Stephanie Faris's Blog, page 69

More Blog Stops and an Exciting Week Ahead!

Check out today's stop on my 30 Days of No Gossip blog tour.

Booklikes
Here are my remaining book tour stops. An exciting giveaway coming up next week, so stay tuned!

Booklikes: March 15Extraordinary Reads: March 16Jaxy's Shared Universe: March 17-24 Elizabeth Seckman, Author: March 28Diane Estrella: March 31

Also...to celebrate my book tour, I'm part of a Rafflecopter (isn't that a cool word?). If you want to enter to win, all you have to do is follow me on Twitter or like my 30 Days of No Gossip Goodreads page. The more sites you follow in the widget below, the more entries you'll have into the giveaway. Here's the widget to get you started:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you already have a Kindle, don't worry. The winner can choose $229 in an Amazon gift card or PayPal cash instead!

Join Me at Jamie L. Kaplan's Blog and Win a Free Autographed Book!

I'm hanging out at author Jamie L. Kaplan's blog today, writing about how much publishing has changed since I wrote my first novel, 20 years ago (gasp!). Click over and be sure to leave a comment because...

I'm giving away a free autographed copy of 30 Days of No Gossip to one lucky commenter. I'll also throw in some of my beautiful bookmarks. Readers can never have too many bookmarks, right?

To read my guest blog and leave a comment, navigate on over to Jamie L. Kaplan's blog:

Jamie L. Kaplan, Author
So far, my book tour is kicking off in a big way. Check me out on the following blogs on these dates:

Get an eBook Review: March 9 Wacky WhatEver (WordPress): March 10Wacky Whatever (Blogger): March 11Books with Bite: March 12Jamie L. Kaplan, Author: March 14Booklikes: March 15Extraordinary Reads: March 16Jaxy's Shared Universe: March 17-24 Elizabeth Seckman, Author: March 28Diane Estrella: March 31

Also...to celebrate my book tour, I'm part of a Rafflecopter (isn't that a cool word?). If you want to enter to win, all you have to do is follow me on Twitter or like my 30 Days of No Gossip Goodreads page. The more sites you follow in the widget below, the more entries you'll have into the giveaway. Here's the widget to get you started:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you already have a Kindle, don't worry. The winner can choose $229 in an Amazon gift card or PayPal cash instead!

Kindles, Blog Tours, and Books...Oh My!

Today I'm hanging out on Books with Bite's blog. It's the fourth stop on my blog tour! Check it out and comment:

Books with Bite
So far, my book tour is kicking off in a big way. Check me out on the following blogs on these dates:

Get an eBook Review: March 9 Wacky WhatEver (WordPress): March 10Wacky Whatever (Blogger): March 11Books with Bite: March 12Jamie L. Kaplan, Author: March 14Booklikes: March 15Extraordinary Reads: March 16Jaxy's Shared Universe: March 17-24 Elizabeth Seckman, Author: March 28Diane Estrella: March 31
If you'd be interested in hosting me on your blog, drop a comment below or email me and we'll set something up. I can do a blog post, you can interview me...or you can just tell the world about my book!
Also...to celebrate my book tour, I'm part of a Rafflecopter (isn't that a cool word?). If you want to enter to win, all you have to do is follow me on Twitter or like my 30 Days of No Gossip Goodreads page. The more sites you follow in the widget below, the more entries you'll have into the giveaway. Here's the widget to get you started:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you already have a Kindle, don't worry. The winner can choose $229 in an Amazon gift card or PayPal cash instead!

Want to Win a Kindle?

To celebrate my book tour, I'm part of a Rafflecopter (isn't that a cool word?). If you want to enter to win, all you have to do is follow me on Twitter or like my 30 Days of No Gossip Goodreads page. The more sites you follow in the widget below, the more entries you'll have into the giveaway. Here's the widget to get you started:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you already have a Kindle, don't worry. The winner can choose $229 in an Amazon gift card or PayPal cash instead!

Today I'm hanging out at Wacky WhatEver's WordPress site. It's the second stop on my blog tour! Check it out and comment:

Wacky WhatEver (WordPress)

So far, my book tour is kicking off in a big way. Check me out on the following blogs on these dates:

Get an eBook Review: March 9 Wacky WhatEver (WordPress): March 10Wacky Whatever (Blogspot): March 11Books with Bite: March 12Booklikes: March 15Extraordinary Reads: March 16Jaxy's Shared Universe: March 17-24 Diane Estrella: March 31
If you'd be interested in hosting me on your blog, drop a comment below or email me and we'll set something up. I can do a blog post, you can interview me...or you can just tell the world about my book!

Let the Blog Tour Begin!

Today I'm being featured on Extraordinary Reads blog. It's the first stop on my blog tour! Check it out and comment:

Get an eBook Review
http://get-an-ebook-review.blogspot.com/

So far, my book tour is kicking off in a big way. Check me out on the following blogs on these dates:

Get an eBook Review: March 9 Wacky WhatEver (WordPress): March 10Wacky Whatever (Blogspot): March 11Books with Bite: March 12Booklikes: March 15Extraordinary Reads: March 16Jaxy's Shared Universe: March 17-24 Diane Estrella: March 31
If you'd be interested in hosting me on your blog, drop a comment below or email me and we'll set something up. I can do a blog post, you can interview me...or you can just tell the world about my book!

30 DAYS of 30 Days of No Gossip

I've spent the past two years reading about other people's blog tours, so this is a very exciting time...

My book is coming out in one week!



So far, my 30 days of blog touring are starting off great. Check me out on the following blogs on these dates:

Get an eBook Review: March 9 Wacky WhatEver (WordPress): March 10Wacky Whatever (Blogspot): March 11Books with Bite: March 12Booklikes: March 15Extraordinary Reads: March 16Jaxy's Shared Universe: March 17-24 Diane Estrella: March 31
If you'd be interested in hosting me on your blog, drop a comment below or email me and we'll set something up. I can do a blog post, you can interview me...or you can just tell the world about my book!

I Hate to Break It to You

I can't remember the last time I heard about a celebrity's death on the news. Michael Jackson, Brittany Murphy, Philip Seymour Hoffman... I learned about every one of those deaths on either Twitter or Facebook.

So when I noticed on CNN's Breaking News page that writer/director/actor Harold Ramis died, my first thought was, "Bet this is already all over social media." I clicked over and guess what?

It wasn't.

I considered posting it myself, but instead I stopped to think about why I would do that. Why anyone would do that. It all goes back to why we gossip...which I've written a little something about. ------->

We want to be the one who knows things. It makes us feel important. I was exposed to that feeling when I was in college, studying to be a TV reporter. News of Operation Desert Storm broke [video] and I thought, "How exciting to be present when history is happening."

But it goes deeper than that. We like to pretend we want to pay tribute to deceased people we barely know--to honor them because they touched our lives somehow. Cartoonist Ash Vickers even designed this tribute, which immediately began circulating on Twitter:


We can't wait to share the news online. Why? Because it makes us feel like we're part of the event. It connects us to other human beings in a very basic way. Yet if someone told us we had to break the news of someone's death to his family members, it would be the last thing in the world we'd want to do. Interesting how that works.

Social media just gives us a new outlet for our gossip. It's the online version of, "Did you hear?" around the water cooler. Speaking as one of the 13.4 million Americans who work from home and therefore no longer have access to a water cooler, we get gossip where we can. And these days, that gossip is on social media.

So the next time a celebrity dies and social media blows up over it, ask yourself--why is everyone so eager to add to the "RIP" posts once someone dies? Is it really to honor the deceased?

Or are there other, slightly more selfish reasons?

Anatomy of an Internet Hoax

Someone posted a video on Facebook a month or so ago that I ended up watching early one Sunday morning. It was a progression of Tweets from a girl in Canada who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and died. I went to the girl's Twitter page and read through all of them...and, for just a minute, I fell for it.



I wanted to read more about this girl. A little time had passed since her supposed death, so surely there would be some details about this "Amanda" person in Ottawa, right? She worked for the government, her video had gone viral...by now, at least 100 people should have come forward to say they'd worked with her, gone to school with her, gone on a date with her and never called again...

Nope. Nothing.

Immediately I knew it was a hoax. I went back to her profile, looked through her Tweets, noted the complete absence of any personal communication with anyone she might know face to face, and dismissed it immediately.

Then a week or so ago, I read something about Munchausen Syndrome and immediately thought of online pranksters who pretend they have some fatal disease (usually cancer) to get attention. My next thought was of Amanda on Twitter...so I went in search of more information. Another month had passed, so SURELY by now someone had seen the viral video of the Tweets (which now has 950,000 views) and come forward to say, "Hey, that's Amanda So-and-So."

Still nothing. However, a very enterprising journalist named Jennifer Mendelsohn went to some major investigative work to determine whether Amanda was a real person or not. If you read through her article, you'll find that 1) nobody died of cancer in Ottawa on that date; 2) doctors can easily poke holes in her claims of a three-day brain cancer diagnosis, and 3) of all of her followers who responded to Mendelsohn's e-mails, not a single one had ever met Amanda in person.

Mendelsohn questions whether someone with Manchausen by Internet (yes, that IS a thing!) would be so low-key about it. My answer is, YES. In the MySpace heyday, I was very active in the blogging community, which sounds geeky but we were a large group of avid readers. Many of us averaged daily views of our blog in the thousands.

There were at least two separate instances I knew of where someone lied about major life events to get attention. One was a woman going by the name of "Babe," who duped most of us into believing she'd come home from work to find her girlfriend dead. Later, she faked her own death in a motorcycle accident--a fact her "new girlfriend" told us by logging into her account to say she was dead. The second time was when a couple of guys convinced everyone one of them was dying of cancer. Turned out, they weren't even guys

Why do these people do it? I'm no psychotherapist, but I think we all have known people who feign illness for attention. They don't have to have millions of followers on an online forum. It could just be the people they work with--six or seven people. I once worked with a woman who had 12 separate conditions she mentioned at one time or another. She just wanted attention. I read somewhere once that sometimes these people grew up with a sick sibling and learned that was how you get attention. They spend their lives trying to make up for the attention Mom and Dad never gave them.

The practice is so rampant on social media, someone has created a
Is Amanda fake? I not only think so--I'm 99 percent certain of it. But if you feel you can get inspiration from reading her Tweets, who cares? She doesn't want anything but attention. I am still curious where she got her profile picture, though. One would think at some point, someone would at least recognize that.

We're All in This Together

The lovely Michelle (Blogger in Transit) is hosting a blog hop this week. The theme? Ubuntu. What is Ubuntu?

Good question. I had to Wikipedia the word myself!

Michelle describes Ubuntu as, "the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievement of others."

It's all about people. The concept is that society itself gives us our humanity. We're surrounded by human beings, which makes us more human.

My first thought was of a blog I'd read only last week from writer S.P Bowers. She mentions a quote from Dale Carnegie about novelists that says that if an author doesn't like people, readers won't like that author's stories. We, as writers, MUST like people.

Fiction writers are expected to strike a delicate balance between being reclusive and being social. We need to be able to spend hours alone with nothing for company but a computer and the characters we're creating. But we also need to be able to head out into society and interact with other human beings.

I'm now in my fifth month as a full-time freelancer. Because much of my work involves writing articles and blogs for a variety of clients, I do have regular interactions with people, primarily through e-mail. However, none of these interactions inspires me to write middle grade fiction. To be fair, though, my day job working with adults between the ages of 30 and 70 didn't go very far in inspiring middle grade fiction, either.

For middle grade authors, it's important to spend time around tweens. Since most tweens want little to do with grown-ups, this remains a challenge. Teachers, parents of teens, librarians...we're all just grown-ups. We aren't in their world. We can do school visits, but we're still just visiting authors. We'll never be one of them.

We can still observe them, though--and that gives us a great excuse to hang out at the mall. Any excuse will do, right?

This is the first day of Michelle's blog hop, so feel free to join in. The rules are here. And while you're there, read the other blogs participating!

Ding Dong. Avon Blogging.

In the 60s, bored housewives (now called "stay at home moms") traveled from one house to the next, pitching lipstick and perfume. These items, made by Avon Products, were sold successfully by enterprising women who helped the company become the fifth-largest cosmetics company in the world.






It's no surprise that Tupperware parties soon followed, pioneering the "direct marketing" concept, as women learned that their friends were a great source of income. Decades of PartyLite, Pampered Chef, jewelry, lingerie, makeup, aromas, and other direct marketing parties ensued, leading record numbers of people to grow exhausted with the people they once called "friends."

Today, nobody has time to spend a Friday evening listening to a sales pitch about the benefits of scrapbooking. But these women continue, both through social media and blogs. In fact, an entire generation of women are currently using their blogs to promote a variety of products, often for financial compensation.

But is this a lucrative business? A Facebook friend recently promoted her latest blog through her Facebook page, but it was entirely about some new MLM she's involved in. I quickly scanned the blog and realized it was all sales pitch, no substance. I then clicked away. If she hadn't been an online friend, I wouldn't have even gotten that far.

I applaud enterprising individuals who successfully mine their real-life and online friends for funds. But with more than half of all Mary Kay consultants making less than $100 in commissions each year, I have to wonder if all of this hard work ever really pays off? If it doesn't, why do people keep doing it? Isn't there an easy way to make money?