Updates

You might say, "Hey you said you weren't blogging!"  And I'd say, "Aaaaaaaaaactually, I said I wouldn't be blogging regularly."  So there, suck it imaginary confused reader!  In your non-existent face!

So anyway, for the first post of 2019 (though not the first post I wrote for 2019 or in 2019), I just wanted to do some updates I stuff I had previously talked about.

In the post Dear Readers:  It's a Trap I wrote about how I wrote a whole book as dark as possible and made it look as dark as possible because I knew some imbecile would complain that a book fully advertised as too dark was too dark.

It took a while, but someone finally fell for it!  I don't usually like 1-star reviews but that was one that made me happy.  It's good when your low expectations of people are met.  So anyway, this book with a scary font and unsmiling (sorta scary) person and called DARK Gender Swap, this idiot complained was a horror story.  Um, yeah, idiot, that's why it was called DARK Gender Swap and not Super Happy Funtime Gender Swap.

As Bill Simmons would say:  Yup, those are my readers.

In the post You're Branded, I mentioned Chuck Wendig's foul-mouthed, in-your-face attitude is his brand.  Apparently Marvel/Disney didn't realize that because last October they fired him from writing Star Wars books because he wasn't civil.  Um, really?  The guy who wrote The Kick-Ass Writer isn't Ned Flanders?

Disney seems to have a problem with that lately as they brought back Roseanne Barr and then fired her a couple episodes in for racist Tweets.  Which if they'd done any kind of homework they would have realized she was a fucking Trump-supporting racist beforehand.  They also had problems with John Carter and Solo because they hired directors who were eminently not qualified to direct big-budget live action sci-fi movies.  Both then went over budget and flopped.  And both cases could have been avoided if Disney actually acquainted themselves with the directors beforehand.  I mean just because someone (or someones) have success with animated movies or comedies doesn't mean they can direct a big live action movie.

By the same token, if someone from Marvel/Disney had read pretty much anything by Wendig, they would have realized that he wasn't really Disney material.  You can't blame a guy for sticking with his brand.  Your ignorance of the brand is on you.

In one post I noted how terrible Amazon's giveaway system was.  Then in another I noted how they'd added a Goodreads-like giveaway option that was more useful.  Guess what?  They backslid back to uselessness.  When I went to make a giveaway for my book Casting Change, the Goodreads-type option was no longer there.  All they had were two pretty useless options:  first come, first serve or every X number.  I mean the latter is great if I'm a huge company giving away 300 products but not great if I have one.  I set it for every 3 people I only get 3 entries; I set it for every 100 people I might not get enough entries.  The first come-first serve option is especially useless if I only have one or two books to give away because the first one or two people to enter would win and then it's over.  So there's no time to build up any interest.

Meanwhile Goodreads still wants $150-$600 for doing nothing more than hosting the giveaway.  Their platform is nice, but it's not worth that much money for a small operation like mine.

For Casting Change I wound up doing two giveaways that didn't accomplish much.  The first I did through my newsletter.  I offered whoever answered a 2-question survey the chance to win.  Only 22 of 215 or so newsletter recipients even answered.  And then I had to pull three names out of my hat to find someone who would answer my email to tell them they'd won.  Geez, talk about a gift horse in the mouth.

The second giveaway I ran on LibraryThing.  It's sort of like Goodreads but the problems are that people need to join a special LibraryThing group to enter.  And there's no direct link to your book being given away and even though it's free you know even the slightest effort is too much for some people.

Naturally neither person who got a free book has written a review or anything.  (Probably.)  And the sales weren't great either, so it wasn't really worthwhile.

I just wish Goodreads would be more reasonable.  I mean, $150?  Maybe if it were $20 or $30 it'd be worth it for me but $150 is outrageous for hosting the thing and sending a couple of auto-generated emails that'll be ignored.

I wrote a post about how annoying all these people saying Aaaactually [or just impying it] are.  There have been a few more of those.  Like one on Facebook about Trump not going to visit a graveyard in France on Veteran's Day because it was raining.  I commented that remember when Hillary had the flu and fainted and Fox "News" and its fans were saying that didn't make her qualified for the presidency?  Someone said [Aaaaactually] it was pneumonia not the flu.  Because the specific illness is what was important there, right?  I said yeah, yeah, whatever.  And she says, Ah, an asshole.  To which I said, Yes you are and blocked her.

Another time the Geek Twins linked to an article about Sony maybe hogging Spider-Man since Venom did pretty good.  I said, I guess Sony forgot how their last Spider-Man didn't exactly light the world on fire.  So this doofus replies, "[AAAAAACTUALLY], Sony has lots of other things not just Spider-Man.  You should read the article before commenting."  But the article was about Disney and Sony sharing Spider-Man, not Sony's other Spider-verse projects.  Duh.  So he was the one who should have read the article.  I just said I did read the article and then blocked him.  I don't know, who are these people who have to jump all over you when you don't even know them?  And for stuff that's so inconsequential.  Yeesh.  Get a life as Shatner would say.