Nearly done with this, it’s hovering somewhere between novelette and novella length. Thank you to Mary Robinette Kowal for suggesting the title.
Friendly Village loops and winds, tiny roads scattered among the trailers. Every patch of landscaping is different ““ cacti surrounded one mobile home, followed by a forest of rhododendrons, then dahlias that might have originated in my own garden.
Up along the creek ran a little road, unlined with homes. It led to a trailer of a peculiar pearly hue that might have been mistaken for grime at first. It was a Nordic style, almost, simulated white pine beams, rough wrought ironwork on the walls. Its landscaping was bare: a line of rocks, two tiny fir trees, one slightly larger than the other.
Outside, a massive rock crouched beside the mailbox.
In Greek mythology, such stones were sacred to Aphrodite. But I didn’t think a Greek God lurked within.
I’d taken the time to change into a shirt with a pattern of sunglasses. Not the most subtle enchantment, but that was deceptive. It hung a little oddly due to the lining I inserted, fashioned entirely from a different shirt, one patterned with shells, and it helped that the artist had depicted them as fragile things made of spines and arcs, but thick white clam shells. There was enough protection that shirt that it felt as heavy as a full suit of plate mail, even altered my gate a little, made it more of a shuffle.
A man stood on the front porch, watching me approach. His attitude was expectant, perhaps even a little impatient, as though my visit was overdue. His gray beard hung down to his belly, woolly as a blanket. His eyes were blue and a few golden strands showed among the silver on his scalp to attest to his Nordic heritage.
I stopped a few feet away, looking at him.
“You’ve come of your own accord,” he said. “It would’ve been easier if you just let them bring you.”
I acted unsurprised, and maybe I was. Occam’s razor again. One) move to a new place. Two) be attacked by a powerful magical adversary. More than time connected that chain.
“I’m Forseti,” he said.
I searched through crumbs of mythology. My knowledge might have only the depth of a Wikipedia article, but it was wide. You learn the names of all the gods, once you realize most still exist and are acting out their own plans, few of which are constructed to advance humanity. Or even take it into account, really.
“Justice, right?” I said.
He dropped a slow nod.
“What justice is there in killing me?” I asked.
He said, “Perhaps you should come inside for tea.”
Love this snippet! Being invited to tea b the deity planning to kill you is s nice hook. I am looking forward to reading the rest when it comes out. The imagery of the crouching rock stuck with me, but I was confused by the description of the shell shirt – is it of delicate, spiny shells or clams?
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Making the Most of GoodReads
(This originally appeared on the SFWA blog.)
Goodreads is the largest reader community site in the world, with over thirteen million members. Goodreads was recently acquired by Amazon, creating worries that the site would change, but Amazon has said they do not intend to make changes. Users can track their reading, find or make book recommendations, and discuss what they’re reading. Goodreads lists self-published books as well as those from professional presses.
Goodreads reaches outside its own site, supplying reviews to Powell’s Books, USA Today, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and Kobo, among others. It supplies lists of books to the popular website Listopia, such as “Best Books of 2012.”
Beyond that, however, Goodreads offers authors tools that they can use to promote books. Using Goodreads, you can create giveaways, post excerpts, and help Goodreads readers discover your books.
When someone joins Goodreads, they create a profile that shows their reading side. Your profile includes optional information such as a photo, location, date of birth, website, reading interests, and a brief bio. Fill it out but be aware that after you’ve added an author profile, the second profile will be what most people see, rather than this one.
Goodreads allows you to maintain lists of what you’ve read, what’s on your to-read list, and what you’re currently reading. Each of these is referred to as a shelf.
You also have a newsfeed, which is displayed on your Goodreads home page, and shows recent news from friends and authors you are following as a fan. You can see what Goodreads events they are attending, whose reviews they are following, when they rate, add, or review a book, and so forth.
As a writer, you can expand your basic profile by adding an author profile and joining the over sixty thousand authors participating in the Goodreads author program. How do you add an author profile? It’s simple. Find one of your books on Goodreads and look for the “Is this you?” link at the bottom. Click on that to claim the book. It will take a few days for Goodreads to confirm you are the author, but they will mail you when your profile has been updated.
Now that you’re a Goodreads author, you’ve got access to a dashboard of new and interesting tools. On the home page, click on “Visit your dashboard,” which should appear near the top on the righthand side. The page that opens up should have Author Dashboard up in the top righthand side under the Goodreads toolbar. You’ll see it displays stats like number of works, which is the number of works attributed to you, and the number of fans and friends.
That section may seem a little mystifying. What’s the difference between “added by unique users,” “fans,” and “friends”? When you are looking at someone’s profile, you can opt to become a fan or add them as a friend. (If they’re not a Goodreads author, the option to add them as a friend will not appear. Goodreads automatically creates pages for authors.) If you are friends with someone, both people have to have approved the relationship, and each will have their reviews and comments displayed in the other’s newsfeed. If you are a fan of someone, their reviews, comments and blog posts will appear in your newsfeed, but they will not see yours. Added by unique users does not affect your newsfeed at all but is the number of people who have added one or more of your works to one of their shelves.
You’ll see all of your works listed in the “My Books” section under your statistics, along with statistics for each, including the number of ratings, the average rating, the number of Goodreads reviews, how many people have it on their to-read shelf, and how many people have it on their currently-reading shelf. You can drill down on each listing: while I don’t believe you can currently add ebooks, you can edit the book’s information and see Goodreads statistics for how many people have added, rated, reviewed, or included that title on their “to-read” list.
Beneath that is your blog. I am still looking for an easy way to push a WordPress blog post to one’s Goodreads blog, but so far I haven’t found one. There are plenty of Goodreads related WordPress plugins (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/goodreads) but the majority of them allow you to display data from Goodreads on your site, such as a list of what you’re currently reading. Generally I mirror a few, but not all of my blog posts, here, because it’s a pain in the butt.
One of the most useful Goodreads Author Tools is their Giveaway system. Go to their giveaway page and you’ll see a wide variety of giveaways, which you can sort by which are ending soon, which are most requested, which are from popular authors, and what’s been recently listed. Goodreads makes it very easy to enter giveaways and allow requesters to add the book to their to-read shelf/. You can set the dates for the giveaway, as well as what countries it’s available in, if you don’t want the cost of shipping something overseas. It does not cost anything to list a giveaway, but be prepared to follow through. You cannot give away e-books as a giveaway, so you will have to bear the cost of shipping.
This is handy because Goodreads promotes the giveaways for you. Over 40,000 users sign up for giveaways on a daily basis, according to Goodreads, which means that mentions of your giveaway are appearing in the newsfeeds of their friends, as well as being accessible from the main giveaway page.
For the best experience, I suggest going through GoodRead’s Author Tutorial, as well as the abundance of other documentation they’ve provided. You’ll want to investigate groups as well as how to run an author Q&A. You can create trivia questions that drive interest in your book or publicize book signings and other promotional events. You may want to add some of its widgets to your blog or website or even pay to use its Self-Serve Advertising platform.
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Social Media: Pinterest Analytics and Links for 3/18/2013
August 8, 2015 edit: Hey folks, Pinterest has changed their analytics. Here’s the resource I used to update mine: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/pinterest-analytics. And for what it’s worth, I realized a lot of you were looking for info and stumbling across this through using them so they’re worth paying attention to!
Some notes: even after I’d verified, Analytics wasn’t appearing in the upper right-hand corner as specified. I logged out and back in, and then chose the “Switch to the New Look” option. At that point, I went back and read the instructions and realized Analytics will not work until you have switched over to the new look, which to me seems pretty similar to the old look.
I didn’t see any data on there at first, just the message, “We don’t have any data yet! Please wait for us to calculate it for you,” but I could see the options: Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned, and Most Clicked, as well as an Export button (always so handy). A day later, the same message was still displaying, but when I drilled down to look at the past seven days, I found I did have some data for the time since I’d validated my website. Pinterest Analytics aren’t semi-real time, the way Google Analytics are. Today’s data is not available until tomorrow.
Site metrics Pinterest will show you, along with my scores for the first few days:
Pins/Pinners:
Pins is the number of times people have pinned from your site, i.e. bookmarked a particular page by pinning an image from it. Pinners is the number of people who have done this. So these are people who are not accessing your site through Pinterest (at least they don’t have to be), but who are using Pinterest to save bookmarks. I a single individual pinned five pages from your site, pins would be five, pinners would be one.
Day one: 1 pin from 1 pinner
Day two: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day three: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day four: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day five: 5 pins, 3 pinners
Repins/Repinners:
Repins is the number of times your content was repinned, meaning someone saw a page that had already been pinned on Pinterest and decided to save it to one of their boards. Repinners is the number of people who did this. So if someone pinned two pages, and one person repinned both of them, repins would be two while repinners would be one.
Day one: 0 repins, 0 repinners
Day two: 10 repins, 10 repinners
Day three: 2 repins, 2 repinners
Day four: 2 repins, 1 repinner
Day five: 3 repins, 3 repinners
Impressions/Reach:
Impressions is the number of times your image(s) appeared to someone on Pinterest, either in the main feed or through viewing a board or search results. Reach is the number of people who saw one or more of your image. I’ve bolded day five’s result, which surprised and pleased me.
Day one: 247 people saw 474 total images
Day two: 324 people saw 1063 total images
Day three: 242 people saw 1347 total images
Day four: 159 people saw 247 total images
Day five: 856 people saw 2957 total images.
Clicks/Visitors:
Clicks is the number of times people clicked on an image and viewed your site. Visitors is the overall number of people who did so.
Day one: Three images were clicked on, each time by a different person. As a note of interest, Google Analytics claims only one visitor from Pinterest that day.
Day two: Eight images, eight different visitors. (Google Analytics reports 6.)
Day three: Twelve images, one visitor. (Google Analytics reports 4.)
Day four: Two images, two visitors. (Google Analytics reports 2.)
Day five: Three clicks, three visitors. (Google Analytics reports 3 as well.)
Factors that might have affected those numbers:
Day three: I re-organized my boards so one with a lot of links pointing back to my site was in the top row. I submitted that board as a StumbleUpon bookmark. And I made one of my boards, fabulous female protagonists, a group board and invited some other people to pin to it.
Day four: I was completely absent from Pinterest activity.
Day five: I pinned a new piece from my site onto a personal board that collects similar pieces from my site.
The most repinned images are images attached to pieces with interesting content. The most repinned one is also one of the most popular pages on my site, 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs. This emphasizes one of the most important points for anyone working with SEO and web traffic stuff: good content is the most crucial thing.
And it’s also interesting to note the discrepancies between what Pinterest and Google Analytics is reporting, which emphasizes something about this sort of investigation: the numbers may be fuzzier than you think they are.
So why would you want to know any of this? Mainly to know if Pinterest is a successful way to drive traffic. It looks to me, based on this, that it’s quite capable of driving traffic and I really like those (relatively) high Impressions/Figure. Beyond that, it’ll let me know if some images are consistently getting pinned more often (or less often) so I can try to figure out why in order to use that knowledge when employing images in the future.
Why be interested in Pinterest as a social medium overall? Well, the jury’s still out in some ways. But it offers a chance to organize information in a new way. I’ve been planning to write up all my class descriptions on the blog and add them here, for example. There’s also some weird gender stuff going on around popular perceptions of it that someone needs to take apart (imo). Here’s an infographic about who’s using Pinterest.
Are you using Pinterest? If so, how do you use it?
Recent Social Media Links of Interest:
WordPress is looking to the future and will be doing more content curation. A lot of folks are hosting their blogs on WordPress and may want to look and see what has a chance of affecting them.
Nearly done with this, it’s hovering somewhere between novelette and novella length. Thank you to Mary Robinette Kowal for suggesting the title.
One Response
Love this snippet! Being invited to tea b the deity planning to kill you is s nice hook. I am looking forward to reading the rest when it comes out. The imagery of the crouching rock stuck with me, but I was confused by the description of the shell shirt – is it of delicate, spiny shells or clams?