So I made about the best pop-art ad in my history; it was a classic and at least one friend pointed that out. It led to a page advertising all ten of my short stories. This was a short-story campaign. I put it on Facebook, Twitter, my blog promotion site, and on various Facebook sites. On Facebook I had found about twenty sites that accepted book promos and even welcomed them, and I put it on each one. A great ad, a great launch page, and even a kindle promo (99 cents on the newest and best of the stories) to throw into the deal.

In short, it was a wash. I only got nine views of the launching site altogether, no sales. Whether anyone clicked from the launching site into my various Amazon book sites, I don't know; if those nine even become more familiar with my work I can at least say there was a benefit. Some of my Facebook friends are already familiar with my work but may have gone in there just out of idle curiosity. Most people didn't click the link. They liked the pop art; they put a "like" on the posts, if they saw them, but they didn't buy anything.

Should I just accept this as the price of doing business? I knew that idea of blanketing the Facebook kindle sites was kind of hot air, a bunch of noise on a pile of noise. I am not sure anyone is really using those sites to buy or read books and I know that the authors who dump stuff on there, myself included, are too busy to check out anything anyone else dumps on there.

On Twitter you have a few people who systematically retweet anything an author puts out. They seem to be grateful that I have ten books of stories with one on sale and they are glad to tell all their audience, no matter how wide, about it. I myself have a thousand followers, of whom maybe a hundred will see it, depending on when they get on there I assume, but to most of them it's random noise too. I don't often get readers from Twitter, though I've gotten a few.

My next campaign is haiku, and it will go on the haiku and poetry sites as well as the big three (my FB, Twitter, and blog promo), and the twenty or so abovementioned Facebook sites. I am not going to get on Tik Tok or Instagram (maybe I should?) but rather just feel like the short story audience is somewhere else, still eluding my fine pop art and collection of ten sets of short stories, all reasonably good in my opinion.

It's something to think about.

This actually falls under the category of fanatic constant monitoring of somewhat pointless author ratings, which I've become obsessed with. I actually had a victory in this regard which i am inclined to document, if only because so much of this is, as I said, pointless. Amazon sucks us into wanting ratings to keep improving - well, I can't really blame Amazon, they just make the ratings and we are sucker to them naturally. All the work I do - I actually read all these other books - I do so that I will get readers and the main benefit of getting readers is getting ratings. When you appear to be more successful you get more business just by that appearance.

It is my hope that people don't look at my reviews and say, "these were all done by other desperate indie authors," because sometimes I look at them, and say something very similar to that. I have some non-author fans out there, but not many, so the vast majority of them are done by other indie authors who have in effect traded reading mine for having someone read theirs. I still learn from it; I enjoy it; I don't mind the reading. Sometimes it wears on me. Sometimes I wish I could just wake up and have my books selling off the shelves.

So anyway working the read-marketing lists I put my opus, epiphany coup haiku, 80 haiku from an unusual day , on one of the lists and it's possible that two people snagged it at once; in fact those two may have been from the UK. the book is doing well these days although not as well as i'd want given that it is actually january sixth today so if it going to do well, now would be the time. because perhaps two people snagged it at once, it became #1 in Japanese haiku in the UK for a short while. This was the first time I'd ever been #1 in anything, anywhere, so that calls for a celebration.

I should put a little qualifier in there. First, Japanese haiku in the UK is one of the easiest categories to win, as it just doesn't have all that much action. Sure, there's haiku in the UK, and people know what it is, but it turns out that if a couple of people read your book that's all it takes for it to rise to the top. Second, we all know it isn't going to stay that way and by nightfall some other haiku book will be bought on kindle and totally replace it. My books are not being bought, they're only being read, so they are not going to stay #1 for long. But the main point is, I was at the top of that list for a minute.

Now back to the grind. I have like four books on the table, in return for which, someone is out there reading something.