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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.