I suppose I can't put it off any longer. I just need to bite the bullet and get my knees replaced. I see my doctor today to get the ball rolling. I've been hesitant to get them done because of the two gals I take care of. Fortunately, I have two daughters who will come over to help out.
It was also very frustrating missing the first meeting of the new year for my critique group. I was looking forward to starting out the new year on the right foot by sharing my vision for the future with my friends. I did feel better after several of them e-mailed me today and said they missed me at the meeting. There are so many excellent writers in the group, and I hope to see them published by the end of the year.
I know some of you are not happy that I'll be spending less time on google, but I feel I need to go where the action is. Participation on posts and interactions between people have dried up. Personally, I feel the abundance of negative, political BS has driven people away. I can post a question in one of the communities I belong to on google and I'll be lucky to get one or two people to respond, and these are communities with thousands of members. If i Post the same question in a writers group on FB, I may get twenty or more comments in the first hour.
As far as I can tell, very few new people are coming to google. The communities are stagnating. Even though I have over four thousand folks in my circles. I only see posts from the same ten people each day. Since I joined the group on FB, at least a dozen new people join everyday, and discussions are going on continuously.
It's also been a huge confidence booster as I've received nothing but positive feedback from folks in the FB group about snippets of writing I've shared or they've actually read my stories. As a test, I made my books free for two days last week and only mentioned it in the group and on my blog. I had over two hundred downloads in those two days, and a couple sales the day after. That's more than any other promotion I've run using paid advertising and sharing on google.
Whether all those downloads will result in a few reviews on Amazon remains to be seen, but it was fun being ranked in the top twenty for a day.
OK, I've got to quit and put my leg up. Thanks for reading!
Hey there. Hope your feeling better. We did miss you at the last meeting. The FIRST meeting of 2018, a day lost, never to be repeated, evaporated by the hands of time. I have tell you though, poor Tom. He got really beat up over his short story. But, there's next month and I'm praying you'll be fit as a fiddle by then.
ReplyDeleteI'v heard from those that have had knee and hip replacements they wished they'd done it years earlier. It really does improve quality of life for those suffers.
I'm glad to hear your storys promotion went well. As a full paying customer I don't regret not waiting for the freebie.
I'll take a look at the FB writers group, if I can find it. You're right about google. It's platform has taken a few giant steps backward as far a manageability is concerned. And I've commented in the past about the effectiveness of anything with tens of thousand followers. You have two ends of the scale, one is if everyone of those, oh, lets say 50K followers were to respond regularly there is no way anyone could read and respond to them. Then the other end, where there is a solid core of maybe a dozen that post regularly, but then a agitator comes floating through from time to time and posts material that stirs everyone up, generally political or racist in nature. That upsets us and tends to lead us to take our thoughts on writing elsewhere. We all have hot buttons that is near impossible to resist responding too. I think we all feel the need to rant now and then. I have a separate blog just for that. I try and keep it away from my writing endeavors.
Get well and see you next month. -Jerry
Hey Jerry, sorry it's taken me so long to respond, but it's just been to painful to sit at my desk for very long. There are a lot of groups on FB, and as always, you might have to join and then drop out of several before you find a group that fits you. I eventually found a group that is strictly fantasy and the constant discussions are fun. I'm slowly getting better and think I'll be able to make it to the beta meeting. See you then. Roland.
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