The one true prayer

If you know me, you know I’m not religious. But if you know me well, you know that I was raised with a lot of comparative religion, so I know my way around the different sects and arguments. Given that I don’t have a dog in this fight, I don’t really have a right to comment, but what the hell. This is my blog, and this is something that bothers me.

There is only one true prayer. If you believe in a single, infallible, omnipotent, omniscient God, then there is only one true prayer, and all else is vanity.

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My First BookBub Promotion

Recently, I signed up with a company called “BookBub” that is essentially a huge mailing list of books on sale. I promoted my book “The Hidden Institute” on there, dropping the price to $0.99. For sci-fi books selling for under a dollar, the cost was $120 to mail an ad to 90k subscribers who had expressed an interest in sci-fi. If I got even half of one percent of their subscribers to buy my book, the ad would pay for itself.

Goals

Before we start talking about numbers, let’s look at everything I hoped to accomplish with this ad.

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A kind of Stopwatch

Back in the 60’s, the Twilight Zone did an episode called “A kind of Stopwatch”. In that story (warning: spoilers) a man receives a stopwatch that can stop time for everyone except him. He tries to use it to rob a bank, and in doing so, breaks the watch. The story fades out with him trapped in a moment in time, alone for all eternity.

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I love living in the future.

So, a couple of days ago, I bought a new computer. Here’s how that worked. I read an article about an ultra-cheap, android system that plugs directly into your TV (called the MK-802). I went to Amazon and bought it for $35, with two-day shipping free (because I’m an Amazon Prime member). So, on Wednesday, I paid $35 for a computer, and on Friday, I got it in the mail.

It is slightly larger than a thumb drive, with cable connections all over it. I plugged it into the HDMI connection on my TV, then plugged it into the USB on my TV (for power), and boom. I had a working, hi-def Android system hanging off of my TV.

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The Amazon Tax

organize-taxes-money1Recently, someone asked where they could find new authors, and new e-books. I jumped at the opportunity, wrote down a description of two of my books, and put up links to the Gumroad pages for them.

Gumroad

Now let me back up a minute, because I know some people aren’t familiar with Gumroad. If you already are, feel free to skip ahead. You see, Gumroad doesn’t deal in books, e-books, publishing, or any of that. All they do is distribute digital files, and they do it really well. They handle payment systems better than Amazon (they can take purchases from anyone in the world, and they don’t have different sites for different countries), they fulfill the digital orders well, and they even provide a good storefront for the producer.

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A nibble of “Invito Rex”

I love editing this thing. It’s like, when I first wrote “Invito Rex”, I was worried about the story. Who the characters were, what they were doing. I got about ninety thousand words written, and it’s almost all story.

Now that I’m doing the editing pass, I’m taking it slow. I know that I had a picture in my head of how the world looked in each scene, but I never bothered to write it down. Now that I’m going back through it, I’m describing people and places in a way that makes it jump to life. I’ve never enjoyed editing so much.

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Google doesn’t like me anymore

Google AdSense is a system that allows regular bloggers to host ads on their sites, or advertise their own products on other sites. Given that it’s a Google product, it’s one of the largest systems out there. And yesterday, I got kicked off of it.

To give you a little background, I very rarely blog anything. I have a fairly popular YouTube show that I partnered with AdSense, giving them the right to put ads on the show, but I never really checked it. It was a passive income stream that, to be honest, made me no income at all. I got a card in the mail from Google, offering me $100 in ad promotion revenue, and using that, I determined that ads didn’t help me sell my stuff at all. I’d basically forgotten that it existed.

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Charlotte Bronte’ improved my writing tonight.

So, Allison convinced me to read a bit of Jane Eyre each night, before I sit down to edit “Invito Rex”. It’s made a huge difference in my writing. Check this out:

 

“As the boy becomes the man, so he must bear new burdens of sufferance and sacrifice. A monarch’s duties are, I find, no more heavy than those of a common man; they are, however, more devastating in the breadth of their effect. It is, therefore, with a heavy heart that I must commit these words, that they be recorded truly, and I pray, never acted upon.

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Are you on Smashwords?

Something strange happened to me yesterday. I was reading through Google+ when I saw someone ask, “Are there any Indie e-book authors I can throw money at?”

Now, an offer like that is music to my self-promoting ears. So, I responded in the comments, adding links to my books on Amazon, with short synopsis of each. She responded with, “Those sound great, but I don’t think Amazon Germany will take PayPal. Are you on Smashwords?”

So, let’s stop here for a minute. Of course, I sent her a link to my books on Smashwords, but that’s not the point. The point is that a reader asked, specifically, for a distribution format… and it wasn’t Amazon.

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Invito Rex is finished!

Okay, not a hundred percent. I still have to fill in a few chapter headings, and I want to let it sit for a bit, and I need to edit it a couple of times, and then send it to a real editor, etc, etc. Still, I’m hoping I’ll be able to get it out there by January or February of next year.

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