaning I’ve had increasing traffic three months in a row, which is good. Still not up to December’s numbers but I feel like they’re coming.

Now the (mildly) depressing part– but, again, I’m not whining, I swear. Let’s look at book sales. The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 went on sale on May 10 and has had two free days. One I went to some trouble to promote, the other I deliberately did virtually nothing for. Sales are the red line and free copies are the green:

It has not escaped my notice that you can barely see the red line for most of the graph. Incidentally, I think the book’s going free again around my birthday in about a week and a half. Unless I decide that putting the book free on 4th of July weekend is as bad of an idea as making it free on Memorial Day weekend was.

Let’s take a closer look at sales:

Shit ain’t making me rich, obviously. I’ve never had a day of double-digit sales, and haven’t had a day with multiple sales since the week the book was released. Two days in a row with sales since then have been rare, too, and that dry spell for the first half of June was discouraging. Now, again, the goal for this book has not been to make me rich, and as soon as Skylights is out, it’s probably going to go permanently free. I’m also probably not going to go with the Kindle Select program again, because… well, you see the results of letting Amazon have the book exclusively. If they’re promoting it, I don’t see the results.

Not that I’m promoting it as much as I could be. I know you guys see a lot of it around here, and there’s Facebook and Twitter, but I’d be willing to bet good money that nearly every single copy has either gone to someone who already reads the blog or knows me personally or both. Maybe 95%. Thing is, that means that free or otherwise I’ve moved over 100 copies of my book to my readers on a blog that gets 200 hits a day; I can’t feel bad about that.

I still need to find some promotion methods that reach beyond my immediate audience, though. I’m working on some possibilities and am way open to hearing about more. And since I’ve got the grant I’ve got some room for paid advertising, too, if I can find anything that I think will convincingly work.

Meanwhile, I gotta keep working on the next book, and the book after that.

Oh, Twitter, right. See if you can pick out exactly when I started working on increasing my Twitter followers:

It’ll be interesting to see how long I’m able to keep up spending time on babysitting my Twitter presence and whether it’s going to prove useful in the long-term. My theory that no one ever clicks on links on Twitter appears to still be true; even with a couple hundred new people who haven’t seen previous promotional opportunities for Benevolence Archives, blog links and book links regularly go without being clicked on at all. Right now Twitter is still slotted in my brain under “fun” and not necessarily “useful,” but we’ll see what I can do to change that.

The Facebook page has 67 Likes, I think. There’s no graph for that.

How to be an idiot on the internet

On June 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy17 Comments

In convenient, step-by-step form.

Read an article on the Internet about something that you don’t care about. Like, for example, the fact that Lifetime has cast someone to play Aaliyah in their upcoming biopic about Aaliyah, and that that choice is controversial because the actress in question isn’t “black enough” or something like that. Note that it is critical that you don’t care enough about Aaliyah to know what she looks like.
Look at the picture of the actress they chose at the top of the page and determine that she manages to look like a black woman as far as you can tell.
Google “Aaliyah,” because you don’t know what Aaliyah looks like. Blink a couple of times at sheer disbelief at the nonsense people can get mad about. Spend several minutes comparing pictures and thinking Jesus, this chick looks just like Aaliyah, what the hell are these people complaining about?
After several– several— minutes, decide that maybe the picture of the actress is just the most Aaliyah-ish picture of her they found– maybe already in hair and makeup for the movie?– and Google the actress’ actual name, Zendaya Coleman.
Oooooohhhhhhhh.

Sooner or later, I need to stop procrastinating and actually do some goddamn work.

Ugh.

On June 23, 2014June 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

The following happened:

I woke up with about a third of a cold. Juuuuuust enough to be massively annoying and make me want to spend the day in bed.
The boy somehow managed to cut my soul when I dropped him off at day care today. No tears, but…god, the betrayface was somehow twenty times worse than usual.
Two different job interviews, both half an hour away, but far enough separated in time that just hanging out in goddamned Elkhart for five hours wasn’t reasonable, that both went very well, for at least one job that I think I’d really like, neither of which will pay me sufficient wages to keep my house.
Three positive reviews (one four-star, two five-star) for The Benevolence Archives have been removed from Amazon, for no reason that I understand. I found an email address to write and complain to; I suspect it will get me nowhere. (HA! They’ve already sent me a form letter back, without actually reading my message. It took ten minutes. I love it when customer service is a robot!)
I have gotten no writing done whatsoever in the last two days that isn’t on this site. This isn’t the big problem that the others were (I wasn’t expecting to, what with bathroom reno yesterday and the job interviews occupying my brainspace today) but I feel weird stopping at four things.

I am going to bed in the very near future and saying to hell with today.

Well, that was depressing

On June 23, 2014June 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

Just got back from an interview that, I think, went really well both for me and for the other folks– and which was, for once, a couple of people having a conversation across a table, which is how I think job interviews ought to go– and which ended by me basically having to admit that there was no chance in hell I was going to be able to work for them because of their legally-mandated-by-the-state-of-Indiana salary structure. I have twelve years of experience and two Master’s degrees; no, I will not be teaching for you for $35,000.

It is literally illegal to pay me according to my experience and training. I have another interview scheduled for this afternoon; I have already read through their master contract and it is going to go the same way. I am sorely tempted to save myself the gas money and just cancel the interview. They can’t afford me, because the state doesn’t want them to.

Governor Pence’s master plan to entirely deprofessionalize teaching in Indiana is having its intended effect. I hope the state enjoys the results they will get.

Refusing to Educate Other People’s Children: Woes Continue in Philadelphia

On June 23, 2014June 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Whaddya know, I guess it could be worse.

janresseger

What does it mean when, in June, the leaders of a school district that serves over 131,000 students are working with city and state governments to locate enough money to open school in August? In the United States—where provision of K-12 education has for nearly two centuries been provided publicly, where it has been believed essential for the formation of an informed democracy, where all have taken for granted the provision of schooling that is free and universally available—what does Pennsylvania’s seeming incapacity to provide adequately staffed schools for Philadelphia’s children mean?

On June 18, the Associated Press reported that school superintendent William Hite remained alarmed about a gaping hole in next year’s school budget. Still needed was “at least an additional $96 million to offer students even a ‘wholly inadequate’ education next year.”

Pennsylvania lacks a working formula to distribute funds to local school districts. At the same time the…

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In which let’s talk about soccer again

On June 22, 2014June 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

So I’ve figured out exactly why soccer isn’t going to ever really catch on in the States. It’s not the low scoring, although that’s part of it. It’s the inaccuracy. I just watched Cristiano Ronaldo, a soccer player so amazingly well-known and famous that I have heard of him, take a free kick on goal that missed the goal completely. It is at least the fourth shot on goal in this game that was not touched by any defensive player and literally did not even come close to actually touching the goal. I’m not talking about shots that were deflected by defensive players or the goalie. I’m talking about a guy with an open shot ten or fifteen yards from the goal who proceeds to miss the goal completely, and about the fact that this phenomenon happens all the time in supposedly “professional” soccer.

And it’s not limited to shots on goal either. Passes, corner kicks– why the hell is a corner kick even a thing?– regularly appear to go absolutely nowhere near where they are supposed to go. It lends the entire sport this weird atmosphere of amateurism and randomness that I don’t think us ‘Merkins really like to see in our pro sports.

I can hear the soccer fans. “Well, it’s difficult to <x>!” Well, I’m sure it is. That’s the problem. There appears to be no difference between athletic brilliance and pure geometric accident. Our goalie just pulled off what, on first glance, looked like an awesome save– but was it, really? There were two shots in rapid succession. One caromed off the goalpost– because, again, the offensive player missed— and bounced right back toward a bunch of other Portuguese players. One of them kicked it again, and our goalie, who let a goal in earlier by just falling down instead of doing some sort of, y’know, cool goalie thing, and who was already flailing around and stumbling because of the previous shot, just threw his hands up and just managed to deflect the ball over the top of the goal.

Was that an awesome save? Incredible athletic skill from one of the premiere soccer players on Earth? Or just dumb luck? Dunno; near as I can tell they look exactly the same.

(It’s halftime. Some doof sportscaster dude just said if you “take out the goals,” it would have looked like the US lost the last game and was winning this one. Can you imagine someone saying that about basketball or football? It means that scoring is basically random in soccer. That’s bad!)

I have a suggestion.

Eliminate the position of goalie entirely.

Think about it. Most of the missed shots in this game have been just that– missed shots. Each goalie has maybe a couple of saves, and I’m willing to bet that at least a couple of those misses wouldn’t have hit the goal anyway. It’s apparently really goddamn difficult to hit the goal. Why have somebody in the game whose job it is to make scoring even more rare? Get rid of ’em. Add another midfielder instead or something. It’ll make the game more exciting and at least make it look more skillful.

Get on that, FIFA.