Bloggishness

Writing and marketing

I am on my way to Budapest in a few minutes, or at least to the airport.

Writing: I wrote a Flash Fiction piece yesterday called Welcoming Night. The interesting thing about this was that I was blocked. When that happens, I usually make up a wild first sentence and the rest of the story comes right out. Yesterday, when the story came out, it was all scrambled. It was as if I had tapped into several stories at once, all the while knowing that there was only one in there that would fit. So, I wrote about 400 words and then looked and the jumbled mess. It wasn't a story but there was one in there. It felt like those pictures we used to see when we were little and had to find certain things hidden within. Anyway, after a few reads, I tentatively started again and this time the story flowed right out. In the new story, were large parts of the original but put in a different order to make the story that was meant to be. I don't know if this makes sense but it was weird and yet, somehow not surprising.

Marketing: I am trying all types of marketing things. I am marketing my ebooks with no real intent to make money. I am just practicing so that when I have a novel to sell, I know how to do it. Yesterday, I placed an ad with facebook. I pay $.47 per click through. I set it up so they click to my site www.jamesdillingham.com and the page where my books are. From there, they need to click on the book cover to go to the book seller. I set my daily budget at $5.60 per day. It took several hours before the ad was reviewed and approved. After that, it took 20 minutes for the budget to be used up. this means people were clicking through at the rate of 36 clicks per hour. In the meantime, during that 20 minutes, my ad was showed up on facebook pages more than 81,000 times! That is not a typo.

Off to the airport.