Mary Sisson's Blog, page 49

This is not impressive

So far I have 11 keywords up on the Bing campaign, and this is the message I get for 10 of them when I check to see if the ads associated with them are being displayed.

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Yeah, OK. I've already had to contact support because my account was "suspended" (not actually suspended, it just told you that it was, because that's good design), and at this point I'm feeling like the PIA factor is pretty ridiculous. I know it's been a while, but what I recall of advertising on Facebook was that it was truly "set it and forget it"--you weren't expected to ride herd on it to make sure it did what it had to do in order for the company to make any money....

And, by accident

Hey! I'm actually doing a little promotion, entirely due to chance! I wanted to improve the search-engine optimization for BlockB.com, so I signed on to the Bing Web administrator thingy, and they gave me a coupon for $100 in free advertising on Bing, Yahoo, and some other search engine no one actually uses, I don't remember what it's called.

I never tried search-engine advertising before (I mostly stuck with Facebook), but hey, it's free, so I figured I'd put in a little text ad for Trang. We shall see if it has any impact or is worth doing.

It will also be interesting because when I last did this three years ago, I got the best results by explicitly targeting Kindle users. It will be interesting to see if that helps this time around, or if people are just so used to reading on their phones at this point that it won't matter....

Progress report

Not a lot done today (and even less done yesterday because of other responsibilities), but I did manage to sketch out how the next scene is going to go. I'm pretty happy with it--in this volume some minor characters become a bit more major, so it's fun to flesh out how they're going to sound.

Progress report

There was some quality procrastination going on because the scene is pretty dark and unpleasant, but today I bit the bullet and go it done! 1,290 words!

Progress report

OK! The holidays have been the holidays, but I am back in the saddle today, huzzah! 1,040 words!!!

Progress report

A little busy today, but I looked over the earlier chapters (I'm quite a bit further along than I realized!), did some tweaking, and hopefully have set myself up for some good work tomorrow.

And then I'm going to have to get a shot, but fingers crossed that won't be such a huge deal now that it's been a month since my last one.

Crawling back out

All right--things have been very busy for lots of reasons, but it looks like the weather will clear after Tuesday, so hopefully I can get back in the saddle soon after that.

Lots of allergens + lots of antihistamines =

Yeah, the only thing brewing inside my head right now is a sinus infection. Hopefully I can nip it in the bud....

I got my last shot/You get a free book

Last allergy shot was yesterday! Yay! Now I'm back on the once-a-month schedule, thank the Lord.

And my sister's book is free for the next five days! Check it out!!

Go, sis!

My sister has taken the plunge and self-published a novella! It's called The Brother on My Back, and it's a Sherlock Holmes story (he's in the public domain)--but Sherlock is, like, 14, and it's set in the 1990s. Let's say there was considerable debate over whether or not she should just rename the character, but a lot of the storylines are related to the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, so she felt she could not in good conscience.

It's on Amazon, and she will be doing a five-day free giveaway starting Thursday, so give it a whirl, and if you like it, please review it! If you really like it, she's got others--I think three are basically written.