#atozchallenge: Final reflection and blogwanking

On May 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

a-to-zreflection2015-lg I am, for no clear reason, tired as hell, and have been all week, so the tl;dr here is “That was fun, I look forward to doing it again, and I need to do a better job of driving traffic to it.”

The longer version? I got the entire challenge written in March, and April was an insanely busy month, and so while I got the thing completed I wasn’t really able to put any energy into visiting other people’s blogs and leaving comments and actually interacting, which is what the Challenge is actually supposed to be about. It showed in site traffic; while April of 2015 was up over April of 2014 by about 2000 pageviews, it had less traffic than March of 2015. And the posts really weren’t getting much attention. Check this out:

You’ve got to go way down the list to get to the most popular A to Z post. Anything with an orange bar next to it was written in April. (That goddamn Snowpiercer review will never die. Why are people still Googling this fucking movie?)

But anyway. I know exactly why this happened; it’s because basically all I did as part of the Challenge was write the posts and participate in one Twitter party that just happened to be going on while I was online. I didn’t really participate in any of the other social aspects of the thing, and that’s sorta supposed to be the point. So maybe I try and get my spring 2016 book out in March so that I have more time for this. The writing was fun; I just gotta nail the other stuff down.

(I have seriously been a dead man walking once I’ve gotten home from work all week, dying on the couch or going to bed excessively early. I still want to review Avengers; I have no idea when I’m going to get around to it, though. The signing is Saturday; I’m glad I’m already bald or I’d have pulled all my hair out from general anxiety by now.)

Sunday #saleswanking: February

On March 1, 2015March 1, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing7 Comments

Man, but this was an uneven month. This will be entirely unreadable if you don’t click on it:

On the plus side: 73 downloads, which is about 20 more than last month, and with fewer days in February besides. Also on the plus side: Feb. 7th was the first day I have ever gotten a double-digit number of people to pay me for stuff I wrote, which was a nice little barrier to break through. Another milestone: a streak of seventeen days, going back into January, with no 0 sale days. That’s great.

“Sales” at Smashwords also went pretty well– that three-day streak of five downloads a day was especially gratifying. I also found out I had some movement at OpenBooks, and even made some money off of it. Note that they’re currently in closed beta; I don’t know if you can get in without registering yet. I’ll tell y’all more about them once the beta actually ends.

Not-so-good stuff: even without clicking you can probably see all the red on the back half of the month. The back part of January and the first part of February were fantastic; the back half of February, not so much, and I’m currently on a three-day slide with nothing happening. So blech. Also, no sales of the print edition of Skylights, which is disappointing but really not surprising. I suspect for me print sales are going to be mostly a vanity project for a while, although I’m starting to ramp up for my first signing event and those sales will appear on here when they happen.

On to March! Hopefully the overall upward trajectory will continue.

In which I need a nerd

On January 18, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek5 Comments

Hire engineers I need y’all to understand something: when most people say they need a nerd, they’re looking for me. And I am vastly unqualified to perform this task on my own, so when I say I need a nerd, I need a nerd. Like, nerdery is how you make your living.

Gotta be a couple of y’all out there somewhere, right?

Here’s what I want, and I can already think of three ways it’s complicated without knowing anything, so basically what I’m expecting is that the first person with any experience in app development who reads this will leave a comment telling me why it’s impossible. I am fairly obsessive about monitoring my sales numbers, right? I’m sure I’m not the only one. But as of right now that means monitoring three different websites several times a day.

(“Be less obsessive” is not the answer I’m looking for. I want a nerd, not a psychologist.)

I want a mobile app that monitors those websites for me, sends me a notification whenever I get a sale somewhere, and aggregates everything together in a bunch of lovely graphs and charts and other things. If it can monitor royalties and ping me when I get a review, too, that would be superb. Also an awesome bonus: exporting to Excel.

You can have all the credit for this awesome idea, which will surely make you a multimillionaire. Go go go!

In which the future is subtle

On November 30, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

original (I pulled the sale post off of the front page because I’m tired of looking at it; the sale is still good at least through the end of the day and I might extend it through Monday if I make some sales today. Yesterday went well; expect a roundup early next week for those of you who enjoy data posts. Buy my booooooooks!)

I Tweeted about this yesterday, but Twitter is by nature kind of ephemeral and those posts are already off the front page, and also I’m inexplicably wide awake at 7:20 AM on my last day of Thanksgiving break, so I might as well write about something— I had two outbursts of The Future yesterday that struck me as interesting enough to write about.

Outbreak the First: I am about to take a shower, but have a couple of random computer tasks that need doing on a desktop first. I leave my phone on a bookshelf in the living room and go into my office to use the computer. My mother calls.

My watch lets me know my phone is ringing. My phone’s on silent. I don’t hear it and neither does anyone else. The phone’s a good fifty feet away and behind a couple of walls.

I proceed to answer the phone with my computer and have a conversation with my mother about having lunch today. She appears to have no idea that anything is odd about the conversation.

I got my first cell phone fifteen years ago; prior to that, I’d always been tethered to land lines. Now I don’t even need the phone with me. That’s awesome.

Outbreak the Second: We made the kieflies (I really need to find out how to spell that) at my in-laws’ place yesterday. Or at least we put them together there; the recipe requires about 24 hours for the dough to chill before you can fill and fold them. My mother-in-law and I were mostly doing the filling while my father-in-law and my wife alternately put things in the oven and monitored the boy.

At one point we had to explain to him that Grandma and Grandpa’s TV didn’t work like Mommy and Daddy’s does, because they don’t get to decide when to watch things. See, we’re cord-cutters and we watch everything through Netflix, Hulu or iTunes on our Apple TV. My parents have a DVR and have filled it with an assortment of kids’ programming that he likes.

Her parents, on the other hand, have the same kind of TV that everyone did prior to, oh, seven or eight years ago: you get the TV that is being piped into your house at the time it’s being piped in and that’s all the TV you get. And the boy just did not get it. He wanted his Mickey Mouse show or the Winnie the Pooh movie he’s been into lately and just absolutely did not comprehend why the TV in front of him couldn’t produce it on demand.

Which, when you think about it, is awesome. I like TV a lot more now that I don’t have to wrap my life around its schedule, y’know? And he’s young enough that he has no idea that that ever happened.

The Future!

Your Friday blogwank

On October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

So apparently one of the ways to get long-term attention paid to a post is to write an incredibly negative review of a critically-acclaimed, yet irredeemably terrible movie. There’s been a weird resurgence of interest in the SNOWPIERCER review over the last couple of weeks that I find vaguely fascinating, especially since my referrer logs don’t seem to think it’s all coming from one place, and if it keeps up the post will have more views in October than it did the month it actually came out. Have a look:

Quick question for the WordPress folks

On October 12, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking8 Comments

Any of you out there using wordpress.org as opposed to wordpress.com? How have you found it in terms of ease of use, being worth the money, all that stuff? I want to use Google Analytics on my site and it’s leading me down a rabbit hole at the moment…