I ran into this today, although it isn’t at all uncommon, and I thought I’d write about it because it does come up so often. An author on Facebook decided to whine that “nobody likes my books!”
Okay… what’s your marketing like? That’s where all of these things fall apart. If you’re not doing any marketing, then of course you’re going to fail.
That’s where it all started to go wrong.
This has been rolling around in my head for a very long time and now and then, it pops up. I suppose I’ve covered some of it in my discussions on stamp NFTs, but two recent things happened and I wanted to talk about it in more detail.
First, a discussion on a stamp forum about the USPS just packing it in because they provide terrible service, which I absolutely agree with, and secondly, I’ve started watching a UK-based coin channel, mostly because I get bored, called Christopher Collects. He’s the YouTube face for a UK coin dealership and in a lot of those videos, they bring up what I have a problem with.
However, we’ll get into both of those things in more detail below. See you there.
Today, I finished up another book. It was the third book in the third trilogy of a series that’s going to go fifteen by the end. It came in around 140k, which was completely fair and about as expected. Now, I set it aside to breathe while I start working on a new book, this time, another series where I’m on book four of a thirteen book series.
I decided, perhaps foolishly, to read through the other three books first, just to get myself in the right mindset and I’m having a huge problem!
Now I’m not trying to say that the people over at Stamp Show Here Today are wrong, but… yeah, I think they’re wrong. They had an episode a week or so ago (just heard it over the weekend) on bad stamp collecting advice.
Sorry, I think a lot of bad advice is coming from the podcast.
Right now, I’m kicking myself. I’m getting close to finishing the ninth book in a series that will ultimately be fifteen books long. It’s been going really well, everything is coming along as I’d hoped and, if nothing went wrong, I’d be done by the end of next week, somewhere between 130-135k words.
Yeah, that’s until I entirely screwed the pooch and I have no idea how to fix it!
I really, really, really hate writing out of sequence!
I’ve officially given up trying to help most people with writing because they don’t want any help. They just want comforting platitudes and I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s skirt.
So, effective immediately, I’m retiring from online writing forums. It’s just not worth my time.
I’ll never understand how people can try to get attention by riding on the coat tails of their well-known relatives, as though who you know or who you’re related to matters. Someone popped up on Reddit and said “my father was James P. Hogan, ask me stuff!”
Who the hell cares?
I know I’ve talked about this a lot lately, but I stumbled across this video by RedLetterMedia and it seems that they understand the problem, from an entirely different hobby. This kind of crap happens everywhere!
So let’s go look at the video, which is funny, and talk about it.
They just sent a survey, which I took, about a lot of issues facing the American Philatelic Society and how I use it. I’m happy to help so I went through and dutifully answered all of their questions, but in so doing, I realized a couple of things.
Mostly, I realized just how little the APS actually does that I care about. Let’s talk about it.
I know this is just going on and on, but it keeps evolving. I got into a discussion over “investing” in coins vs. just investing elsewhere and, as expected, they really weren’t impressed with my take.
That’s fine. All the down votes in the world don’t bother me. Imaginary buttons online mean nothing. So here’s what I had to say and why I said it.
