This site, as well as several others of mine, were down today due to database errors. This has been fixed. I, and my host, apologize profusely for the problem.
Month: June 2007
bookmark_borderOther Writers’ Blogs Part 2
A long time ago (May ’05), I wrote a post where I gave a short list of other writers’ blogs. Someone commented there today and I realized I’d short changed my fellow-ette writers. My apologies. 😀
Now, to fix my oversight. These are listed in no particular order so don’t think the first is the best and the last stinks, ‘kay?
Jane Fletcher – author of 7 fantasy/scifi books with another due out soon. Jane’s got a great sense of humor. I had the great privilege to meet her at both GCLS conferences.
Jane Volbrecht – author of 4 books with more on the way. She’s also the editor of my book, Butch Girls Can Fix Anything. Jane V. also has a great sense of humor. Must be a Jane Thing.
Lori L. Lake – author of 7 books, editor of 2 anthologies. Lori…well…I hate to say it…but…she has a great sense of humor too. Really. Most of the people I admire do. Well, except for Janet Reno, but that’s a herring of a different color.
Renee Bess – author of 2 novels, the second coming out in August. Renee and I have been on two GCLS Con panels together. And yeah, she’s got a sense of humor too, only she doesn’t toss it out there for the whole world to see.
Lisa Cohen – poet and writer. No clue how we met via the ‘net other than fate.
Vada Foster – the evil twin. Co-author of one book and contributor to three anthologies. She’s crazy, by the way. Insane. She wasn’t at this year’s con and I never got around to asking why.
Verda Foster – the good twin. Author of 3 books, co-author of 2 books, and contributor to one anthology. She’s sane.
Sandra Barret – author of one book, with another coming out soon. Sandra’s crazy too. Not as crazy as Vada, but then, no one is other than myself. (link to Sandra’s blog)
Sophia – straight but not narrow. Trying to write a good book by outlining it to death. (insert me giggling while ducking)
J.C. Madden – another straight but not narrow. She has an AGENT! And books said agent it panhandling to publishers. (link to JC Madden’s blog)
Kait – yet another straight but not narrow. She’s writing away while looking for an agent and raising her own alien baby.
Reckon, that’s enough for now.
bookmark_borderMore on Author Websites
I found my notes from the Author Promotion workshop! Way freakin’ cool.
Keep bringing visitors back:
There’s another way to help readers/visitors keep track of you and your site: change notification.
Over on the main site, They’re Just Words, changes are not daily like they are here. So a reader/visitor won’t always remember to keep coming back once or twice a week to see if anything is new. Enter change notification methods. This is where a reader/visitor signs up for notification emails when a change to a website occurs.
WordPress (which is fantastic, btw) has a plug-in for this. It is aptly named WordPress Email Notification plug-in. To the right in the sidebar is a place for visitors to sign up for changes to the blog. I just checked and They’re Just Words doesn’t have one (duh!).
For non-WordPress users, there’s ChangeDetection.com. The webmaster of a site can request the code and place it on the site for their visitors to use. Alternatively, anyone can use ChangeDetection.com’s change wizard to monitor any site they wish.
At first, I thought this service was just a way to get email addresses to then turn around and sell to spammers. Not so. This is from their Policies page.
Privacy We take your (and our!) privacy seriously. We never sell your e-mail address to spammers. Your e-mail address is used to provide you with feedback from the ChangeDetection system and inform you about issues relating to ChangeDetection such as system updates and changes. E-mails from the ChangeDetection may contain advertising. Additionally your e-mail address may be shared with the webmaster of the site your are monitoring. In such cases you should check the privacy policy of the site you are monitoring.
If you have opted-in to the optional mailings, you will receive e-mail advertising related to the topics selected. You may unsubscribe from these lists at any time.
So, yeah, there will be ads in the email notifications, but anyone who is on a Yapoo group list is used to those.
Ways to get your book release announced and keep your book up front:
Email signature – use it! I use Thunderbird and there’s an extension called “Signature” which allows me the option to have more than one signature and to choose which one I want for any email.
Internet Social groups/websites: FaceBook, MySpace, LiveJournal, places like that. Link to “friends” who then link to you who then have their “friends” see it who then perhaps also link to you.
Start early! – as soon as the cover is released, start putting it and the book info everywhere
More suggestions later!
bookmark_borderWhat Site Stats Mean
While at the con in Atlanta, I attended a workshop on author promotion. It was quite possibly the most valuable workshop I went to.
One of the things they mentioned was authors utilizing their websites. And in that part we discussed website statistics.
There’s Unique Hits (or visitors), which is the better way to tell how many people visited a website. So if Visitor 1 drops by at 9am and then later at 12pm, they are only counted once.
Then there’s Page Views. This is the number of pages total that all the visitors viewed. If Visitor 1 read today’s post and then went over to look at the link page, that’s TWO page views.
The best way to view how active your site is (vs folks just zooming through) is to take the number of page views and divide it by the number of unique visitors.
VISITS
Total 46,600
Average Per Day 107
Average Visit Length 0:54
Last Hour 6
Today 98
This Week 750PAGE VIEWS
Total 67,064
Average Per Day 140
Average Per Visit 1.3
Last Hour 7
Today 141
This Week 979
This is my site stats according to SiteMeter.com. So if I take the page views today (141) and divide it by the visits today (98), I can see that on average, a visitor sees 1.43 pages. SiteMeter’s stats gives me this information. They say it is 1.3 since they used the average per days (140 / 107) as their numbers. The stats also tell me that the average visit was almost a full minute.
How real are these numbers? Good question.
There’s a plug-in for WordPress called ShortStats. It tells me that today I had 1261 unique “hits”. Big diff between it and SiteMeter.
Then there’s other meters/counters such as Blog Flux’s Mapstats.
Unique Visitors
Today: 63
Last 7 Days: 560
This Month: 1920
Total: 37891Page Views
Today: 79
Last 7 Days: 635
This Month: 2230
Total: 47399
Again, I take the total page views (79) and divide it by the total uniques (63) which gives me 1.25. What I like about Blog Flux is their graphs.
I can see at a glance just how relevant the two are. I can also see at a glance that almost everyone views one page, with a few viewing two perhaps.
Regardless, it is obvious this site gets a lot of visitors. So am I that popular a writer?? No, not in the least.
The next thing to look for is what are the visitors looking for. For the most part, visitors to this site are looking for images. The tattoo discussion I had a long time ago about The Tree of Life gets a lot of hits. One of the top pages visited is the Past vs Passed discussion. Very few visitors come here because I am a writer and they adore me and my book.
What can I do to attract more folks to me as a writer? Well, not do it here! I need to attract folks over to my main site where the writing info is. I checked in with the Shortstat plugin over there (while “They’re Just Words” is not a blog, I still use WordPress for content management) and got some depressing results. My “redneck humor” images are the biggest attraction.
What can I do to correct this? Not a clue. But the fact that so many people visit this blog, it gives me a chance to give big HINTS that I am a writer, I have a book (published by a REAL publisher), and I am actively writing more. I can use my name (Paula Offutt) and the title of my book (Butch Girls Can Fix Anything)and make them links. I can check this blog and the main site and make sure a visitor can get to the info they want with as few clicks as possible. (I had to click 5 times to find the right page!) The more links, the more search engines notice. The less clicks, the greater the chance the visitor will stick around.
bookmark_borderCharacters and Muses
My characters don’t speak to me. They don’t tell me what they want to do or how they want to do it or what they will not do. I don’t have conversations with them in my head or elsewhere.
Often, I visualize a possible scene in my head and in that “daydream”, I can hear and see my characters. But it is like watching or making a movie and I am not a participant.
I also don’t have a muse. I don’t have some inner person rooting me on or feeding me ideas. I tried to have one, once, because so many other people spoke as if theirs were such a vital part of their writing lives. But alas and awoe, it didn’t work.
Does that make me a flat writer? Have I no depth or imagination? Is that why I feel destined to be a one-book-wonder?
bookmark_borderOopsie?
From CripHumor:
When a fellow piano tuner from our company was ill, I was assigned to take over his assignment of tuning a piano in a young ladies’ boarding house. While I was at work, several of the girls strolled casually through the room in various states of undress.
The climax came when a pretty young lady, with startlingly little on, appeared to pay the bill. As I was handing her the receipt, she suddenly gave me a bewildered look, then fled, screaming, “That’s not our regular man!”
Turns out their regular man is blind!
bookmark_borderPseudo Redeux
From CNN.com:
Author loses fraud case for writing as a man
NEW YORK (AP) — To writer Laura Albert, her alter ego was a psychological necessity, but to jurors, the fictitious male prostitute JT LeRoy was a fraud.
A Manhattan jury decided Friday that Albert had defrauded a production company that bought the movie rights to an autobiographical novel marketed as being based on LeRoy’s life.
The federal jury, after a short deliberation, awarded $116,500 to Antidote International Films Inc.
The San Francisco author, who went to strange lengths to hide her identity behind the nonexistent LeRoy, condemned the jury’s decision, saying it had ominous implications for artists.
“This goes beyond me,” Albert said. “Say an artist wants to use a pseudonym for political reasons, for performance art. This is a new, dangerous brave new world we are in.”
Antidote’s attorney, Gregory Curtner, said the producers “have sympathy” for Albert.
“I think we would have preferred that we never had to get here,” Curtner said after the verdict.
Albert was identified as the author of “Sarah,” the tale of a truck stop hooker. Her friends donned wigs and posed as LeRoy at book signings and they duped journalists with the phony back story about truck stop sex. Posing as the troubled teen, Albert even made phone calls to a psychiatrist.
Linkage:
bookmark_borderOuch!
From CripHumor:
[from Jim Mica] A Tale of Two Parts
A woman named Jill stood up at her church’s Testimony Meeting one Sunday morning, took the microphone from one of the church ushers, and bared her soul to the entire congregation:
“I want to tell you about the awful accident that my husband, John, has suffered this past month. He was riding his bike, lost control, ran off the highway and hit a tree. He was rushed to the hospital, and could have died, but thank the Lord, all he suffered was a broken
scrotum.”The congregation gasped in horror. The men in the congregation were obviously uneasy and writhed in their seats. “John has been in terrible pain all month since the accident. He has trouble breathing. He has trouble swallowing his food. He can hardly lift anything, he’s in so much pain and he has missed work because of it. He can’t lift our children up to hold them and give them the personal love that they need, worst of all, we can no longer cuddle and have intimate relations. He is in constant pain, a pain so terrible that our love life has all but slipped away into oblivion. I would like to ask you all in the congregation to pray for John, and pray for us, that his broken scrotum will soon heal and be as good as new.”
A dull murmur erupted within the congregation as the full impact of this terrible accident sunk in, and the men in the congregation were visibly shaken-up.
Then, as the murmuring settled down, a lone figure stood up in the midst of the congregation, worked his way up to the pulpit, obviously in pain, adjusted the microphone to his liking, then leaned over and said to the congregation:
“My name is John, and I have only one word for my wife, Jill. That word is: STERNUM!”
bookmark_borderProof Reading Your Work
Got this from an email list. Every writer should hear/see this. Honest.
The Impotence of Proofreading from the I Am Bored website.
bookmark_borderPhotography
I keep forgetting to mention this. I upload weather related images to WeatherUnderground.com. One of my more recent ones got an Approver’s Choice Award! How cool is that?
You can find all my weather images on their site. Below is the winning image.
The above image is taken from this one:
This was after one heckuva hail storm a few days ago. The sun had come back out and the temp difference made some pea-soup thick fog. When the sun started to set, the trees and bamboo just framed it right.
Some of the hail storm:
4pm (that’s not rain, that’s hail coming down; the dark things are ripped up leaves)
Afterwards: (the light-colored patches in the road is piles of hail)
Damage:
My poor hosta! First the late snow, then the hard frosts, now this.
The other end of our road:
