Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem (Bloodsong 2)

Boy, there’s a title for a blog article that will SEO like like last month’s pablum! I’ve been doing all these itty-bitty crazy making things today. For instance, we’re planning a sales campaign for Mogollon: A

2014 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS

Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem for … oh, maybe next Thursday? We’re talkin’ about it. Plans are  heating up.

I’ll let you know if they actually get hot. It would be a free day Thursday September 18th, with increased savings available for the weekend through Amazon’s “dribble it out” program. Why do they make it so hard to find the NAME of something?

So, think about free to lowered prices on Mogollon, the ebook with the fabulous cover featuring Native American actor, model & philanthropist Rick Mora. While the cover of this book is amazing, I’d say that the interior of the book––it’s content––is just as stellar.  If you want the maximal immersion, get the paperback version. The cover is KILLER. Front and back.  Mogollon won the Visionary Fiction Category of the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards. All that beauty and a prizewinner, too.

My Lady Grace was a Freebooksy Featured Book

How about submitting to them for Mogollon‘s free day? Good idea, but while I was on the site, I noticed that they have a new free app that you can install on your Facebook Page, that converts it into a mini-version of your Amazon sale page. Whoo-hoo! “You can install it in thirty seconds.” Or two hours, if you were born before 1974. People in my age group should take two or three years to install that puppy.

I got it up in in one day! The only problem is that while loading my books, I assumed that the app used the first loaded is the bottom position on the stack method, which made sense to me. I loaded my books, thinking I was ordering them so that the most recent ones that I wanted everyone to see would be the top of the list, and the older ones on the bottom. That isn’t what the app did, so … I’ve got the books that I want you to see most on the bottom. That’s why people go crazy and run screaming through … fill in your own place for running amuck.

YOU FIND THE NEWLY DISCOVERED, ENTICING APPS UNDER THE "ABOUT" ON MY FB PAGE AND ABOVE THE PHOTOS. CLICK THE BUTTONS TO EXPLORE.

I was filled with joy, having successfully installed that Freebooksy App on my Facebook Fan page. That’s THIS FACEBOOK PAGE, MY FAN PAGE, a opposed to THIS OTHER FACEBOOK PAGE, MY PERSONAL PAGE. In doing the installation, I looked at my page for the first time and discovered the already existing apps on it that should bring me much closer to … heaven? I dunno. You, I hope. This is what they look like. (To the left) You find them on the left side of MY FAN PAGE under the ABOUT bit and above the PHOTOS.

I love having people join my mailing list, going to extraordinary lengths to write funny, informative newsletters with special offers in them. In the process of installing Freebooksy app, I discovered that I had a previously semi-installed thing where people could sign up for my newsletter from my Facebook page. This is marked Join My List on my page. All I had to do was complete the installation process I’d started in prehistory. All I needed to do was sign in with  Constant Contact, which involved  CC accepting the password and username that it has been accepting for the last ten years. How many tries did it take? Let me count the stars in the sky. But I got it working. You can sign up for my newsletter and be first to know my news and get special deals available only there. 

Does anyone hate the Constant Contact mailing service like I do? That intensely? I find it horrendously hard to use. Expensive.  They do have great templates and lots of them, but learning them? There’s the on-going thing about it not accepting my passwords.

Mail Chimp – The Mail Service Everyone but Me Uses Now

I’d hop over to the free Mail-chimp in in a minute, but it took all of my cyber-muscles to figure out how  to use Constant Contact’s templates to send out the lousy three newsletters I do a year. Having to learn a new system from scratch would kill me. Having said that, I expect the Thought Police from Constant Contact to bust me any minute.

 The Goodreads App was the final app already existing on my FB Fan page. It was hooked up, too. It takes you to my Goodreads author page, or a facsimile.

How does everyone feel about Goodreads? It has about fifty bazillion members, all rabid readers. No, avid readers. Authors are told that they absolutely must get out there and interact with Goodreads reader community. “It’s a marketing gold mine.”

I had my only scary on-line experience on Goodreads. Imagining that I’d find marketing nirvana, I hopped in and joined my genre, Really Nice Fantasies about Fun Things. I had read about Goodreads members being a little bit prickly about rules, so I studied everything about the group and its functioning before posting anything. My group had a bunch of subgroups: Fun Fantasies Involving Torture, Nice Fantasies about Clouds, Fantasies about What You’d like to Do to your Mother-in-law.  They were all my area, so I signed up for all of them. The voluminous instructions to participating in the group said, “Post… somewhere. I forget where… a bit about yourself by way of introduction.” I did this. And then I wrote pretty much the same message in all the subgroups, “Hi, I’m Sandy Nathan, I write fluffy fiction about clouds and I have this book …”

Before I could say “roll me over with a steam roller and keep the change,” some guy got on my case about spamming. I hadn’t spammed. I followed all the rules. Then the group got in on my alleged spam. It escalated. Had I advocated barbecuing children, it couldn’t’ have gotten much hotter. Right when they had my head on the guillotine’s block, the moderator intervened saying, “She didn’t spam. You all belong to the same groups. That’s why you got multiple messages.”

I never went  back to Goodreads. Then there was all the uproar about the young first-time author who got a bunch of low ratings on a book that wasn’t out and no one had any information about. She complained on her own blog, to find her book listed on really nasty lists. So much for the authors’ marketing bonanza.

Any Goodreads experiences to share, readers?

 NEXT TIME, WHICH WILL BE VERY SOON, I’LL LET YOU KNOW IF WE’RE HAVING THAT PROMOTION NEXT THURSDAY! YES!

SANDY NATHAN