I grew up in Northern Ontario and have lived for the last forty years in Nova Scotia – so believe you me – I KNOW SNOW!
I have shoveled it when it was up to my navel.
I have slogged through it when it was up to my nostrils.
And I have pushed my share of cars from out of the snow.
Even now I can hear my Grampa telling me an my brother as we push his old silver ’71 Impala – which still runs to this day – out of a heavy Northern Ontario blizzard.
“Just rock it,” Grampa would tell us. “Just rock it.”
That is the trick, you see. It isn’t about that big blow-your-gut-out-in-the-middle-of-your-never-you-mind heave that some folks seem to figure is necessary.
It is about a series of gentle nudges.
When your wheels are spinning you are creating ice. That is the power of friction and winter precipitation. So when you rock it all that you are trying to do is to get ONE of your freaking wheels to latch onto something with a little more grip and a little less slip.
It helps if you curse a little – but don’t curse a whole lot on account of it wastes your energy.
Getting a book to move is a little like getting a seriously-stuck automobile.
I’m not talking one of those lightweight Toyotas. I am talking a serious “this-is-the-seventies” Red Foreman road boat.
(no, none of that youtube video has a THING to do with road boats – but damn I sure love to hear that fellow say “dumbass”)
You’ve got to learn to rock it, just a little. A series of slow but steady nudges designed to push your sales figures out of the hole that you have dug them into.
Which is what I am trying to do this year. I am trying to overpower inertia with a siege of slow but steady shoves of my shoulder bone.
Yesterday my book Hammurabi Road was featured on ReadCheaply.com
Okay, so it DID sell a couple of copies – which is better than a frozen mukluk in the ass – but not by much.
Still, it is one shove, one rock of the icebound Impala.
(I’ll give a free book to the reader who can tell me JUST how many times in a single blog entry that I mix me some metaphors!)
Today I have got two more promotional spots going live. I will tell you a bit about them – but let me tell you a few of the things that I like about ReadCheaply.com – as well as a couple of things that leave me scratching my head.
For one thing, ReadCheaply.com gives a writer that dedicated page that you will see if you click on that picture of that hairy bear-hatted fellow you see about three or paragraphs back of me here. I like that a lot. I am not sure how long that page will remain – but so long as it remains I can send potential readers there and they will see just EXACTLY all the places they can pick up my book.
That’s a big old plus for me.
ReadCheaply.com is FREE, so far. And I like that too.
I also like that ReadCheaply promotes non-Kindle e-books such as Nook, Kobo, Apple i-book, and Smashwords.
That’s another plus.
I also dig the banners that they have available for promoting authors.
That’s another plus.
You want to read more info about ReadCheaply.com just click right on this sentence here.
All that you have to do to “pay” for your promo-spot is to promote the site on Twitter, Facebook and the like – which is pretty painless and easy to do.
The thing that confused me about ReadCheaply.com is that their Twitter page is pretty well abandoned. Last Tweet I saw was back in the first week of March. That strikes me strange but I figure it boils down to a matter of time and manpower. ReadCheaply is a small outfit and all of that Tweeting takes time, even if you use something like Hootsuite. You still have to enter all of those tweets, sooner or later.
Still, I count that in the negative column.
All in all, ReadCheaply.com is a good little service that might be more effective for other folks than it has been for me.
And it was cheap.
Which I liked.
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Today HAMMURABI ROAD is being promoted on PeopleReads.com.
I’ll let you know how that works out tomorrow.
On April 15th I’ll be hitting The Fussy Librarian.
I hope she doesn’t hit back.
I have also just bought some Tweetage with Jeff Bennington’s Tweet The Book service.
I am saving his Kindle Book Reviews promotional website for a promotion I have got lined up for UNCLE BOB’S RED FLANNEL BIBLE CAMP – THE BOOK OF GENESIS to help promote a Kindle Countdown deal I have set up for May 5 to May 12.
That’s all I can think of for now.
I’ve got to get back to some writing now – because my Muse keeps whispering in my ear – “Rock that gently, you dumbass!”
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
Note: If these blog entries are helping you at all why don’t you help me out by sharing it and shouting it out and best of all buying a copy of HAMMURABI ROAD for a mere 99 cents – less than the price of that paper cup that was holding the cup of coffee you sipped on last week at the mall.
Nag, nag, nag…
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 