(no subject)

Man, I should have been looking at Kindle stuff earlier. I've had people ask me if I was going to put Tales of MU on Kindle and I didn't really understand what they meant (I mean, I knew it had a web browser and I figured that was good, right?) so I said I'd look into it. Well, now I've looked into it and it's like, wow. This is so easy. I don't really understand why people would pay money to subscribe to RSS feeds of stuff they can read for free, but I'm not turning up my nose at it. I guess I of all people shouldn't underestimate the willingness of people to pay for free content, right?

I'm not even thinking of Tales of MU in particular here... I can use this to monetize Fantasy in Miniature, which is one of the major problems I've had with keeping it going.

Mmmm, the thing about putting Tales of MU on Kindle is to make it really work I'm going to have the RSS stream have the full copy. But you know what? I can do that. I'm big enough, and my ad revenue is a small enough part of my income now that lose some views if people are reading it on their feed-readers. At this point I feel like I should be focusing on getting more eyes on my content... and the cross-promotion I do for my other projects and my fundraising attempts... than on trying to maximize the number of ad views. It wasn't too long ago I was considering axing the ads entirely, after all. It's only the fact that other creators asked me not to that kept them there, and you know, it's really kind of gratifying to see how many other serialists have been able to use the remaining ad spaces for under a dollar a day. I don't want to cut them out from that, but zealously trying to squeeze every pageview out of the ads is just not going to help.

(And of course, I could get ads on the RSS if my survival comes down to that, somehow. But I doubt it will.)

I don't expect this to be a huge revenue stream by any stretch of the imagination, but it's money that will come in just from me doing what I'm doing.

Update: Tales of MU is now available on Kindle. If I get 10 subscribers there today, I'll do an update on Wednesday.

Monday: I CAN TASTE ELECTRONS CRACKLING IN THEIR ORBITS

Personal Introspection

I don't know where all this energy is coming from (I know where some of it's coming from, and I'll get to that), but I got a ton of stuff accomplished this past weekend and all of it without any actual sleep. I kept coming upstairs to lay down and then thinking of one more thing I should check out or look into or get a good start on or do some more work on. Gift of the Bad Guy is going to be noticeably better at launch than it would have been. I've begun converting The 3 Seas. I made some headway on stuff I'm not going to be ready to share for a while.

A big part of it, I think, goes back to what I said a while back around when I announced the push for Volume 2. I need applause. I need approval. I need the roar of the crowd. I am a performer as well as an author. And even though I was sick as a particularly sick dog who isn't very good at constructing similes, last week was a hell of a show and the applause was thunderous. I'm mentally adding this to the lesson of "rattling the cup < putting on a show". The dividends are more than just money.

And it's more than just the derby. I also found out I'm nominated for an award, and I learned that a MU reader whose frequent comments I'd been reading as uniformly negative and buzz-killing really wasn't doing nothing but tearing the story down... yeah, yeah, I shouldn't let one person affect me even if he is being completely negative. But it's easier to make the decision not to be affected from a position of strength and awesomeness than one of malaise and doubt.

Now that I'm aware of this I'm going to be taking advantage of it to help keep me going when this burst of enthusiasm and momentum has died down. "Crowdfunding" isn't a word that's a natural part of my vocabulary yet, despite the fact that it's what I do and that I believe in the concept beyond what I do. But it's a word that's on my mind right now because of the Rose and Bay nomination, and it's got me thinking about crowds. Drawing crowds. Working a crowd. I'm convinced that there are great big reveleationy epiphanies lurking just under the surface of those words. I feel like I'm on the verge of uncovering fabulous Castle Greyskull-style transformative secrets, or unlocking the power of SHAZAM!.

News For Today

One of the things I did this weekend was audition platforms for my e-book store. I aim to get my e-books into the major marketplaces, but the simple fact is that if a couple of more things go my way then I can get the highest "royalty" by selling them directly, so that's what I'm going to do. The big marketplaces have some big winners, but a big market is a crowded market and if I can direct people who've never heard of me to go seek out my books and find them in a crowded market there's no reason I can't have them beating a path to my door, right?

I greatly feared I'd end up having to go back to Joomla or a similarly clunky, un-intuitive, non-user-who-isn't-also-a-web-developer-friendly Content Management System. I tried a bunch. Many were slightly better than Joomla, but with most of them it seemed like if I were going to have a site run off one of them, then learning and maintaining the CMS would become a non-trivial occupier of my brainspace.

Then I discovered GetSimple, which is perfect. Which is simple and straightforward. My knowledge of HTML and XML and basic not-being-afraid-to-poke-around allow me to customize and extend it, but it's so tiny and self contained. I've got the beginnings of my bookstore set up. I also started creating a new personal website, something I badly need.

My current personal website is nothing more than the decaying bones of the blog I had before I embraced Livejournal. It looks dated and it doesn't do much for me. There's a page on it that I've used as a central repository of Ways To Give Me Money. For now I'm keeping it up mainly to preserve that page as I've linked to it from so many different places. When my new page is farther along, I'll have requests for the support/funding page redirect to the appropriate spot on the new page and it'll supersede the old one entirely. You can see how the new page is coming along at http://about.alexandraerin.com.

As the URL suggests, I intend for this to be an informational site. Current readers (and friends and well-wishers) will be able to visit it to get a concise snapshot of my life without having to wade through a blog that alternates between manic rambling rambles of doom and sporadic "I still aten't dead" posts. But as my profile increases, I'll need a place people can go to find out who I am, what I do, what I'm about, and how to get in touch with me. My less-than-stellar ability to keep on top of social things means that every once in a while I find an invite in my email to attend something or contribute to an anthology that I discovered months too late. I've been improving my email handling, and making a contact page that's easy to find and has clear instructions about how to get a hold of me will help, I believe.

I'm thinking the GetSimple page will remain at aboutdotcetera even after I phase out the old blog site. I'll just have alexandraerin.com redirect to it. Because I like the about.format. It says something. It tells you what the page is about. And it sets a nice precedent for expansion later, if the need arises.

Personal Assessment

I got four-ish hours of something like sleep today. I might have had two or three of those on Saturday, I'm not sure. I planned to lie here until eight and then six, and then five came and I couldn't lie still any longer. Ah, well. Next week I'm going to be in Florida for a "working vacation" with my parents; I suspect being away from my desktop and having nice things to go out and do will help me slow down, because while this energy and getting-things-done-ness is nice, I really couldn't keep it up forever.

The only reason I crashed for four hours today is that we had to move my housemate's rather large plasma TV twice today, a task that neither one of us is really equipped for. I am honestly astounded to have rebounded so quickly. My knees are a little sore from that, but my muscles aren't complaining.

Random Link For Today

I have a wonderful link but it's going to get its own post later on so it doesn't get swallowed by ramble.

Plans For Today

Finish and post the next chapter of Tales of MU. Shouldn't take long in terms of actual writing, especially since I'm awake hours before I expected to be. The problem is in my current state that I have a hard time focusing on one thing for very long, so even though I'm awake before eight or nine I expect it will still be up rather late in the evening.

So, I mentioned in my previous post that I have one honey of a random link to share...

...but in fact it's a few links that are related in my head.

Last May, I visited an art gallery in the awesome little community of Dunedin, Florida. There are many things that could be said about Florida, but among them is that there's a lot of passion for art there. It may not be uniformly represented across the state, but there are enclaves and communities and so on. One of the exhibitions there had to do with found objects, I believe, and one of the artists was Aganetha Dyck. I may have linked to her work before, back when I first saw it. One of her techniques involves using objects and beehives to create effects like you can see here:


(Click for source.).

Back when I first became acquainted with her work, it made me think of Cat Valente's Palimpsest (this is not a hard thing to do, internets). What's an interesting confluence is that when I left Florida, it was to go to Madison, for WisCon 34, which is where I first heard tithenai read aloud one of the entries in her book The Honey Month, which... if my brain isn't drawing the wrong connections in the wrong places... may have been inspired or gained impetus from Palimpsest.

If anybody ever asked the question, "Is blogging art? Can a blog book be an artistic work?", The Honey Month is the answer to that question, and that answer is: "Yes. Of course. What are you, ignorant or something?" I didn't think of it as a blog book at the time, or even until I started typing this post.

For one month, Amal sampled a honey each day and wrote her impressions of it, and a short piece inspired by them. And she blogged about it on her LJ, and those blog entries became a book, a rich and gorgeous and sticky-sweet book. This year she's re-blogging it, doing re-runs with extra DVD commentary.

So check out some more of Aganetha's work, and browse Amal's sweet and golden reminisces... and if they intrigue you, consider the book.

(It's worth poking around the publisher's website, too. Papaveria Press has some awesome people putting out material.)

...

Oh, and there's only a week to go, so lest I forget again:


Get your own valentinr

Yes, I have a Valentinr. I've always worried that these things would just be trollbait, but I'm learning to be open to good things looking for a way in.