Work on Space Vixen Trek Episode 17 is proceeding. Still, I was expecting to be done sooner. I ended up making some tweaks, and one thing led to another. Specifically, I decided to make one of the aliens a Valley Girl, which meant rewriting some dialogue. I found that it’s impossible to have an intellectual conversation in Valspeak – like oh my Gawd, fer sure! So, I’m still going over the final draft, and might give it one more re-read after that.
It’s consuming much time, and all the painstaking work is turning into a drag for me, but I want to make sure that the content is as perfect as I can get it. Science fiction fans will go for considerable suspension of disbelief. (Pod people work, Jedi swinging lightsabers work, though nuking the fridge is a step too far.) However, readers hate to see spelling mistakes or flaws in logic. So it looks like I’ll be staring at the manuscript for a good while longer before unleashing it on the world.
Amazon versus Smashwords
For SVT17, I’m seriously contemplating making that one an Amazon exclusive. This has various advantages – for example, access to viewership by their Kindle subscriptions – and with this experiment, I’d be able to find out how much of a benefit it is. All my previous releases are on my Smashwords catalog as well, and they are a distribution point to several other ebook vendors. Most of my revenue is through my Amazon store, though, primarily Righteous Seduction. I would like to see my science fiction stories get more sales too.
What I’ve noticed is that when I publish a new title on Smashwords, it will make a sale very quickly, then get hardly any attention afterwards. So I figure it must be popping to the front of the list, then their book display algorithm buries it in the heap and it’s never brought forward again. It would be beneficial to me (and countless other authors) if it circulated up some older titles with tne new releases. I wrote them explaining the situation. They were kind enough to answer, but only provided me with links to their articles about book promotion which I’d already seen.
Smashwords was a pioneer for ebooks. As an advocate of Distributism, I really like their business model. They made electronic publishing commercially viable for the first time, no longer a ghetto for all the authors who didn’t have the patience or luck to get the attention of some snobby agent in New York City. We get horrors like Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and politically correct garbage, while any Melville, Poe, Twain, or Faulkner wouldn’t stand a chance these days. So Smashwords will always have my gratitude for helping to push the gatekeepers and middlemen out of the way.
Therefore, it’s with a heavy heart that I contemplate going exclusive on Amazon, at least with SVT17.
International viewership
On another subject, looking over some of the traffic for my site here is pretty interesting. On the fourth week of April, I got a noticeable uptick in traffic from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and even a hit from Colombia. (I’d like to visit one of these days when I have more of a travel budget.) My analytics doesn’t go into enough detail to provide further clues.
One possibility is that a couple weeks before, someone translated my RoK article into Portuguese about how to fight politically correct language, likely getting some interest in Brazil. (Using BCE/CE instead of BC/AD to a Catholic is a big não dar!) Seriously, translation isn’t easy, so congratulations to them for that effort. If that’s what spurred the mini-viral spike from South America, it’s rather interesting that it reached neighboring Spanish-speaking countries as well.
Other than that, most of my viewers are in the USA, and lesser numbers from Anglosphere countries elsewhere (Britain and Canada in particular). The rest are mostly from continental Europe, but I also get hits from everywhere except Greenland, Albania, Mongolia, North Korea, Iran, and some locations in Africa and Central Asia. Even so, I do seem to have an interestingly high following from Uganda, a little more than the traffic I get from Ukraine.
I even got a few hits from Papua New Guinea – I wonder who is checking me out from over there? Maybe that was when I skewered Margaret Mead.
Other than that…
Thus far the article with the most trackbacks in 2018 is “Would You Bang A Famous Feminist?” In 2017, it was “Women Should Give Bountiful Thanks To The Manosphere”. Maybe there was a bit of triggering going on there!
rainbowalbrecht 