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.