A while ago, Kindle Scout winning author Armand Rosamilia admitted over at kboards that his Kindle Scout editor had told him point-blank that hitting high numbers on your Hot & Trending accounts for maybe about FIVE percent of your chances for acceptance in the Kindle Scout program.
Five percent.
That is a pretty punky number.
So why even bother trying?
The way I see it what the folks at Kindle Scout are looking for is a book that will sell – so by the time that a would-be Kindle Scout author even gets to the whole HOT & TRENDING part of the experience – their book has ALREADY been written. It is ALREADY out there sitting upon the great digital desk of the Eternal Gods of Kindle Scout.
Still, the way that I see it is like this.
Just yesterday at work we had the afternoon off for a once-a-year event that the company calls Employee Appreciation Day. We get four hours to eat pizza and cake and sing Karaoke and wander around the office and just let some steam off.
Did you ever see a movie called THE PURGE? Well, Employee Appreciation Day is kind of like THE PURGE for cubicle working drone dust bunnies like me to blow off a little steam and relax.
(and that IS what it says in my job description – cubicle working drone dust bunny)
Every year the management puts together a big trivia competition. The winning team gets fifty bucks. I am are VERY competitive at it but I still try and have some fun as well.
Well, this year my team of four came first by ONE SINGLE FREAKING QUESTION!
Thank god – that one single freaking question – What do you have to do to a martini to make it into a DIRTY martini – was something that I knew.
Thank god that my wife is a martini snob and has told me time and time again just exactly how she likes her martinis.
I knew the answer and we won the fifty bucks and I figure out of ten pages worth of questions that ONE STINKING RIGHT ANSWER was what it took to build a win at our yearly trivia competition.
Which earned me ten whole bucks and a bit of floating jingle.
(hey, I told you I was competitive)
So – when I beat my head against the digital wall trying to keep myself floating in the Hot & Trending zone of things all that I am REALLY trying to do is to build myself a proper dirty martini!
You know, while I was putting together today’s blog entry I noticed that even though it says DAY 10 up there, it is REALLY my ELEVENTH day on Kindle Scout – on account of I am writing about yesterday.
Holy freaking time warp, Batman – welcome to the digital world.
All right – now that I have got that dirty martini gag out of my system – I have gone and checked my Kindle Scout Campaign and I am STILL on the Hot & Trending list.
Man, doesn’t that sound a lot like a title for a soap opera?
Welcome to THE HOT AND TRENDING (cue organ music).
I’m on my eleventh campaign day with seven straight days of Hot and Trending. I haven’t figured out how to take a screen shot – but I’ve had 173 hours of H&T and about 705 total page views. It’s interesting – but today was yesterday was one of my lowest days for page views – and I believe that was because I spent the least amount of time and energy goosing up the action with Facebook posts and Tweets and the like. That tells me I need to get a bit more pro-active over the weekend if I want to hang onto my H&T rating.
And I think that I do want to hang onto it.
Maybe it DOESN’T have a thing to do at all with whether or not I make this happen with Kindle Scout – but the fact is I want to make this thing happen in a very big way. For about a half a dozen reasons that I am NOT going into I am really seriously invested in this competition.
So – while I sit here and seriously consider shaving my head into a perfect Lex Luthor haircut and working on my soon-I-will-rule-this-world villain-cackle – how about I give you a FREE Kindle Valentine’s Day e-book – just for having the tenacious energy to read all the way down to the bottom of the page.
Yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 