Blogger is being a bear and while I can upload the actual blog information, it immediately goes to draft and won’t post. I’ve got a help ticket into Google but I’m not very hopeful as it takes them forever to answer questions it seems. I’m hoping it will resolve itself but with the latest issue of me not being able to upload pictures as well, I’m not sure what’s going to happen.
Then there is yahoo...what the heck happened to it while I was gone? :-( This is not good and again, things I thought I posted aren’t there and it took forever to get last Saturday’s post to show. All I tried to do was let everyone know I was out of town. There are some days where I wonder if computers are a help or hindrance.
And I remember the dark ages. No, not those times between the Roman Empire and the start of the Anglo-Saxon realm, but when computers were just beginning. Recently, when cleaning out an old box of odd things, I ran across an eight-inch disk. You heard me. I had an old eight-inch floppy disk stuck between two books in a box and I had to laugh. First, floppies were – well – floppy for one. Later they had a hard shell and now they’re flash drives or DVDs. But I know very few people who actually use anything but a flash drive.
I have what my husband calls the flash disk. It’s a passport that I transport between computers instead of saving everything on one machine. It actually saves on the problem of losing things when the box dies or the brain of whatever machine you might be on goes belly up. Right now, I have three backups and there are times when I wonder if that is enough. I’m praying it is. I never want to lose another story again. I haven’t recovered from the last one yet.
Now, back to the internet issues. The thing that gets me about this is these aren’t mine but extensions of what I do. Amazing how two things that are free on the net have become very important to authors and their promotion efforts. In many cases, these are the very essence of promotions. I know I do the majority of my promos on these groups and they give me access to thousands of people.
What’s an author to do when these freebies are bombarded with problems? Punt? But who can we punt to? The fact is that these two social media, along with a few more, are the basis of many an author’s web presence. And if you don’t have a web presence these days, you won’t have readers. Just think, if market standards hold true you will actually hook point one percent (0.1%) of all the people who see your name on the internet. If you can get that number to around ten thousand, that means a thousand people will look at you and supposedly one percent of those will purchase your product so about one hundred people will buy your novels. Therefore, you have to been seen by at least ten thousand new people a day in order to get any real sales.
All I know is that if my web promotions keep getting hit by mysterious ailments, I won’t even get the chance to be seen. And I apologize for not being where I’m supposed to be this week. I’ve been tired from my trip and then having a slew of computer issues, which are slowly getting resolved as I’ve outlined here.
Have you ever had computer problems so bad that all you’ve wanted to do was pound your head against the desk? That’s been my week since I got back. Tell me about your worst time and I’ll put your name in for another five entries for this month’s drawing.
See you tomorrow for This & That Friday.
Lynn
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