R.J. Askew's Blog: Indie tester, page 5
May 12, 2012
CELEBRATING SALES
The ritual is this: log on, go to dtp.amazon.com, sign in, hit 'Reports', hit 'Month-to-date Unit Sales,' eye the numbers, hit 'amzon.co.uk', eye numbers.
Ach, what is this?
One of the numbers has changed. There's been a sale, no, TWO sales.
What to do?
How do we cope with this unexpected bounty when we are have grown used to signing on, time after time, day after day, and finding no change in the numbers?
And why are numbers of such primal importance to us when words and their creation are what we live for?
Sometimes we are stunned, don't quite believe what we see, have to double check, delve into 'Prior Six Weeks' and 'Prior Months'. And even then we are sceptical.
In this mood, our celebration will be minimal. We may sniff, swallow, pucker out lips in some way. We are happy inside, but not happy enough to show it. Not that there is anyone around anyway, as this ritual is often gone through while alone.
Is it that we don't expect to succeed, are so steeped in stoicism, we somehow resent any change in the familiar pattern?
We sniff again perhaps, and try to convince ourselves to be a little happier. 'Two sales: HOOT, HOOT.' But we are not really into it, the two hoots are forced. And the moment has passed. Delayed triumph is just not triumph.
We walk away in a confused state. We have suffered during months of painful ig-nor-ance. Now we can't enjoy a flicker of interest from two kindly strangers. We may even resent the fact that we have earned 60 Amerian cents, that all our efforts have produced two krill. A sardine wld starve on this fare. We hate the two kindly stranges for putting us through this torment, wish we cld tell them to reverse their purchases, to give us back our equanimity. We force ourselves to look away.
The next day normality returns. The numbers have not changed. We even check amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.it, amazon.es, just to be sure. There is no need to do this as there have never been any numbers to be found on any of them, not even a line of noughts.
Then the anger resent rises up, wild, mad resentment. Why have the numbers not changed? What is wrong with those people? Why are the not filling their trollies with our goodies? Don't they know we designed and created our own front cover? Don't they know we have our voice on soundcloud.com? What is wrong with them, them, them, them? Not us. We are fine, balanced, normal, t*******. We are not wrong? They are. Anger changes to despair. A cup of tea on and we are numb again, safely numb, all is well. We can go about our daily business.
Alas, our daily business involves repeating the exact same dysfunctional pattern every couple of hours, with exactly the same result.
This goes on for a couple of days.
We start to fantasies about the next number, variously trying to bully it, make love to it, ignore it. Other people swim thrice its number as an offering to the gods of numbers and sales.
And then, maybe ten entire days late, during which we will have checked the numbers say 30 or 40 times, click. One of the numbers has clicked on one. We are creative black belts, tenth dan, once more. We have had a sale.
This time there is no delay. We clench our fists, our pectrals tense, we bare clenched teeth and utter ... a strangulated, almost whispered, 'yes'. That's it. No more. We sigh, not out of triumph, out of a deep and needy sense of relief. We may not be scaling the amazon best seller list, but nor are we still sinking back into the slime where the broken bodies of other doomed spear-carriers lay themselves down to morph slowly into fossils that will become some new oil deposit in a hundred million years.
Might it not be wise to look just once every year or two? Or even to ignore dtp.amazon.com, 'Reports', altogeter.
Yes, but we are not wise.
Tomorrow, I will think about moving towards a sitution where I might possibly consider re-reading THE MEDITARIONS of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who rose about the pain and pleasure of it all. Yes, that is what we shall do. We shall get Marcus down from the shelf. There is no actual need to actually read him again as that will depress us. But just knowing that he is there, to hand, will definitely be a comfort when we find ourselves clickerty-clicking towards those mocking figures once more. I swear to you the number 7 sniggered at me on Tuesday morning, positivley sniggered. They know their power those numbers do.
And just so you know, I have checked my figures twice in the short time it has taken for this puddle of woe to form before my eyes.
I wld like to think that the numbers might have clicked on just to mock me and so kept on adding graph after graph in a mad terrorise them into escalation. Ach, I am even chosing words of many syllables, such is my madness.
Should I ever achieve another sale, I will think no more about it.
Actually, you know that that is the most monstrous of lies. And here is the link to Watching Swifts in case you want to spin my plate and watch me w-w-wobble precariously on and on and on and on...forever...more.
http://rjaskew.com/
Ach, what is this?
One of the numbers has changed. There's been a sale, no, TWO sales.
What to do?
How do we cope with this unexpected bounty when we are have grown used to signing on, time after time, day after day, and finding no change in the numbers?
And why are numbers of such primal importance to us when words and their creation are what we live for?
Sometimes we are stunned, don't quite believe what we see, have to double check, delve into 'Prior Six Weeks' and 'Prior Months'. And even then we are sceptical.
In this mood, our celebration will be minimal. We may sniff, swallow, pucker out lips in some way. We are happy inside, but not happy enough to show it. Not that there is anyone around anyway, as this ritual is often gone through while alone.
Is it that we don't expect to succeed, are so steeped in stoicism, we somehow resent any change in the familiar pattern?
We sniff again perhaps, and try to convince ourselves to be a little happier. 'Two sales: HOOT, HOOT.' But we are not really into it, the two hoots are forced. And the moment has passed. Delayed triumph is just not triumph.
We walk away in a confused state. We have suffered during months of painful ig-nor-ance. Now we can't enjoy a flicker of interest from two kindly strangers. We may even resent the fact that we have earned 60 Amerian cents, that all our efforts have produced two krill. A sardine wld starve on this fare. We hate the two kindly stranges for putting us through this torment, wish we cld tell them to reverse their purchases, to give us back our equanimity. We force ourselves to look away.
The next day normality returns. The numbers have not changed. We even check amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.it, amazon.es, just to be sure. There is no need to do this as there have never been any numbers to be found on any of them, not even a line of noughts.
Then the anger resent rises up, wild, mad resentment. Why have the numbers not changed? What is wrong with those people? Why are the not filling their trollies with our goodies? Don't they know we designed and created our own front cover? Don't they know we have our voice on soundcloud.com? What is wrong with them, them, them, them? Not us. We are fine, balanced, normal, t*******. We are not wrong? They are. Anger changes to despair. A cup of tea on and we are numb again, safely numb, all is well. We can go about our daily business.
Alas, our daily business involves repeating the exact same dysfunctional pattern every couple of hours, with exactly the same result.
This goes on for a couple of days.
We start to fantasies about the next number, variously trying to bully it, make love to it, ignore it. Other people swim thrice its number as an offering to the gods of numbers and sales.
And then, maybe ten entire days late, during which we will have checked the numbers say 30 or 40 times, click. One of the numbers has clicked on one. We are creative black belts, tenth dan, once more. We have had a sale.
This time there is no delay. We clench our fists, our pectrals tense, we bare clenched teeth and utter ... a strangulated, almost whispered, 'yes'. That's it. No more. We sigh, not out of triumph, out of a deep and needy sense of relief. We may not be scaling the amazon best seller list, but nor are we still sinking back into the slime where the broken bodies of other doomed spear-carriers lay themselves down to morph slowly into fossils that will become some new oil deposit in a hundred million years.
Might it not be wise to look just once every year or two? Or even to ignore dtp.amazon.com, 'Reports', altogeter.
Yes, but we are not wise.
Tomorrow, I will think about moving towards a sitution where I might possibly consider re-reading THE MEDITARIONS of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who rose about the pain and pleasure of it all. Yes, that is what we shall do. We shall get Marcus down from the shelf. There is no actual need to actually read him again as that will depress us. But just knowing that he is there, to hand, will definitely be a comfort when we find ourselves clickerty-clicking towards those mocking figures once more. I swear to you the number 7 sniggered at me on Tuesday morning, positivley sniggered. They know their power those numbers do.
And just so you know, I have checked my figures twice in the short time it has taken for this puddle of woe to form before my eyes.
I wld like to think that the numbers might have clicked on just to mock me and so kept on adding graph after graph in a mad terrorise them into escalation. Ach, I am even chosing words of many syllables, such is my madness.
Should I ever achieve another sale, I will think no more about it.
Actually, you know that that is the most monstrous of lies. And here is the link to Watching Swifts in case you want to spin my plate and watch me w-w-wobble precariously on and on and on and on...forever...more.
http://rjaskew.com/
April 23, 2012
LONDON GHOST BIKE
I took a pic this morning of one of London's ghost bikes.
Whenever a cyclist dies on London's roads, a ghostly white bike appears chained to a railing, or in the case of the one I photographed this morning a lamp-post, close to the spot where the cyclist lost their life.
The message of the bikes is clear. They are a memorial and they are a warning to the rest of us.
The bike I photographed in the rain this morning is close to Kings Cross Station where a young woman, just 24, lost her life, last November.
Her name was Deep Lee.
The bikes also hold a warning to those of us who cycle, to beware, especially on London's merciless roads.
And they are a warning to London's impatient motorists.
More people are cycling in London for all the right reasons. It is not right that thay should lost their live for doing the right thing.
The lines of the following ghost verse are to London's impatient motorists.
Not all cyclists are saints. But I have yet to hear of a cyclist killing a van, truck, bus, taxi, or car driver in one of the many accidents involving cyclists in London.
So here y'go. I will attach the photograph of the ghostly memorial to Deep Lee to my other pics here.
LONDON GHOST BIKE
Following, always a-following
Following you now
Riderless
Ticking of spokes
What?!?
Just a bike!
A riderless bike
All white, just a-coasting along behind you
Bell, white
Saddle, white
Tyres ... white
White, whites, eyes, white
Can you see me? Deep Lee
Sharper now?
Or now?
Moreso on your way a-home
Late at night, No-No-November
To an empty, emptier, emptying red, bed, bled, dead
http://rjaskew.com/
Whenever a cyclist dies on London's roads, a ghostly white bike appears chained to a railing, or in the case of the one I photographed this morning a lamp-post, close to the spot where the cyclist lost their life.
The message of the bikes is clear. They are a memorial and they are a warning to the rest of us.
The bike I photographed in the rain this morning is close to Kings Cross Station where a young woman, just 24, lost her life, last November.
Her name was Deep Lee.
The bikes also hold a warning to those of us who cycle, to beware, especially on London's merciless roads.
And they are a warning to London's impatient motorists.
More people are cycling in London for all the right reasons. It is not right that thay should lost their live for doing the right thing.
The lines of the following ghost verse are to London's impatient motorists.
Not all cyclists are saints. But I have yet to hear of a cyclist killing a van, truck, bus, taxi, or car driver in one of the many accidents involving cyclists in London.
So here y'go. I will attach the photograph of the ghostly memorial to Deep Lee to my other pics here.
LONDON GHOST BIKE
Following, always a-following
Following you now
Riderless
Ticking of spokes
What?!?
Just a bike!
A riderless bike
All white, just a-coasting along behind you
Bell, white
Saddle, white
Tyres ... white
White, whites, eyes, white
Can you see me? Deep Lee
Sharper now?
Or now?
Moreso on your way a-home
Late at night, No-No-November
To an empty, emptier, emptying red, bed, bled, dead
http://rjaskew.com/
April 20, 2012
THE LITTERING OF LONDON
1,000 business cards packed in four small boxes arrive. I open one and check for literals. There are none.
They show the front cover of a certain ebook of such rare distinction no one can understand it.
A fetching orange and yellow background with the angled black silhouette of a swift bleeding off the sides of each crisp card. 1,000 of them. Quality.
My web site is jogging along, garnering hits in a desultory manner, none of which have converted into ebook sales as yet as far as one can tell.
So, too, my Facebook advertising. My ad did well in Iceland. Perhaps because of the sunny nature of said front cover. But no known sales, as yet. Tres mal.
And so the Vistaprint and 1,000 cards with said sunny front cover to the fore, website, email, amazon links on B-side. Contemporary fiction, it says. I have a copy on my keyboard here as I type.
The card represents, no, is, a sliver of my creative soul. Much rides on it. So brignt and positive. How can it fail?
I leave the first one on a train into London. It feels strange. I am sheepish about it, just as I am sheepish about all to do with my writing. Other words spring to mind: shy, secrative, sly. I wish it were otherwise.
No matter. I will go to places where literary folk gather. I will smile and circulate, reach into my pocket at apt moments. Cards will pass from hand to hand. My sales will soar in keeping with the theme of my achingly poetical novella, WATCHING SWIFTS.
The fact I am disconnected from all that is cool in the second decade of the twenty-first century will matter not. I know it.
I secrete the odd card among the sugar sachets in Starbucks in London's Canary Wharf. I watch in horror as a waiter sweeps one left on a counter into a bin. There is a malice in the motion of his hand. My soul bleeds.
I watch as a tired commuter sits on a card deftly left on a seat on a train out of London. I retrieve said card when said commuter gets off said train.
Another train, another commuter, a young woman, says, 'Excuse me sir, you've dropped your business card.' I smile and thank her as I pocked the 'dropped' card. Little does she know.
I visit London's Kew Gardens where my neglected, and failing story is set. I strew fifty cards perhaps in the most obscure and beautiful places I can find. The bark of certain capital trees offers great potential to your determined poet with 1,000 shards of soul to scatter.
I sign the guest book in the Marianne North Gallery and leave a card in said book.
The District Line tube from Kew to Westminster is favoured with five or six cards. Those damned cards! How I hate them!
I watch for places where people with Kindles sit a-reading. I also watch for litter collectors with their plastic bags.
I be-card a poster on London Bridge station advertising some other writer's outpourings. 'Sold over 14-milion copies,' the poster says. I notice en passant a week on that my card is still there, unnoticed by litter collectors and Kindle readers alike. I am simultaneously ecstatic and devastated it is still there. Thousands of people have passed within inches. Platform 5. Have a look if you there there tomorrow.
I slip cards between bars of dark chocolate in a supermarket. The chocolate is in orange packageing which I regard as fitting. I slide them among stacks of napkins in cafes, and into copies of the New Yorker and like journals in newsagents.
I devlop a technique for slapping cards onto alfresco cafe tables as I pass. The trick is not to seem furtive, to seem to have a perfect right to slap said card down sans shame.
I leave them on train windows, facing outwards so that people on the platforms will see them before boarding. I leave them in the lift-down trays on the backs of train seats to beat the litter collectors.
There is no end to the creativity of my littering. I pass back and forth through London, eyes darting from place to place, looking, wondering, checking. A bus timetable on a bus stop near St.Pauls Cathedral finds favour, a certain wall behind Mansion House in the City of London. I smile as I notice the card is still there three days on.
300 cards gone, I pause to reflect.
In the two weeks of my below the line advertising campaign, of scattering my branded message around London, my sales have risen... No matter! The information is a between me and my sanity.
Many of the cards are of course swept away and never seen by an ebook reading member of the walking around British public.
This makes me think.
I should explain perhaps that my mania is now in an advanced state. I no longer write now being some kind of strange post-creative husk, a carapace of disbodied determination.
The next step is obvious. I have to press said cards directly into the hands of those reading their Kindle in public. Mad, yes. But also glaringly obvious from a marketing perspective. Yes, I will be rebuffed, will annoy. But what of it? My duty is to the words. I am their servant. The acceptance of a card by one person will outweight the rejection of twenty.
And so, should you be in London for the Olympics, just suppose, and you see a seemingly crazed man in, this is quite possible, a harlequin suit complete with painted face and matching jesters hat with bells, keep calm. And should said man sway your way on some semi-crowedd tube train stuck in some sweltering tunnel under Oxford Street and seek to press an orange and yellow card into your hand please humour him and accept his card. You can always bin it at Bond Street. For he is innocent, far too innocent for this world. And will soon be on his way.
The really worrying news is this. Once the 1,000 cards are gone I plan to begin my global Twitter campain with 1,000 Twits a day. That is to say, I plan to complete my failure. I may even start following my new best friend for life, Stephen Fry.
I won't expect an answer when I twit him of course.
http://rjaskew.com/
They show the front cover of a certain ebook of such rare distinction no one can understand it.
A fetching orange and yellow background with the angled black silhouette of a swift bleeding off the sides of each crisp card. 1,000 of them. Quality.
My web site is jogging along, garnering hits in a desultory manner, none of which have converted into ebook sales as yet as far as one can tell.
So, too, my Facebook advertising. My ad did well in Iceland. Perhaps because of the sunny nature of said front cover. But no known sales, as yet. Tres mal.
And so the Vistaprint and 1,000 cards with said sunny front cover to the fore, website, email, amazon links on B-side. Contemporary fiction, it says. I have a copy on my keyboard here as I type.
The card represents, no, is, a sliver of my creative soul. Much rides on it. So brignt and positive. How can it fail?
I leave the first one on a train into London. It feels strange. I am sheepish about it, just as I am sheepish about all to do with my writing. Other words spring to mind: shy, secrative, sly. I wish it were otherwise.
No matter. I will go to places where literary folk gather. I will smile and circulate, reach into my pocket at apt moments. Cards will pass from hand to hand. My sales will soar in keeping with the theme of my achingly poetical novella, WATCHING SWIFTS.
The fact I am disconnected from all that is cool in the second decade of the twenty-first century will matter not. I know it.
I secrete the odd card among the sugar sachets in Starbucks in London's Canary Wharf. I watch in horror as a waiter sweeps one left on a counter into a bin. There is a malice in the motion of his hand. My soul bleeds.
I watch as a tired commuter sits on a card deftly left on a seat on a train out of London. I retrieve said card when said commuter gets off said train.
Another train, another commuter, a young woman, says, 'Excuse me sir, you've dropped your business card.' I smile and thank her as I pocked the 'dropped' card. Little does she know.
I visit London's Kew Gardens where my neglected, and failing story is set. I strew fifty cards perhaps in the most obscure and beautiful places I can find. The bark of certain capital trees offers great potential to your determined poet with 1,000 shards of soul to scatter.
I sign the guest book in the Marianne North Gallery and leave a card in said book.
The District Line tube from Kew to Westminster is favoured with five or six cards. Those damned cards! How I hate them!
I watch for places where people with Kindles sit a-reading. I also watch for litter collectors with their plastic bags.
I be-card a poster on London Bridge station advertising some other writer's outpourings. 'Sold over 14-milion copies,' the poster says. I notice en passant a week on that my card is still there, unnoticed by litter collectors and Kindle readers alike. I am simultaneously ecstatic and devastated it is still there. Thousands of people have passed within inches. Platform 5. Have a look if you there there tomorrow.
I slip cards between bars of dark chocolate in a supermarket. The chocolate is in orange packageing which I regard as fitting. I slide them among stacks of napkins in cafes, and into copies of the New Yorker and like journals in newsagents.
I devlop a technique for slapping cards onto alfresco cafe tables as I pass. The trick is not to seem furtive, to seem to have a perfect right to slap said card down sans shame.
I leave them on train windows, facing outwards so that people on the platforms will see them before boarding. I leave them in the lift-down trays on the backs of train seats to beat the litter collectors.
There is no end to the creativity of my littering. I pass back and forth through London, eyes darting from place to place, looking, wondering, checking. A bus timetable on a bus stop near St.Pauls Cathedral finds favour, a certain wall behind Mansion House in the City of London. I smile as I notice the card is still there three days on.
300 cards gone, I pause to reflect.
In the two weeks of my below the line advertising campaign, of scattering my branded message around London, my sales have risen... No matter! The information is a between me and my sanity.
Many of the cards are of course swept away and never seen by an ebook reading member of the walking around British public.
This makes me think.
I should explain perhaps that my mania is now in an advanced state. I no longer write now being some kind of strange post-creative husk, a carapace of disbodied determination.
The next step is obvious. I have to press said cards directly into the hands of those reading their Kindle in public. Mad, yes. But also glaringly obvious from a marketing perspective. Yes, I will be rebuffed, will annoy. But what of it? My duty is to the words. I am their servant. The acceptance of a card by one person will outweight the rejection of twenty.
And so, should you be in London for the Olympics, just suppose, and you see a seemingly crazed man in, this is quite possible, a harlequin suit complete with painted face and matching jesters hat with bells, keep calm. And should said man sway your way on some semi-crowedd tube train stuck in some sweltering tunnel under Oxford Street and seek to press an orange and yellow card into your hand please humour him and accept his card. You can always bin it at Bond Street. For he is innocent, far too innocent for this world. And will soon be on his way.
The really worrying news is this. Once the 1,000 cards are gone I plan to begin my global Twitter campain with 1,000 Twits a day. That is to say, I plan to complete my failure. I may even start following my new best friend for life, Stephen Fry.
I won't expect an answer when I twit him of course.
http://rjaskew.com/
