Dale’s Comments (group member since Sep 15, 2017)

Dale’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Winter stargazing: fun and easy, if a bit chilly. The Winter Hexagon

Alicya wrote: "Does anyone know anything about Top Shelf?
I keep getting emails from them about advertising but since I'm always getting book promoters contacting me I'm skeptical.
Are they worth looking at or an..."

Don't know the name, but I did some searching. I can't find print circulation figures. They claim 50,000 visitors and a quarter million page views per month. But they don't have enough traffic for an Alexa ranking, so they aren't a huge site.

They have a couple of relatively cheap advertising products, including a $25 "discovery listing" and a $75 "web spotlight. They claim to review every book promoted in the magazine. I'd guess you can probably get some decent exposure for the money with those two packages, although it might not lead to significant sales. It usually takes repeated advertising to get many people to make a purchase.

That's about all I can say about it.

A new short story at Lit Up: Mr. Smith's Shed

My next Writing Cooperative story: Collaboration, in which I talk about collaborating on a story with my wife Kathleen.

D.J. wrote: "I've seriously had nothing since I put the book in KU and reactivated the UK Amazon ads. In fact there's been nothing since I bought the books for the Miami Book fair. I've got to look into doing t..."

I've never put anything on KU, but it always sounded to me like a bad deal. They give you a few perks, but you restrict yourself to a single market during the very time period in which most books sell most of their copies. I guess that's good for Amazon, but probably not for most authors.

Here's a very good blog post on self-publishing in the current environment:

https://annerallen.com/2018/09/self-p...

My next stargazing post: Seeing Faint

Sounds like a great initiative. I'll email them.

Rhonda wrote: "My book cover is a semi-finalist @authorsdb in the young adult section. I kind of think it's now a popularity contest and since I've never been very popular, I thought I'd ask for help. If you like..."

Congratulations!

My next Publishous story: The Art of Gentle (nonfiction).

Here's something different. Lit Up's November prompt asks writers to choose a photo from a set of photos and write a "55er" based on it. What's a 55er? I didn't know, either, until this prompt. It's a 55 word story written in 10 sentences of decreasing length: a 10-word sentence, a 9-word sentence, an 8-word sentence, ... and finally a 1-word sentence. My entry is called Foreshadowed. I hope you enjoy it.

My next astronomy story: How Dim Is Dim?

This will be my last one until after the holiday weekend.

D.J. wrote: "Ooh I like those Dale. I'm very behind with my reading. I will catch up"

Thank you!

D.J. wrote: "When was Thanksgiving? Did you have it? Hope it was good. Happy probably belated Thanksgiving."

It's tomorrow (11/22) in the U.S., but was 11/8 in Canada.

Happy Thanksgiving, all . . . whenever it is or was!

My next astronomy piece: Orion Rising. Go out and look up!

Two of mine were published today, one fiction, one on writing:

Trophy, published in Lit Up

Symbolism in Fiction, published in The Writing Cooperative.

My latest from Publishous: Erased, a short story. This is an expanded version of my earlier flash fiction work, "The Window." I wanted to give one of the characters more depth and add some background to the situation. I think it worked . . .

Sam (Rescue Dog Mom, Writer, Hugger) wrote: "I did it again! I left out an important sentence in my article that provides additional meaning and explains my difficulty! Smacking myself upside the head... hard! For those of you who already rea..."

Eh. It happens. I often end up fixing typos and sometimes bad wording in my stories after they're published. At least it's easy to fix errors on Medium.

You're both quite welcome!

Kimberly wrote: "Just 1 more question before I dive in. Is your work on there protected? Are there rules in place to protect your work?"

Medium's Terms of Service are here. See the section "Content rights & responsibilities." That probably answers your main questions.