Myspace 2

I wrote in the previous post about the myspace.com. You may be slightly confused reading the rest of this post, if you have not read the Myspace post.

While adding friends to my myspace account I have come across many authors, some, it seems, trying to do just what I am attempting. Clearly, nothing I am doing is original, and thus not as likely to succeed. If I was in the first group of people to use myspace as a marketing tool, I may have more success.

OR, if I was an established person, I could come onto myspace and promote myself with pretty good success. If Stephen King wrote his newest book and choose to promote it exclusively on myspace, he would undoubatly sell a large number of books.

The site is a big enough venue that word can spread quickly on there. But, if you’re like me, still hoping one day to rise up enough to be included in the masses of the also-rans, why would anyone talk about me or my project?

Firstly, I must produce a quality product. Because, even if I convince some people to check out the GIANT, and it sucks, they’re certainly not going to spread any positive word.

After I have produced a quality work product I have to reach out to enough people with a creative message to convince them to give the book a shot.

In other words, I have to figure out how to do what so many people can not do. It’s certainly a long shot. Though, if I could get a complete stranger to say that they read the book and liked it? That would be great.

Myspace

Sometime last year I started a myspace account to get my name into the credits of movie. Myspace is a site where any person can make their own page to describe themselves. The page must fit into myspace’s general format, but there is room for creativity. Each person can view other’s pages, and request to be their friends. Upon approval, that other person becomes your internet friend.

Initially I added people I knew personally, along with the random famous person. But after a while, it occured to me that I could build a network of people who might be interested in purchasing the book. I started adding libraries and bookstores. I looked up publishing houses and other authors. Individual books have their own pages as well.

To search for potential readers, I did general searches. However, I found that when searching for “book” or “reader” I most often found people that claimed to “not be a big book reader”.

Fortunately there were people before me that had overcome this problem. Other authors, publishers, and their books. Now I just search out similar books in genre to the GIANT and look at their friends. I go to those people’s pages and if I think they might enjoy the GIANT, I request to add them as a friend.

Everyday I try to request 20 friends or so. Hopefully by the time of publishing I could have a few thousand. Then I could notify them that the book is coming out.

The notification will be in the form of a bulletin, which is distributed to all of my myspace friends. A certain percentage will read the bulletin. A percentage of those people will follow direction to this website (which in the future will be retooled to be a marketing machine). A percentage of those website visitors might be interested enough to purchase the book. At least, I hope the myspace thing might generate a little word of mouth.

The great thing about myspace is that it’s free. So when this book fails to sell more than a dozen copies, the bulk of the marketing will be free.

A Lull

I don’t believe I’ve written anything for the book in this month. I hope that I still am able to pick this thing back up.

I purposely took some time off after the completion of the first full draft. Over that time I planned on going over my assembled notes I had made about the book. Any ideas or points that were not already included. I have been writing these down on a central piece of paper that I can refer to when writing the second draft. Currently, I have one more notebook to go through to look for notes.

There was another good reason for the break in writing. At the time of the writing of Draft 1a, I could work on two halves of the book semi-independently of each other. At first I worked on the first and second halves together, then focussed on the second half of the book. Once that was finished I returned to the beginning, completing the first half of the book. I use “half” not in the literal sense. The first section is probably only 25-30% of the book. So when I completed the first draft, I finished the first quarter of the book.

So, having most recently worked on the first part of the book, I did not want to turn around and dive right back into that section.

I was also on vacation for a little more than a week this month, and had no opportunity to write. I did make a lot of notes and start to put together some plot lines that created themselves as the book was being written. I think it will strengthen the book greatly. I have a good feel for the characters and story now, so should be able to tie everything together.

Of course, this all assumes that I can get back into the groove of writing. Now that I haven’t been doing it, I have filled those time slots up with other life activities. I will have to find some other chunk of time for those things so I can get back to my evening writing routines.

What I’m writing on

While I’m in a little down period between the two drafts (I’m letting things simmer), I figured I should backtrack a little.

I started writing the book on the main household computer. It has internet access, lots of games, and is in a room full of distractions. I knew early on that it wasn’t ideal. So when I picked up a new monitor for the computer I took the old one upstairs and hooked up my now nearly ten year old computer to it.

And it still worked. It’s a little slow, but I’m not sure if that is due to its tiredness or that I am now used to faster computers. At one point it was blazing.

But I went through and stripped down the whole machine. No games, no old files, nothing that could launch me down some “remember when” gushy fests. That memory-lane, for me, can eat up an hour faster than computer solitare can. The only thing that sits on the computer are mp3s and the documents where the book is contained.

I’m writing it all in a rich text format. It allows for all the font changes I need, but keeps the file sizes small enough to fit onto a 3.5″ disk. Plus it allows me to use a basic text editor. No spell or grammer checks. No word counts. Only me and the keyboard.

The computer has two hard-drives. I make a backup copy after each writing session. Every few days I then put a copy on a floppy disk.

The computer is in the art room / seldomly used guest bedroom. Its on the second floor which is pretty quiet. I have a few books and pictures and such to thumb through if I need to get into a calmer mood in which to write. I also havea a portable DVD player there, but I have found that watching movies is too much of a distraction while writing. So I will only listen to music, which I find to be a nice background noise.

The writing sessions vary in length from thirty minutes to maybe four or six hours. More than two hours is a rare occurance. I usually don’t have that much time to devote in a day to writing and I usually find something else to dsitract me in the room.

It looks like there will be no snazzy ending here