This original Trouserpress, alas, has pressed its last wrinkle. The PHP has gone delinquent on me, and rather than mend its ways, I have re-started the blog at a new address, and in snazzier form. I hope.
There are a few good posts on the old press and I leave them up.
If you are an avid and regular reader of Trouserpress (if there is such a person), you might want to consider bookmarking the new page or resetting the RSS because all future posts will appear there.
Something is deeply dysfunctional in my Trouserpress.
First it was a little stylesheet problem and since trying to fix that, the blog will only show in two default themes. If I apply any other templates the whole thing disappears from the net with ‘fatal error’ messages. Presumably the fatal error being me trying to play with php without an adult present.
So, this is the result of me sprucing up the site as part of my Weed campaign. Don’t let me ever straighten your collar: your head will fall off.
Another so: this is yet another day sucked into the cyber black hole where I could have been writing or curled in my basket picking my nose. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. The Man doesn’t want Weed on the streets expanding people’s heads.
Music: Holgar Czukay, Movies
Mood: Postal
Reading: the writing on the fucking wall, pal, and what are you going to do about it?
Well, it has been about three weeks since Weed and Shorts appeared in the online shops as ebooks to no fanfare at all apart from a bit of parping by me getting over the celebratory hangover.
I have been grinding out the press releases and sprucing up the site in the hope of raising a shadow of interest while fending off this mounting sensation of futility with a bottle. More than one bottle.
It’s gratifying to have Weed out there after so many years of muddle and inactivity but promoting it presents a challenge I had not thought through very well. How to connect with the people who might like it? And who are the people I want to connect with anyway? I mean, who are the Weed readers? Who are they really?
I read up on how to promote your publication online and in short it went:
have a blog (done that; tick)
use Facebook (tick)
use Twitter (tick)
optimise your web site (yawn tick)
wave a digital magic wand and watch the punters roll in (waft waft tick)
All this promote-yourself stuff is written by glib nonentities, and the efficacy of their advice is measured by the fact that they are nonentities.
For example, the how-to on marketing yourself on Facebook goes:
get a Facebook account
friend all your friends who also have Facebook accounts
say how much you like your friend’s profiles, individually — it gets you noticed!
make friends with total strangers if you feel up to it
A lot of the advice is full of typos and grammatical errors and is sometimes so cursory that I think it is hacked out by freelancers in the Philippines or India at one dollar per essay (I know this happens because I am a member of a freelancer site through which such writers are recruited at exactly those rates).
On Facebook, I can potentially reach perhaps 200 people through my friends, most of whom I would rather gift the book than see them pay. While I cannot speak for the tastes of my friends, even cyber friends, I suspect that Weed would not appeal to most of these people. Twitter reaches about 30 people, some of whom are not actually real.
If any reader (hi!) has any real advice about using Facebook, please let me know. I am a complete Facebook novice and am open to any suggestions.
I notice that unpublished British writer Rebecca Woodhead has thousands of followers on Twitter and is the subject of regular warm and cuddly comments from Steven Fry. How does she do that when she hasn’t published an actual book yet? She is held up to be a model of how online self-promotion for writers can work, but I honestly cannot see what she is doing that I’m not (except in being more prolific in her blogging and Tweeting). Well, she is charming and endearing, doesn’t swear, doesn’t rant about destroying capitalism in general and the publishing industry in particular, and is considerably better looking than me, so perhaps I should find clues there.
Having moaned so emphatically, there are many more things I can be getting on with to push the writing, and more importantly, there are many more stories I am itching to get on with.
If any reader out there has a site and would be prepared to link to www.psipook.com in exchange for a reciprocal link, please let me know and we can mutually raise our profiles in search rankings. If you know of any online communities or e-zines whose readers might like to hear about Weed, please let me know.
And in the meantime, pity me for the style sheet for Trouserpress has gone missing rendering it a visual mess (another contrast to Ms. Woodhead) and fixing it is just one more of a million tasks I need to attend to. (Cue visit to bottle).
And for the sake of search engine visibility, I must add the following sentence: the fab ebooks I am referring to here are of course Weed and Shorts by Chris Page
E-books Weed and Shorts have appeared on the Sony ebooks site about 10 days before expected, while they have not yet shown on Kindle, Mobi or Barnes & Noble as I thought they would by now. http://sony-ebook-samples.com/sample/5714/weed
It didn’t register with me at first but my ebooks Weed and Shorts are available from SmashBooks.com in all the following formats:
• Online Reading (HTML)
• Online Reading (JavaScript)
• Kindle (.mobi)
• Epub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others)
• PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing)
• RTF (readable on most word processors)
• LRF (for Sony Reader)
• Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)
• Plain Text (flexible, but lacks much formatting)
• Plain Text (viewable as web page)
That’s so many formats, I’m almost embarrassed. And it also means that the books are available in just one place to everyone who has any kind of digital device whatsoever. All possible nice things to Sage Evans and SmashBooks.
Meanwhile, I’m grinding out the press releases but not anticipating an overwhelming response — or any response other than the cat rubbing round my ankles as he is. But then, cats like Weed, don’t they.
Following on my theme (frothing obsession) with publishers and their iniquities.
In my last rant I complained how the big boys were sewing up ebook/POD independent publishing process and effectively disempowering the independent.
Yesterday, I came across more grist for my ire. Not content with merely appropriating the means of production and distribution, one of the big boys, Amazon, to name a name, has been bullying the independents into working its way, or not getting listed at all.
Some time ago, Amazon set up a company called Book Surge which, for a commission, will format and print your POD books and list them with Amazon. Clever bit of marketing from Amazon. Book Surge’s homepage claims that it was set up by writers for writers, thus implying independence from the Goliath. Bollocks, it was set up by Amazon as an exclusive portal and the independents were coerced into working through it or having their books de-listed by Amazon. The buy buttons were removed from the listings of many books before the independents had time to respond or were informed. And never mind that Book Surge’s services were considered shit by some people. You can read the story here in a article I came across on The Register site (biting the hand that feeds it, and good for it too). The article is a little old but retro is the new now.
For lots of reasons, it would be nice not to do business with Amazon. Fuck ‘em. But they are so big, is it possible to ignore them? Amazon remains the single biggest, distributor of books, reaching those parts that, etc.
The time is here (not for the first time) for some proper punk DIY alternative publishing and distribution, and I probably ought to initiate something as a matter of principle, and indeed I have hoped to. That was a breathless sentence, but I’m too puffed to take another run at it.
Punk publishing does take time. Lots and lots of it. Lorry loads of time. It will require a group effort. I would need to upgrade the software on my site. I looked into this and became dizzy at the enormity of the task for one so unused to code.
Well. Anyone out there want to build a shopping cart and some proper blog PHP for the site’s front page? You know where to find me.
Meanwhile, the distributors of my ebooks have told me today that they should be listed by the end of this week.
I just wrote a wonderful blast of invective but deleted it in favour of this mature and dignified mein. Thing is, neither Weed nor Shorts have appeared on the ebook lists despite news from the distributor that they were going up this weekend. I have now bitten my my nails so badly I am down to the last knuckles and will never be able to type another novel again.
Well, Weed and Shorts are due to be published Friday, North American EST. After all the false alarms, delays and non-events, I shall believe it if it happens. I will also scream so loud I won’t need a blog to broadcast the news. And despite a week off the bottle, I will likely get hog-swaggling drunk.
Well, it seems that Kalamazoo has disappeared again. The damn place is blinking in and out of existence. Actually, on a quantum level, all matter does appear to be blinking in and out of existence (or perhaps winking in a ‘come on’ kind of way.) Kalamazoo, however, is taking the existing-not existing thing way too seriously. I bet if I were to check out the place on Google satellite photos, I would find a big brown indistinct sort of blur.
The alert reader (hi!) will remember that Kalamazoo is where the chaps are based that are putting out my ebooks of Weed and Shorts. Except that last time I checked, they were not listed with the ebook outlets. Perhaps the guys in the office are too engrossed in reading the stories and laughing their bottoms off.
On the brightest of bright notes, I learned last week that Kindle is finally coming to Britain — Kindle being, as I am sure you know, Amazon’s ebook reader device. It has been available in the States for months and months and months, but inexplicably, nowhere else. In the meantime, Amazon UK suspended selling ebooks, presumably until they have their own Kindle store and Kindle machines to read on. Well, Amazon has yet to open a UK ebook store so customers in that country will be buying their ebooks from the US, where happily, my publications are due to be listed. Amazon’s release of the Kindle in the UK is serendipitous indeed, or perhaps they just like me very much indeed.
Right. Back to staring in the e-windows of the e-book stores and waiting for Weed.
