Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘Publishing’ Category

New Jersey Marketing Consultants Offer Real Support for Webmasters

Let’s face it: It’s extremely difficult to build your website’s brand in a sea of websites that make-up the Internet. As your website grows, there will probably come a time when you’ll need to engage the services of a professional offering consulting Internet marketing services.

The problem with that is, most of the so-called SEO/Internet marketing pros online often turn-out to be some guy who lives in his grandmother’s basement who maybe read a book, took a seminar, or perused Google’s own support page. In other words, they don’t have the bone fides to back-up their rhetoric when it comes to navigating Web 2.0. Thankfully, there is one company (that happens to be located in my own neck of the woods) — Reciprocal Consulting. Reciprocal Consulting, formerly Foreman & Pike Consulting, is a company made-up of serious IT professionals with solid track record for success. With over twenty years experience in Information Technology and with employees who bring with them knowledge from many areas including webdesign, telecommunications, Internet and traditional marketing, webmasters will find that both their brand and their reputations are in good hands. They offer services ranging from pay-per-click management and search-engine-optimization to social networking optimization and competative marketing intelligence.

There Are Days When Calling It a Slush Pile is Too Kind

It’s Saturday morning and normally you wouldn’t be caught dead reading submissions on a weekend.  But, you’ve got a lot of balls in the air and you can’t afford to drop any, so in addition to maybe pounding out a blog post or two and persisting with working on a new issue of one of your ezines, you decide (against you’re better judgement) to spend an hour early this A.M. trudging through the slop.  Okay, there is one decent poem that you think you might want to squeeze into the very ezine issue you’re working on, but the rest are pretty goddamn awful, and worse still — almost none of these wannabes has followed you’re submission guidelines. One guy has sent his poems, written in mouse print, in red ink on paper so thin it’s almost like that tissue paper they use to wrap gifts before stuffing them into a box.  His cover letter (at least you think it’s a guy. His names is not written on his submission and you cannot read the chicken-scratch on the envelope. You think the name reads, "Chase" or "Carr" or something like that)  is a one liner that says, "Here’s a few for you."  Yeah, okay, Hoss. As if he’s doing you some major league favor by sending these crappy poems in this crappy, unreadable condition.  As if you’re supposed to whip out a rubber stamp and just accept them just because he decided to send them.  Christ! There’s not enough rubber stamps in the world to make his submission remotely acceptable. Dream 0n, Bucko!

But, you’ve mellowed somewhat in recent years.  Sure, you’ll bitch about this submission on this blog — a guy’s got to vent, after all, but in the past, you’d really tee off on an individual like this.  Back in the day, you would’ve really lost it! You’ve said things that have brought writers to the brink of suicide.  But you’re a kinder, gentler version of yourself.  You’ll send this dude as polite a rejection as you can possibly manage and leave it at that unless he decides to be a complete tool about it.

Still, you’d think these people would learn.  They keep sending these poems out. They aren’t any good, but even if they were, if they’re sending out in an unreadable format on material that isn’t much more substantial than toilet tissue, how can they expect an editor to associate their writing with anything other than shit? You’ve been doing this for a long time and it never ceases to amaze you how brain-dead some of these fuckers are.

Sometimes Online Fiction is the Pits

I recently received review requests from a couple fiction sites — one is a blog (well . . . 3 blogs, actually, but we’ll get to that in a bit), and the other is a new writing community site.

The idea of using hypertext as a tool for storytelling is nothing new. In the pre-blog era, lots of literary ezines tried it in both fiction and poetry. For a few years, it was quite a fad — that is, until the editors figured out that it was a useless gimmick that didn’t really add value to work they were presenting to the public. Don’t get me wrong, hypertext has it’s uses and can be quite an asset when presenting certain kinds of information online, but for the fiction genre, it’s rather impractical.

It was probably inevitable that once blogs caught-on, bloggers would start to use the blog platform for purposes other than what the blog was initially intended for. Lately, there has been an explosion of online novels on blogs all over the place. I pass no judgement on whether or not this is a good thing or not. Other than acknowledging that blogs will continue to be showcases for budding novelists on into the future, I cannot honestly say whether or not this is the best way to publish fiction. I suppose if authors use it as a promotional tool with an eye towards achieving print publication in book form and cultivating a built-in market for that book, it could be a good thing. If it’s peddled as a new “thing-in-and-of-itself” genre, it will probably be written-off as a fad and go the way of the Edsel much like the hypertext ezines of Web 1.0 did in the 90’s.

Lethe Bashar: A Novel of Life
Which brings us to Chris Al Aswad’s Lethe Bashar: A Novel of Life. The novel is presented in a serialized format with the beginning, middle and end on three separate websites. First, let me say that I think Mr. Al Aswad isn’t a bad writer — probably young and certainly not all that experienced, but not without potential. With some sound editing (and some running blog commentary that didn’t smack of asshole-licking) his novel might even be publishable beyond the posting of his blogs. But, whether or not he’s the second coming of Charles Dickens is neither here nor there for the purpose of this discussion. The real question is, does Mr. Al Aswad present his novel in a consistent, useable format that can appeal to a wide audience. Does he understand the Internet and how people access information? Honestly, there are things he does well and things he doesn’t do so well.

The biggest problem I had with this thing is the fact that the novel is posted on three separate blogs (and yet another, fourth site, which introduces and links to the 3 blogs — Jesus fucking Christ, man. Enough already!). Why? What’s the point? It makes no sense to do this. It’s an interesting experiment, I suppose, if your purpose is to artificially generate page views, but if the point is to engage readers in your story, why frustrate them by forcing them to jump around so much? I’m betting that for every unique visitor he attracts he’s losing a 100 potential readers. Afterall, the story is not being told out of sequence, so why present it as if it were? This strategy can force a lot of page views between the 3 blogs, sure . . . but in the long run it does little to grow the number of unique visitors and build a real market for your novel. Here’s a thought: serialize the story on a weekly basis on a single blog. Update the page the same day of the week and use social networking and an email newsletter to promote new posts. Use those 2 other blogs to blog about something else if you must maintain them at all. You can still use hypertext to link readers to older posts, but within a single blog those links would serve a practical purpose rather than merely being a gimmick to force page views.

I did appreciate how the author used digital photography and artwork to highlight his story, however. It is both timely and appropriate with respect to the story he’s telling. I’m certain that combining the visuals with some judicious copyediting and a single blog strategy would greatly improve the presentation of this thing.

StoryPit.com
And that brings us to StoryPit.com — apparently a writing community site. I say, “apparently” because this thing is still in beta, doesn’t appear to have any members actually posting stories and it’s design is, shall we say, skeletal at best. And in looking at it’s style and presentation it does look like a throwback to Web 1.0. It’s just an ugly and incomplete site. It’s akin to being invited to a big, lavish casino and promised unlimited chips only to find a big fucking crater in the middle of a desert where the casino was supposed to be. My question is, even if this site were in a more finished state of development, is it really a necessary site for writers? When there are so many community sites and blogs to post one’s writing, what’s the big draw of a site like StoryPit.com? Honestly, if you happen to be a good writer, you’d do yourself more good in the long run going through the process of submitting your scribblings to legitimate publications where there’s an editor and an editorial process. Barring that, you could sign-up for a free blog account and post your stuff to your heart’s content. And with a community site like, say, Helium.com, you at least get a small cut of the ad revenues. Why StoryPit.com? Until the creators can really answer that question to my satisfaction, I couldn’t possibly recommend it.