Tag: marketing

On FOMO and BookTok

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading5 Comments

I think we all knew this already, but it’s official: I can be manipulated. Rather easily, in fact.

I don’t know if you live a lifestyle that allows you to not have heard of the above book. If you do, I envy you, because it has been everywhere on my everything for two solid weeks. I first became aware of it several months ago, and actually had it preordered for a while, a preorder I cancelled when the word Dramione first entered my vocabulary.

So why do I own it now, snagging it from my local Barnes and Noble for a surprisingly reasonable $21 and change?

Because the reviews this damn book has been getting have been ludicrously good, and while I don’t really think it’s going to be all that good, and I’ve been burned by BookTok fads approximately fourteen thousand times before, if this book is half as good as people have been claiming it’s going to be something I need to read. And the reviews don’t seem quite as dominated by young women as one might expect; TikTok is the world’s epicenter for the “book girly,” a category that I think is supposed to exclude grizzled and ancient penis-havers such as myself, but I’ve seen guys talking about it too, if perhaps not quite as glowingly.

It’s a thousand fucking pages long. I have far too many thousand-page books on my TBR, and seriously, y’all are never going to stop laughing when you see the state of my shelf tomorrow. I will get to it when I get to it, God damn it, and if I don’t love it I’m never trusting another TikTok book of the moment again.(*)

That was a lie, sadly. I knew it was a lie when I was typing it, and it’s a lie now.

The fucking book doesn’t even have pretty edges. I’m trying to save for a down payment on a car, damn it, what the hell am I doing?

(*) What am I reading right now? Book five of Dungeon Crawler Fucking Carl. Which is so much better than it has any right to be that there should be some kind of law that it’s breaking.

Quick request for the WordPress gurus

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

Do any of you know how to change this image? Is it through my hosting site, maybe, because I can’t figure out how to change it on WordPress? It’s the default image on the card whenever I link a post that doesn’t have an image on it, and I have no idea what to do to change it.

In which I plan for the future

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot lately. I am, to be clear, perfectly happy with my stupid little Alien Green Kia Soul– it is a comfortable drive and the car is reliable and gets me where I want to go. I’ve had to replace the tires and the battery since buying it, as well as some brake work if I remember correctly, but nothing that doesn’t fall squarely under routine and expected maintenance, although I suppose I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of warning that the battery was about to shit out on me.

The plan has always been to hold on to this car until my son is old enough to drive and then to give it to him. He’s 12, so that’s still four years off, and I feel confident that the car still has a good 8 to 10 years left in it at least, assuming that everything doesn’t suddenly fall apart at once. So I am not in any meaningful way in the market for a new car right now, and that’s not going to change, absent some sort of disaster that requires me to get a new car.

Anyway, point is, at the moment all of this is purely theoretical. However, I find, the more that I think about it, that I really want my next car to be a Nice Car. And in looking around and trying to decide on what I mean by “Nice Car,” I’m discovering that most of what I find myself idly looking at ends up around the $45-55K range.

My current car cost me $16000 and is the most expensive vehicle I’ve ever owned. So this would represent a bit of an upgrade. I’m literally considering going from a Kia to a Lexus or a Mercedes.

Will I be able to afford it? Maybe. It’s gonna depend on how good I can be with my money once I murder all of my non-mortgage debt during this school year, which– again, knock on wood, absent any disasters– feels pretty thoroughly doable, especially now that I’m getting paid for this overload.

(My first post-overload check is tomorrow. Am I excited? Hell yes.)

So, he said, having taken six paragraphs to get to the fucking point, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot, and I’ve been paying closer attention to the cars I’ve been driving past while I’ve been on the road, and just kind of noticing what I notice, if that makes any sense and I hope it does.

And in the process I’ve been wondering about car logos. How many of these do you recognize?

Some of them have words in them, of course– you’re not going to screw up Ford or Volvo’s logos, and some of them have pretty clear letters in them, although the H in the Hyundai logo is pretty stylized, and the L in Lexus’ logo in the featured photo could probably be mistaken for an ordinary acute angle. But at least half of those don’t have any clear connection to the name of the company they represent.

The point: Why do car companies use logos like this, and — to my knowledge at least, and I’m willing to be proven wrong — no other category of corporation that I can think of? I mean:

With only a very few exceptions– Windows and Shell, and Shell’s icon is a shell— there’s damn near nothing on there that doesn’t have at least some text in it. Computer companies, maybe might be more likely to use abstract logos, but not as rigorously as car companies do. So what’s the deal here? Why are car companies, specifically, so likely to use such abstract logos? I mean, every company has a story behind their logo, and I admit I didn’t notice the T in the Toyota logo until reading about it today, but I can’t find any reason why cars and more or less only cars tend to use wizard sigils instead of readable logos like a sensible company.

I need a historian of marketing. Help me out here.

Six days until Click!

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Pre-orders are still available for my novel Click for another few days, until the official launch on July 26. You can use this link (see what I did there, avoiding using the name of the book?) to get in on the action early if you like. Remember, this is my wife’s favorite of my books, so you should absolutely be spending your money based on her preferences. 🙂

In other self-promotion news, lutherplaysgames.com is a thing now, and redirects to my YouTube channel, but if you’re going to click on one of the links in this post, do the first one. The YT is gonna be around for a minute, but the preorders are only available for another six days!

High-pressure sales tactics

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

I said it was happening, and yep, it’s happening: My novel Click is even as we speak being approved by Amazon’s fooferall machines and will be available for humans to buy in the very near future. Official release date is July 26, but it’ll be available for preorder soon, and as soon as the fooferall process concludes I will actually have a link you can click on to order it.

This isn’t even the official announcement post, really, because if it was there would be a link. This is like that card you get before a wedding announcement, that tells you there’s a wedding announcement coming and to hold a date, but somehow is not, itself, either the announcement or the invitation. This is just the announcement that there’s gonna be a book and that you should be prepared to buy it, if you like.

In other news, my YouTube channel is still out there and I’m still having fun with it, so you should go look at that and hit Subscribe as quickly as possible. Am I talking about it too much? Yes, absolutely– but if I don’t, no one will know about the great fun we’re having with Chicory: A Colorful Tale over there. And that one doesn’t even cost you any money! Go do it.

In other other news, the prophesied Second Child has entered the house, and I’m realizing as I’m typing this that I don’t currently hear any screaming, so either the children are both dead or they have gone somewhere without my knowledge, which seems like it could possibly be an alarming development. I don’t know where my wife is either, though, so maybe she’s with them.

(Thudding in the hallway)

Okay, I guess it’s fine now.

My sleep study has been canceled, because, I shit you not, my insurance company has deemed me “not sick enough” to require one, which … man, that’s a whole entire rant, right there, and I’m going to not bother writing the majority of it because the fact is I don’t think I have sleep apnea and not having to spend Thursday night in a hospital makes the rest of my week easier. Instead, at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future I have to do a home sleep study, and if you happen to know what the hell that might involve, let me know, because I haven’t gotten around to Googling it yet. Fact is I have got shit to do, and taking an entire night in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and pretending to sleep off my plate makes the chances that all the other stuff will actually get done a lot higher. Tomorrow’s tasks involve finding presents for my cousin’s two children, one of whom I’ve never met, and getting all of my video recording for the entire weekend done and out of the way. None of that can really start until the extra child is out of the house, and there may be a trip to the county fair in there sometime as well. I’m bringing my laptop to Michigan with me so I can keep up with bloggery, but if there’s anybody out there thinking hey, I would really love to write a piece to promote something for infinitefreetime on, like, no notice at all, let me know.

In which the hype, somehow, is real

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I am fully, 100% aware of just how behind the times I am, that it is April of 2021 and I am about to use precious space on Beyoncé’s internet to talk about the Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich. But yes, somehow I managed to wait a year and a half from the launch of the sandwich in August of 2019 to finally eat one. But there really isn’t a Popeye’s anywhere near me, and it’s not like we’ve been able to eat in restaurants lately. But I have dinner with my dad every week or two, and generally the way it works is that I bring something over, and he said yesterday that he was in the mood for chicken sandwiches and didn’t specify where from.

And there is a Popeye’s near Dad’s place. Now, it’s a shitty Popeye’s– but then, they all are, right? But if he wants chicken sandwiches anyway, and there’s one by him … well, what the hell, let’s gird our loins for disappointment and try the damn things out. Surely they’ve been out long enough that I can just go get a couple of them, and they’ve probably been scaled back from what they were when they were first out and people were literally murdering each other for the damn things.

Ha.

This particular Popeye’s is a freestanding restaurant that is basically in the middle of a parking lot. It’s not really built to have a lengthy drive-thru line, and when I got there not only did the line completely wrap around the building– let me remind you again that it is April of 2021 and this damn sandwich has been out for nearly two years— but they had someone in the parking lot fucking directing traffic, so that Popeye’s customers could get in line for the drive-thru while still at least theoretically allowing people access to the Subway (this Subway) fifty feet away.

I was in line for maybe fifteen minutes. Given the number of cars, not bad. I ordered three Original sandwiches– Dad had said he wanted two, so I figured I’d get two as well– and one Spicy.

Do not order two of these damn things, and do not try to eat both at a sitting unless you are a giant fat man like me.

Look at that fucking sandwich. That’s the spicy one. The chicken patty was an inch thick. The other one didn’t overhang the bun like this one did but holy hell, this much food for $4.50 or whatever they were charging me– it’s less than that, I think– is madness. The damned sandwiches were delicious; they weren’t overwhelmed with sauce (mayo for one and spicy sauce of some sort for the other,) the pickles were tasty and crunchy although there could have maybe been a couple more of them (I think they slid to the one side of the sandwich during transit?) and the patty itself in both cases was fucking great. This is 100% the best fast-food chicken sandwich I’ve ever had, bar none, and other than a particular sandwich served by one single restaurant in Chicago that obviously I can’t get any longer, it’s probably the best chicken sandwich I’ve ever had, period, and it’s not close. Even the spicy sandwich was, for me, balanced more or less perfectly. It’s probably not hot enough for people who genuinely like super-spicy foods, but for me it hit the sweet spot where I was definitely feeling it but it wasn’t overwhelming.

I finished the damn things nearly two hours ago and my mouth is still kind of watering. That good.

But seriously, don’t order two of them, especially if you want any kind of side. I’ll have more of these– they’re worth going out of my way for– but it’s an enormous amount of food. If, like me, you didn’t want to battle crowds to get one of these when they were all over the news and then just sort of let it fall off your radar, make a trip. It’s worth it.

On coffee and customer service

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

You know this already, if you’ve been around for a while: I moved to Chicago in 1998 after graduating from college, and lived there until getting engaged and moving back home to South Bend in 2007. I loved living in Chicago, and one of the things I miss most about it even after all these years is the food. Chicago’s one of the biggest cities in the country, and (especially once you got used to getting around) you could find anything there, and most of them delivered. Thai food at 3 AM? No problem.

South Bend is not like that. Most of South Bend’s restaurants, for better or worse, are regional or national chains. We’ve got some gems sprinkled here and there (Nedderman’s Steak Place, some good teppanyaki, and a really good hole-in-the-wall Venezuelan bistro) but in general if you’re looking for quality cuisine outside of what you would expect to find in a mid-size Midwestern city you’re going to be disappointed.

I found out yesterday that we’ve recently acquired an Ethiopian coffee business. How did I find out? They brought a bunch of free coffee to work, and the secretary emailed everybody that there was free Ethiopian coffee so come get some free Ethiopian coffee, and I wasn’t at work to go get it, so the email just sort of sat there and teased me. Interesting fact: they don’t appear to have a retail footprint, but they’ve got the website, and if you’re local they bring you your coffee. If you aren’t, they’ll still ship for you.

I ordered some coffee yesterday evening at around 6:15 PM. At 6:38 I got an apologetic text message that due to the blizzard taking place outside my coffee would not be delivered that evening. So their usual standards are pizza-delivery speeds, which I feel like isn’t completely necessary for coffee. I replied to make it clear that they could take as long as they needed to; I don’t need someone sliding off the road into a ditch so I can have novel caffeine the next morning.

At any rate, I did get my coffee today, and had a weird moment with the delivery guy when we both realized the other one looked kind of familiar, but it was dark and bloody cold outside and also COVID and neither of us were masked up (side note: “masked” can autocorrect to “naked” if you aren’t careful with your typing, which would have altered the meaning of that sentence somewhat) so we did not stand outside and chatter at each other long enough to figure out where we might have known each other from. Have I consumed coffee yet? No, which might make this post premature, but I figured the whole apologetic about not bringing me coffee during a blizzard thing probably warranted its own post. Plus, dear God, I know better than to have coffee at 8:15 at night, and that’s, like, Folger’s and shit. I assume this is probably going to be a little stronger.

I’ll report back tomorrow, of course.

Because capitalism

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

It is May the 4th, Star Wars Day, and I find myself not in the talkiest of moods. So I will do something I haven’t done on here in a while, which is to say that if you enjoy Star Wars you will very much enjoy my Star Wars-inspired series The Benevolence Archives, and that you should give me 99 of your American pennies and buy the first book. Then, once you’ve read that and you like it, you can get the other two! It’s also available in paperback at just $7.99, same link. Go forth, then, and I’ll be back tomorrow.

5:42 PM, Monday, May 4th, 2020: 1,177,784 confirmed cases and 68,387 deaths.