Y is for You

Yes - you, dear reader without whom all my efforts are totally worthless.

We have never met, but I do have some idea of what makes you tick.   Over 400 of you have responded to the survey to give some insight in what things are shared experiences and which ones make us stand apart.

From the pattern of my book sales, I can deduce which plot lines ring a chord with you, and which ones you find a little less than stellar.  That's OK - it is my job to fulfill you reading wants, not yours to spend your hard earned cash on stuff just because I am inordinately proud of it.   And the number of reads of short stories also give a hint - but that is more an indicator of how intriguing a title is, I rather suspect.

I get some hints - some clear, some obscure - from the comments some of you make about my posts, my stories and my published works.

One hard statistic of e-books is that, on average, it takes about 700 sales to generate one customer review.   And since getting such reviews is vital to turning a pot boiler into a best seller, some new authors get friends and family to write glowing reviews for them in order to create some "buzz" about the work.   A tactic doomed to failure, for if a new book arrives complete with half a dozen glowing reviews, just about everyone knows that it has not been in circulation long enough to get any reviews at all, and the game is up.  If you are going to use phoney reviews, wait four to six months before publishing them and you may succeed with such con tricks.

If your are not an author, it might surprise you to learn that the hard currency for some web sites is the comments from the public at large who visit and partake of the stuff that has been put out for its amusement.


When it comes to the free stuff we hand out, some authors are desperate for comments and reviews.   A very promising new picture blog was pulled a couple of years ago because not one of 12,000 visitors had been polite enough to make a comment.   Not one single comment.   That author - wrongly thinking he was entitled to get responses - was so upset that no-one agreed with that point of view - he pulled the plug rather than changing his mind.

There are free story sites that if a member does not comment after a pre-set number of reads, has membership rights revoked.   "Good members" give comments freely, so if you are a "bad member" you can get the hell out of here until your manners improve.   Or some such.  Their web site - their rules.   All is good.

But those ways of thinking do not apply to you, dear reader, while you are visiting this site, to pondering the musings or reading the free tales.

That you pop in from time to time is suffice.   All that is published here is for you for without you the entire enterprise is without merit.   By all means tell me if anything is less than average.   But because you want to, not because I might get peeved if you don't.