I am, of course, talking about my business plan. You know, the one where I spend my days slinging words that you get to read, and hopefully enjoy so much that you can’t but help to send me your hard-earned dollar. For you new readers the theory by which I hope to remain not living under a bridge is detailed on my website here. I’ve also written about my putative path to financial success from your accumulated dollar-by-dollar support in my earlier blog post titled Mindin’ My Own Bidness. In that post I talk about my plan to let you read what I write for free in the hopes that you will like it so much you will send me your dollar.
Now it may be counter-intuitive to think that you can send me a dollar – which is only about one-tenth the amount of change you have rattling around under the driver’s seat in your car or between the sofa cushions – and that I will be able to sustain myself with it. But if you consider that there is more than one of you reading this and that several of you might be willing to send me a dollar then the outcome is less problematic. And that was where you came in. Not so much in my quest for dollars but in my quest for readers, who ultimately will be my source for both more dollars and more readers. It is in this Quest for Readers in which I have fallen short.
While you have been busy reading, for free mind you, my blog and magazine articles, I have been busy collecting statistics. After careful analysis I have narrowed things down to one of two possible conclusions: One – you haven’t been telling your friends or Two – you have no friends to tell. Now I am fully aware that most of you have a rich and vibrant social life. A social life that makes mine seem exactly what it is: nonexistent. This means that I can discard option two out of hand and focus on number one.
I dug deeper and found that it just doesn’t look like you quite get how Word-of-Mouth works in the 21st Century. We are living in a time in which “Word-of-Mouth” means one thing: Facebook. Now first let me admit that I was quite clueless at first myself. But after looking into the matter I think I have it reduced to a set of easy-to-follow steps.
First, I must admit, I hold you all completely and utterly blameless in my lack of success drumming up the millions of readers I had hoped to have by this point in my writing career. Had I but chosen to write for a teenage or young adult audience my readers would have come pre-programmed with the Facebook operating instructions. Right in their DNA. However, for those of us born in the Distant Past, a geological epoch which I believe ended around 1985, it is not an intuitive process. It all comes down to how the Facebook “Like” button works.
When you visit a blog or website, such as mine, that displays a “Like” button and you click on it two things happen. First, a “Like” message appears on your Facebook News Feed to tell all of your Friends that you “Like” the page or website. Second, the information almost immediately vanishes. Unless, that is, you are “Liking” something on Facebook such as my fan page. Then your “Like”, rather than vanishing, is merely buried in an obscure location deep in the bowels of your Info where it would take a very skilled detective to find out what each of your “Likes” were.
When you read something not on Facebook, such as my blog, and enjoy it and press “Like” that shows up exactly once and then disappears into the fogs of history. Which, for me wanting to have all of your Facebook Friends find out about my writing and possibly become readers, is almost the exact opposite of what I want to happen. So I came up with a workaround. A way for you not only to “Like” my blog but to also indicate your approval, or disapproval, of the individual posts you read.
Here’s how it works. When you read a blog entry that tickles your fancy or, God forbid, makes you think, just click on the link to my Facebook Fan Page on the left side of your screen. This will whisk you off to Facebook where you will, most likely, see my news feed for the exact blog entry you were reading. Now if you click “Like” or, God forbid yet again, you want to write a negative comment for all the world to see, then you’ll be able to do that. That will flash out onto your Facebook feed for all your friends to see. I’m, of course, hoping that the “Likes” will outweigh the negatives but I’m not too worried as there’s really no such thing as bad publicity.
OK, that takes care of the blog. But what about that day in the far off future where there is something other than this blog and my pitiful number of magazine articles to read? When that fateful day appears I will be putting a “Like” button on each page that will let you announce your feelings about that specific story or article. You’ll need to do nothing more than click “Like”. If you don’tlike it then maybe you’ll just find somebody else who doesn’t have your refined sense of humor, style, and taste, and then tell them.
Following these few simple steps covers your job as a reader to help poor, desperate me find more readers. I thank you in advance for your effort.
Then there’s the money. I’ve been promising for the past nine months to give those of you so inclined a place to show your support by tossing a dollar into my cup on the eSidewalk. Much as a street performer can entertain you for five or ten minutes and induce you to toss your pocket change into their open guitar case, I hope that you find what you will be reading here sufficient reason to throw a pittance in my direction.
To make that oh so convenient, you will start to see “Support” buttons popping up on my website on pages where I hope to catch you at a weak moment and get you to commit an impulse purchase of one dollar. Just as retailers put all this cheap worthless junk up by the checkouts, I hope that my carefully selected product offerings will trick you out of that one dollar bill burning a hole in your pocket.
If you click on one of the “Support” buttons you will be taken to PayPal where you can safely and securely drop your one dollar into my eCup. In the unlikely event that you don’t have a PayPal account, you can easily use your credit card in a secure transaction. How much easier could it get? Plus it’s safe. You won’t have to worry about getting mugged while you’re fishing around for the dollar.
Which, finally, brings me around – as much as I hate to admit it – to the weak link in the whole plan, which, as usual, is me. When is all this going to happen? Yeah! I know, I know. I told you a number of times that there would be NEW FICTION! Gasp! ENTERTAINING ARTICLES Hurray! And other such balderdash. Quite frankly, I have failed to deliver. But I do feel confident in saying, yet again, that there will soon be real new fiction on my website. I feel confident in saying, for the umpteenth time, that there will soon be a place to offer your one dollar of support. And soon, very soon I hope, there will be more “Like” buttons, Tweet buttons, and “email this to a friend” links than you can shake a stick out.
Because “soon” is today.
My first offering of fictional storytelling is “Apotheosis” and is available to download to your eReader or computer, or to read online today. Today, as in Right Now. “Apotheosis” is a short story about what it’s really like on the other side of the fine line we step over when we depart this mortal coil. It tells the tale of what the afterlife has in store for all of us. The story follows a character into the depths of Hell and tells his tale of enlightenment and, what may actually be, a path to salvation. Sort of like Siddhartha with a laugh track.
Then, if you really like the story, just click on the “Support” button. Your one dollar will be taken from under your sofa cushions and magically appear in my busker’s cup. That’s when the plan will have finally come together.
Thanks for staying with the blog for all these months. I really appreciate seeing the number of readers continue to go up. I hope you like the story and when you want to read it just click the picture.