Joe Sault, book 2 - progress report

Working cover and title for Joe Sault, Book II

Joe Sault, book II is more than half completed!  It should end up being roughly the same length as the previous novel, Wakeless.

     I’m currently targeting summer but will be satisfied if I can publish by Christmas. I don’t really have a title yet but the working title (which I hate) is “An Autonomous Goodbye.” That will have to change. And, of course, a real cover is even further away.

     Below are some of the elements that I’ve woven into the story, so far…

• Style-wise, still, Michael Chricton meets Michael Connelly; straight-up sci-fi meets police procedural. Again, the mood is plodding but much more is happening around Detective Sault than before. Sault was off duty during most of Wakeless. This novel depicts a much more typical working life with multiple duties and a caseload.

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• Sault II carries on from the exact moment Wakeless ends.

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• After nearly shattering his life, the Cavallon case seems to be behind him. Sault is happy to still be married, to have earned his Detective shield and to be working far from scrutiny and controversy, under Dennis Hennessey at the Autonomous Droid Unit.

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• And yet, he can’t help but be intrigued by cases that are not his and continually battles his obsessive curiosity for fear of repeating the same mistakes that led him astray, the last time.

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• Such distractions do not go unnoticed by his new partner and is the source of some friction.

• At last, the effect of the injection that kicked off Wakeless becomes apparent.

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• Since freeing the Master AI Module (MAIM) Sault has been worriedly waiting for a sign that the world has changed. And, finally, he may be starting to see evidence.

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• Meanwhile, the Royal BC Museum is hosting a recently discovered DaVinci. Security is tight and highly sophisticated and the ADU is asked to maintain a presence.

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• A seemingly innocuous prank—swapping cosmetic swarms for cheap knockoffs—has the potential to turn deadly.

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• Ana, the Victoria Police Department’s master AI has her capabilities expanded and Sault is not comfortable with the extent of her new power.

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• When a gang war ties up most of the active detectives, Sault is handed his first official homicide case: The body of an indolent construction worker has turned up, stuffed in the trunk of an autonomous car, a hundred miles from home. The list of suspects is small, but given his unsavory past, it looks like the investigation will be short and unsatisfying.

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• A visit from the MAIM fills in a few blanks from the past, hints at the future, and prods the detective toward a new mystery.

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• At home, Amber and Matthew are growing up too fast for Sault’s liking. Sault’s professional connection to a local VR company has the potential to bring him and his sulky teenaged son (Matthew) closer.

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• Sault’s wife’s (Maya) career rebounds when she is offered a position with, Greg Hanover, the man who was once Cavallon’s closest associate, now appointed to dismantle the ill-gotten empire. Maya makes Sault swear that he will stay far away from any case that arises and involves Hanover.

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• A serial killer is in the mix.

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• Unknown to Detective Sault, Cavallon’s influence over his life is not quite over…

(Here is a link to Joe Sault, book I: Wakeless)

Reviewing the Reviewing

(1) I hate it  |  (2) I don't like it  |  (3) It's ok  |  (4) I like it  |  (5) I love it

I've always felt that 5-stars are not enough to accurately rate a book or movie. Especially a book. More-especially, my book.

The 5-star rating system has pretty much been universally adopted across the internet. But the system, itself, affects the ratings, which means that it affects the entire publishing industry.

Twenty percent jumps between each star is a broad brush with which to outline the merits of one book versus another. If the book is simply not disappointing, then the rating must be above 50%. This leaves only 2.5 stars to distinguish a well written romance novel from a modern classic. Raters have little choice but to grant a well-crafted light-read the same rating as a proven classic.

On Amazon, people tend to give products either a 1 or a 5: Bad or good. There is no natural distribution of values over all the five stars. This indicates that this rating system really only distinguishes good from bad. As well, there is a built-in bias toward the "good" end of the scale, in part because that 3-star in the middle covers such a wide and critical range. In fact, most users rarely apply the 2- or  4-star ratings.

What this means to a writer is that the system is skewed so that if your product is good, it should get good ratings and if it lacks, it might still get good ratings. So don't get too cocky if your book gets 5-stars; it does not necessarily mean that you've written a timeless classic. Even with a 5-star rating across the board, if your phone rings, it's probably not Steven Spielberg. But answer it anyway. It might be your Mom.

Of course, we all know that those first 5-star book reviews are often less of an indication of an author's skills and talents than of how many friends and family members they have. Sometimes, it indicates a marketing campaign which includes reviews that have been purchased. This might serve some writers well, but ultimately, it serves none of us. If readers can not hope to find appropriate books through the rating system, then they will either ignore it or turn back to traditional publishers for the assurance of a professional product.

If you look up my book, The Space Between Thought, you will see only unsolicited reviews. The first is from a friend who insisted on reviewing the book because he felt so strongly about it. The rest are from strangers. Amassing reviews this way will be a slow process, but I hope that they will be accurate guideposts for prospective readers. It's part of a trust-building dialogue between myself and the readers. In the long-term, this process is sabotaged by inaccurately positive reviews just as surely as it would be by inaccurately negative ones.

One way to help make the system more accurate, and something that is often overlooked, is the ability to rate the reviews. On Amazon, for instance, you can answer "yes" or "no" to "was this review helpful." On Goodreads, you can LIKE the reviews that you feel are more accurate.

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sources:

* Analytical and detailed article about the 5-star rating systems on various platforms. Amazon's ratings are discussed in detail, near the end of the article. http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2006/08/using_5star_rat.html

* A study of 1.2 million Amazon reviews: http://minimaxir.com/2014/06/reviewing-reviews

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William M Dean's Marketing Plan 1.0 Update

In case you haven't read it, this is a link to my original marketing plan

TWITTER:
* My choice to follow every single person who requests it led to a Twitter feed littered with pornography. Finding something of substance to retweet was considerably difficult... and distracting. The good news is that a couple of weeks later, things had settled down a bit. There's still a lot of porn in my feed, but a lot of other things as well. The latest trend is unremarkable young people promoting themselves and/or their relationships and/or their body parts: Substance is drowning in a sea of banality. Recently, I am noticing that gay guys may be trending.

* I am going to try to alter the types of people who end up asking me for follows, by intentionally searching for and following a specific type—probably science fiction fans. Then Twitter should start recommending more of these new types and eventually, they will drown out the others. (update to the update: this plan worked.)

* My next experiment will be to stop following some people and see if they return the favour. If not, then I can work my way to only being followed.

* I've connected my FB page to my Twitter feed which has increased my Twitter posts by quite a bit. It does cause some of my FB re-posts comments to seem a bit brief and stilted as I don't want to exceed the 140-character Twitter maximum.

* One trick I found: Following the advice from the APE guide, I want to post 4 times, at least twice a day but could not make this work with my schedule until I realized that I had another Twitter account for work and retweeting my original posts can be done in a few seconds, at work. I am now trying to build the work account's audience so that my retweets will hit more people. This is not exactly the same as what is suggested in the APE guide, but I just can't work that out without help from an online service. I'm not yet willing to spend the money, but I am considering it.

* I still accept almost any Twitter-request to follow, but I try to keep the outflow pure with higher quality stuff that truly interests me. Following all the requests is now becoming a significant time-suck; probably 30 minutes a day. Too much for such a small thing. I will soon have to turn this task over to a service of some kind.

* Suddenly, I have hit Twitter's arbitrary following limit. Didn't know there was one. Anyway, once you are following 2000 people, some sort of algorithm kicks in and bans you from following any more until you hit a magic ratio of followeds vs. followers. Exactly how this algorithm works is a carefully guarded secret and it sets limits differently on every account. It has been a problem for many: CLICK FOR DETAILS AND SOLUTIONS Guess I'm now forced to unfollow some people.
   There's a lot of debate over this "feature" of Twitter—especially from writers who might be reaching out to everyone and anyone—but it forces you to cull and hone your list which might be a good thing. As I mentioned above, culling was going to be my next experiment, anyway.

* I no longer will follow anyone who's language I can not understand. There are messages I do not want to spread.

It's probably significant that the largest, closest hashtag to scifi is "free." An indicator of a trendy marketing strategy.

(ABOVE) on a related note...
HASHTAGIFY.ME is my new favorite place to go to improve my hashtags. The interface is better than hashtags.org, it's faster and I can interpret the graphic display much quicker than hashtags.org's graphs.


FACEBOOK:
* The Facebook author's page is pretty much useless. You can't like other pages from it, you can't post using it's identity. I think I'm just going to direct people to my real life on FB. My friends will just have to suck it up and deal with being known as "William's Entourage." It's probably going to get messy.
 

GOODREADS:
* I rarely make it to Goodreads, but am increasing my presence there. Took me a while to understand that the only discussions that I can participate in are on books in my "have read" list. I must have already read a book to discuss it.

* A bit restricted, to me. My memory just doesn't work well enough to allow me to add to in-depth discussions on books I read 10 years ago.

* Another unexpected thing was that I had to rate every book on my reading list. I had read a couple of books by people I have met on Google+ and because I felt there were large flaws, I decided not to comment, review or rate them publicly. However, I still support those writers and would like to  discuss these books. Unfortunately,  in order to do that, Goodreads forces me to publicly rate the book. Now I feel that I should review them in full because the reasons I did not care for them were largely editorial and this may not be important to many potential readers.

* Seems very list-based without a good way to search and jump around. I can't see any way to like a comment or to reply specifically. Also can't see any easy way to mention someone's name in a comment. I'm sure that some of these features must be there.

* I have signed up for their author's program and linked my profile to my book. We'll see what that has to offer.

 * I read somewhere online that Amazon bought Goodreads and people think it will be absorbed. That might prove to be convenient.


LINKED IN:
* I always make it to LinkedIn though I do not like the platform and can't see what good it's doing me. As a result, LinkedIn informs me that I am an "All-Star!" top contributor! I contribute a comment to some thread or other about 2-3 times per week. I don't want to, but can't stop myself. It's because they email me directly with interesting new conversation topics. If Goodreads or Amazon did this, I'd get to them more often. This does graphically demonstrate the power of email.


GOOGLE+:
Still my home turf and favourite place to be. Love the people and the communities there. I need to spend a bit more time finding readers. I want to be genuine and at least appear to be intelligent in whichever forum I participate and strangely enough, most straight-up, hard-core sci-fi discussions bore me so I haven't spent enough time in the sci-fi communities. I don't obsess about much except my writing career. Somehow, I will have to work this out.


PINTEREST: 
I only use this as a repository for my original work and as a way to attach a url to specific images. I can use these url's to refer to an image on platforms that only allow links. I have somehow gained 8 followers. Two are known associates; how the rest stumbled upon me is a mystery.


AMAZON:
* Rarely visit, except to check out new books or see if I have another review. My print book seems to have settled in to the 1.3 millionth postion in the rankings; the Kindle version closer to 700,000th.

* I think that in February, I will check the discussion forum out, rather than visit Goodreads, which to me is limited to discussing the most recent book I've read.

* I did fix up my author's profile so that it's linked to my book. I also added myself in to the top-seller's list using completely fictitious sales information. That lasted for about 3 weeks before it was removed. Those were heady days, my friend—heady days, indeed.

EMAIL:
* Got my first 2 fan emails, thereby tripling the content of my exhaustive list of known readers. 

BOOK SALES:
* Because of the way my "publisher," iUniverse, gathers stats, I still do not have any sales numbers. However I am not really looking forward to this information as it will probably be the only number I am disappointed in.


Overall, I am satisfied with the progress, however, being back at work after Christmas holidays has really impacted my ability to keep up with social media while continuing to write. I've slacked a bit, on the writing, but must soon reduce my reading, commenting and re-posting because, if I'm not writing, then why am I doing any of this?

Another thing that has come to light is that I enjoy talking with other writers about writing and marketing more than I enjoy talking with readers about science fiction. This could be a major marketing stumbling block and it must be addressed.

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Post Script:
I stumbled upon this graphic about the best times of day to post on various platforms. Great info, but you've got to realize that it must be applied time-zone by time-zone. In other words, you will want to time your posts for peak-readership within time-zones that have the greatest number of readers. I don't have such flexibility, but am considering an online post-scheduling service.

to follow my progress,

CLICK HERE FOR THE NEXT MARKETING PLAN UPDATE

Amazon.com Secret Revealed!

I’m so lazy.

The following marketing scheme/scam occurred to me, earlier today: On any social media platform, I would make a post containing the following text and links...

Amazon.com Secret Revealed! 

Once you see this, you will be convinced that AMAZON, not Google, KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU!

 Click on the following link: Amazon Secret. 

This will take your browser to a book on Amazon.com called The Space Between Thought. This book does not exist. Simply make up a review, doesn’t have to be long. Give it 5 stars, complete the process and wait for an email from Amazon. 

If you are not completely amazed—and maybe a little frightened—by what you see, then something went wrong.
 

You can email williamdeanauthor@gmail.com for more complete information.

It's an easy way that I could get some reviews and some email addresses. And, possibly, attention from the media when this blows up in my face.
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Amazon vs Amazon vs Amazon

I am a Canadian author marketing my debut time travel novel (The Space Between Thought) in the U.S., as well as Canada and am discovering things about the Amazon retail platform that all writers should know.

I should mention that I am also older and a bit dull, at times. So it's possible that I am the only one on the planet who does not know this stuff.
 

1) E-BOOK LOCATION: If you purchase a Kindle e-book, it is available to you through Amazon.ca or Amazon.com, but not both. You must manage your content on the Amazon site serving your own country. I assume this has to do with things like licensing rights, tariffs and taxes.
   I am told that if you purchase something from Amazon.com and have it shipped to a US address, you can use this address to cheat the system by registering your Kindle to the American Amazon site. You might find this advantageious because U.S. book prices tend to be cheaper.

2) REVIEWS & RATINGS: If you review a book through Amazon.ca, that information is not transferred to Amazon.com or Amazon.uk or Amazon.jp etc.
   Amazon wants to display the most relevant reviews to readers within a region; namely, the opinions of other people within that region. Readers in the U.K. would probably find comments from locals more understandable than comments from Americans or Australians. A more starkly obvious example is that few on Amazon-Japan would be happy to read reviews written in English.
   Authors might want to try to get their readers to post reviews on whichever site will generate the most commerce.
   As a Canadian author, my priority is for reviews to be available to the wider market of readers in the USA.

There is a meme regarding crazy amazon items and reviews. (for instance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001250201)

3) BOOK RANKING: One day, while roaming Amazon, I was thrilled to discover that my book had suddenly rocketed from a ranking of about 800,000th to 12,000th! Then I noticed that I was logged into Amazon.ca, not Amazon.com. A book ranking is not based on its popularity across all Amazon sites.
    Also, your Kindle book ranking is kept separate from the paperback version's. As I write this line, I am about 850,000th in the paperback rankings but 300,000th among Kindles.
   Another unexpected thing is the degree to which a book can bounce in the Amazon rankings. Typically, my book sits at about the 800,000th mark, but a few times a week it bounces as low as 1.5 Millionth  or as high as 200,000th, on Amazon.com.
   I don't know how amazon works this number out, but the obvious guess is that whenever I sell a book, I bounce higher in the ranking. When someone else sells one, I go lower. Because of the platform I used to release the book (iUniverse) I do not yet have access to my sales figures and so can not verify the exact relationship between rank and sales. But, assuming that I am not selling truck loads, then if you think about it, the huge movement of this number implies that a lot of books never, ever sell.
  
4) PREVIEW: The preview feature may work for your book on Amazon.com, but might not work if people log in to a different Amazon. My guess is that a copy must be uploaded to each platform separately. So, remember to do that for each Amazon site, in each market you want to reach.

5) OUT OF STOCK: It can take a while before Amazon.com has your book's details completely entered and online. I don't really know how they stock stuff, but when my book debuted, the printed version came and went out of stock many times, in the first few days.
   And while it was nice to be able to say, "Amazon sold out of my book!" it was frustrating to the initial wave of friends and family who went to buy. Also a handful of supportive people I'd met online checked it out and it's depressing to think that they might have purchased, had the book been available. With so many other options to distract people, the odds are slim that they will make a point to return.
   I have been told that any time Amazon makes a change to your book's online profile, the status defaults to "Out Of Stock." So to avoid disappointing your first customers, be patient and don't announce for a couple of weeks.
   Actually, there are a lot of details that you might want to change after the book is fully displayed. After looking at the preview, you might want to delete extraneous material from the front of the book. Preview-readers do not care about the ISBN number and publisher info. They just want to get to the meat as quickly as possible.
    After my book came online, I noticed that an excerpt I had put on one of the front pages, while a good idea for readers browsing the printed version of my book in a store, was confusing in the preview format. It looked as if the novel had begun in the middle.

6) YOUR ACCOUNT: Once, a long, long time ago, I bought something from Amazon.com. At that time, I created an account with name and password—long forgotten. More recently, all of my activity has been on Amazon.ca where I created an account and used my name. This has caused some confusion as I begin to establish my author-identity.
   Amazon readily identifies you on all of their sites, however, if you've got 2 identities under the same name, you have to be mindful of which one it thinks you are, otherwise you might find that you have no access to your e-books and current account history or end up shipping your stuff to your old house where your ex will burn it and post the pictures on Facebook.
   As an author, you might find readers navigate to an outdated profile. I noticed that I am shown as an author on Amazon.com, but as just a mere mortal on Amazon.ca.

7) FREE AUTHOR SERVICES: You should be thorough in completing both your Amazon author profile and the book profile. Readers can get extra information and be led to your website from here. It's a free extra opportunity to promote reader engagement.
   You can find details on all of this in Amazon's Writer's Cafe discussion forum. Check out the "Tips, FAQs and Useful Threads for Authors" discussion highlighted, near the top of the forum.
 
8) PRODUCT SELECTION: Some products listed on one Amazon.com are not available on Amazon.ca. However, you can order many of these products from Amazon.com and have them shipped to Canada.
    This actually does make sense to me, as many products come directly from third party vendors which may not have the same restrictions on them as Amazon.
   What isn't so easy to understand is that some of the products that are available on both sites are much more expensive on Amazon.ca, but if you order them through Amazon.com they arrive at your doorstep for significantly less. Unfortunately, I can find no general rule to identify which will arrive cheaper. It might have to do with individual product providers.

9) PRODUCT PRICING: Amazon.com offers e-books cheaper than Amazon.ca—undoubtedly due to differences in licensing, taxes and tariffs—however, if you can manage to purchase even one item on Amazon.com and have it shipped to a US address, you can use this address to cheat the system by registering your Kindle to the American site, thereafter, taking advantage of the American pricing. A good reason to send a small gift to an American friend.

10) Why can I never come up with 10 points, like everyone else?

In the end, whether you are buying or selling, it is probably best to consider each Amazon website as a completely separate entity.

William's Social Media Marketing Plan 1.0

I've been at this social media marketing thing for about two months, now.  I've learned a lot and formed a sort-of marketing plan—or, at least, established some priorities.

I would like to share this with everyone, partially because I like to share, and partially because sharing is the heart of a good social media marketing strategy.

Also, I just like to talk.



Here are some things you might need to know about me:

• I do not take a good picture. I'm actually much more handsome, in person.
• I'm 56 years old, have a wife and 2 kids (7 and 9 years old) and I put them ahead of my writing—though sometimes, it's a tough call.
• I am not a multi-tasker by nature—don't actually believe in it, for humans.
• I am not someone who can just chug out reams of material. I could, but it would all suck. (It takes me 2 years to get a novel ready for professional editing. A typical blog-post will take 3-5 hours.)
• I have written 3 full-length novels—all highly praised in publisher rejection letters. I recently self-published my most current sci-fi novel, The Space Between Thought, through iUniverse (a division of Author Solutions).
   It takes a few weeks for a novel to become available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc. My novel began to go live on December 16th, 2014. As with all great science fiction, it started in Japan—on Kobo.  Marketing genius, or what!  By January 2015, it should be fully available, everywhere.
• I have a bit more time than most people as I only work 25-30 hours each week, at my day-job.
• At present, I spend about 4 hours each day, 7 days a week, at the computer trying to learn and contribute and connect. I don't watch a lot of tv.

  
The following regime may not be sustainable, however, I thought you might be interested in my priorities and intentions...

Using the material I already have to generate new material...
1) Comb through my manuscript for interesting quotes and one-liners. I can tweet some. I noticed that there are many Google Communities and websites dedicated to things like metaphors and similes, so I pull those kinds of quotes, as well. I will keep my eyes open for more venues into which to deposit my book quotes.
   I turn some of these into text-on-graphic jpeg's which I immediately post on a Pinterest board. Sometime after that, they get tweeted and posted as one-liners on Facebook and relevant Google+ Communities.

2) Extract one-liners and memorable quotes from my blog to use later in the same way as above.

3) Edit my unpublished short stories and make them available, either as a free/cheap kindle book or as gifts. I spend very little time on this, but at some point, I'm going to have to take a week or two off of social media to work on this book.


My blog posting rules:
• Make sure that it's entertaining and/or informative. No crap.
• Use hashtags. (check the popularity of a hashtag on hashtags.org before using.)
• Use entertaining pictures.
• Title the post in some catchy, but not irritatingly inaccurate, way.
• When distributing my blog posts, I try to include links to my blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc.


My personal rules when contributing to discussions etc: 
• No spam.
• Stay within a Google+ community's rules.
• Post only my blog-posts that are truly relevant to the Google+ community.
• Use the +name option to mention people whose posts or comments I comment on.
• If I see someone interesting, try to connect a bit. Engage in conversation, and/or follow them.
• Try to include "wmdean.com" when commenting in a discussion or on another person's post.
• +1 and Share, if I find something useful or interesting.
• If I stumble across something truly interesting and not already saturated, repost it on all my platforms, except my blog which I want to contain only original material.


Here are the forums in which I currently focus my efforts (in order of decreasing priority):

1st PRIORITY) Website: wmdean.com is a domain I own and redirect to my blogger account. This will be the main cache of my information. On this site I will have my regular blog, a bio page, A consumer section on my novel, a reviewer section on my novel with info like ISBN number, page count etc., a small gallery of pictures, contact info with links to every social media platform I am currently on.

2nd PRIORITY) Blogger: Express myself. Create original content about the things I know and the things I am interested in. Blog something significant at least once a week. This will include: Personal Anecdotes, Relationships, Marketing/Publishing Info, Japan, science, time travel, Apple devices, select movies, select books, observations about life. After publishing the blog, post it on Twitter, both Facebook pages, Google+ (publicly) and Pinterest.

3rd PRIORITY) Google+: My main connecting forum. Contribute to interesting discussions, curate interesting articles from communities I follow. Post relevant blogs into relevant communities; including non-writing-related communities. Keep learning about Google+ to make better connections.

4) Twitter: Follow anyone. Whenever I Tweet, I will Tweet 2-4 times, 8 hours apart. (The only exception to my anti-spamming policy, as encouraged by Kawasaki & Welch in their famous APE guide.) I should use the lists feature to segregate followers so that I can direct relevant info to each group, but t his is a long process and I'm already about 400 followers behind.
   At present, I am able to tweet something about twice a week. APE suggests several times a day! I do not think I can do this.
   I am still unsure how to really connect with people on Twitter... it seems so quantity-based. It's one of my least-favorite platforms, but everyone is using it and everyone keeps telling me it's useful. I am not sure I believe. In two weeks I was able to go from 14 followers to over 500. What can that mean? Well, for one, it could mean that you need about 500,000 to make a single significant random connection.
   One thing I do know is that you some people and organizations judge your value by the number of followers you have. Also, I am looking for readers and readers are everywhere so I see no harm in following anyone who will have me because most tend to follow me, in return. In the end, when I post something, if that post goes out to a million people, I am sure to generate some degree of interest.
   Jury's out on this one, but I actually like having followers and tweeting my blog posts and one-liners to see if I can get any retweets. Current record 9 retweets for my blog-post: The Untimely Death of William M Dean. Only 3 for my favorite one-liner... (see pic below)

5) Buy and Read Books by Other Authors and review the good ones on their Amazon page and Google+.
   I only do this for stories that I truly want to read. So far I have found and read 4 authors' debut novels. I liked 3 of them and posted good reviews on Amazon. I did not review the fourth. The writing was slick and the story interesting, but the novel was weighted down by poor editing. I know how difficult a thing it is to put your thoughts, talent, skill and hard work out there, open to criticism. I only want to help, so I only want to post positive things. Also, genre-addicts will accept a much lower standard, so it is entirely possible that his target audience is not concerned about technically deficient prose.  I did contact the author to offer my notes.
      NOTE TO AUTHORS: It might surprise you to learn that a review on Amazon.ca does not get published on Amazon.com. Also, just so you know, the preview feature is not made available on Amazon.ca, though it might be on Amazon.com. Look forward to a detailed post on this subject, in the near future.

6) Kboards.com: Contribute to discussions in Amazon's Writer's Cafe discussion area. Always a lot of very interesting discussions. Side note: as soon as my book is fully online at Amazon, I must create my Amazon Author's Page. This is a free service offered by Amazon and it helps provide extra info to others, whenever you post a comment on Kboards.

7) Amazon "Meet Our Authors" Forum: Once my Amazon Author's page is complete, I want to check this out. I'll start by checking out the links offered on kboards.com.

8) Goodreads: Contribute to conversations there.

9) Facebook: Keep up with family and friends and post things of general interest on my main personal page. On my writing page, accept connections from anyone who is interested, but reach out to authors and readers, especially locals and ones whose writing I really like. I do not consider this to be a high priority.

10) Pinterest: Post all the lengthier blogs to one board. Post one-liners and short quotes to another board. Bring traffic from other sites here to discover the collected treasure trove of my genius. I'm new to this platform and still not sure how to connect with others. I have 4 followers.

11) LinkedIn: Maintain minimal presence. Mostly by connecting with other professionals in the arts and publishing world and randomly contributing to group discussions. I like this platform even less than Twitter, however, LinkedIn emails me with some interesting publishing discussions to which I can't resist contributing.

12) Email List (Readers/Writers/Individuals in Media or Book-Related Services): Collect whenever possible. Build a list. In APE, this is suggested as the single most important thing but I think it is also the most difficult. Right now, I am pretty much ignoring it, other than having a subscribe button on my blog which will collect interested parties. So far, one. I love you, Mom!

I suspect that this is more true than I suspect.

Another difficult, but important thing is keeping track of what I post, when and where. Within Google+ I am monitoring and contributing to at least 6 communities on a regular basis. I have to keep a spreadsheet to keep track of where and when I publish each of my blogs or one-liners. I do not want to accidentally spam by repeating myself on any forum.

At this time, I think that I am keeping up with most of the above. However, it is stressful as I feel unfocused; that I am spread a little too thin.

This list is for you, but it will also help remind me of my priorities so that I can ignore the lower ones, whenever the workload gets too heavy.

Above all, I want to keep writing—in the blog, for now and start the next novel, within the next year.

To follow my progress,

CLICK HERE FOR MARKETING PLAN UPDATE 

The Space Between Thought now available on Amazon.com!

I guess if I never blog about my novel, then half the reason my wife lets me blog is lost and I might as well just start surfing porn.

The Space Between Thought

Now available on Amazon.com!

#new #timetravel #book #scifi