I’m just overwhelmed by messages since that column I wrote on self-publishing hit the wires and other papers picked it up. I’m trying to respond to all the messages, both positive and negative, but it’s taking some time to do that. Also, it’s sunny outside for the first time in six months, so I’ve been spending some time in the yard, rolling in the grass.

As some of you may have noticed, I recently self-published my first novel, Please, as an ebook when it went out of print. Self-pubbing an ebook is a lot like putting out a novel the traditional way — it’s not that hard to publish it, but it is difficult finding ways to get it noticed. In fact, in some ways it’s harder to get noticed with ebooks because there are so many more of them.

I don’t want to be one of those writers who babbles on and on about the business side and doesn’t talk about the craft, but I figure I’ve talked about the content of Please enough, and there are people interested in this self-publishing experiment. So.

I didn’t have any expectations of strong sales for Please when I loaded it onto the Kindle service — I just wanted to make it available to readers again. I was pleased with the initial flurry of sales, which was more than I expected, but they tapered off to three or four a day after the media attention died down. I thought I’d experiment with some online marketing, though, because, well, why not?

Halfway through ebook week, I decided to make my short stories free on Smashwords and drop the price of Please to $1.99. It was a promotion that Smashwords runs, so that’s why I did it there as opposed to Kindle.

Downloads of my short stories skyrocketed, which wasn’t hard, given they weren’t selling much before. Surprisingly, the story “Beat the Geeks,” which I consider the strangest thing I’ve written, was downloaded the most. I’m not really sure why people picked that one. Maybe it’s so strange they didn’t want to take a chance with their 99 cents on it? Or maybe word got out about it during the promo? Who knows.

I was more surprised by the boost in sales to Please, though. I wasn’t really expecting much — I was more interested in getting people reading my stories, which are quite different from the book. I sold about 20 copies of Please during the two days of the promo, and then Monday it dropped down to three. I hate Mondays.

Strangely, I only sold one copy on Smashwords during the promo — everyone else bought Kindle versions, even though the Smashwords version was cheaper.

Interesting times.

So to get back to the question posed in the title of this post, yes, apparently online promotions do work.

Next up, I’m buying some ads on Goodreads. I don’t really expect them to pay for themselves in the short term, but I’m told you have to think about advertising long term: just keep the book alive in the public consciousness and eventually people will start to notice it and check it out. In short, act like a virus.

I’ll keep you informed about the Please Experiment. I’m not really anticipating any sales records, because it is an older book. It would make more sense to try this sort of thing with a new book to really see how viable e-publishing is for a mildest writer like myself. So I may just do that.

I temporarily discounted my novel Please at Smashwords and made my stories free. Ends Sunday or when supplies run out.

The other day I posted about You Are Listening to LA, a mashup of ambient music and police scanner calls. Now the site has expanded to include

New York: http://youarelistening.to/newyork
Chicago: http://youarelistening.to/chicago
Montreal: http://youarelistening.to/montreal
San Francisco: http://youarelistening.to/sanfrancisco

It’s like we’re all living in Blade Runner, isn’t it?

…and I had to laugh at the tags for The Warhol Gang. Reminds me of my last relationship.

Anyway, here’s my profile if you’re also on LT.

LAPD radio calls mixed with ambient music. My new work soundtrack.

Once again, my inboxes are full of messages asking me how to publish on Kindle, thanks to my latest article on self-publishing ebooks. So I’ll just point new readers to this blog to a previous post on the subject. I don’t really have time for a step-by-step manual right now — and I’m still figuring out things myself — so if you need more guidance I’d either check out Guido Henkel’s blog entries about ebook formatting or download the free Smashwords Style Guide.

Please note the e-reader services are different — Amazon takes mobi files while the iBookstore uses epubs, etc. So make sure you’re submitting the right kind of file to each store.

Hopefully this helps. If not, I may have to write that more detailed post….

Good luck, everyone!

I wrote an article about self-publishing for The Province. I mention my own experiences a little, but it’s mainly about other writers. I talk about the stars in the U.S., of course — Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath — but I also interviewed a few Canadians. There are some interesting comments from Cliff Burns, Joey Comeau and Nichole McGill. Check out what they have to say — and then buy their books!

I just finished Timothy Taylor‘s The Blue Light Project, and I think it’s his best novel yet. Check out my review here.

I just did an interview with rob mclennan for his great 12 or 20 Questions series. Here’s a sample:

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

It depends on the book. With Please, I was trying to write about the experiences of my generation — I should have subtitled it “Generation Temp.” But I also wound up writing a bit of a historical book in a sense, in that the characters are often longing for something from the past — a lost love, that suburban neighbourhood, the decision they failed to make — and they inhabit the ruins of the past. They live in their own memories, and in social memories, with suburbs and churches and OJ Simpson car chases and such.

The Warhol Gang is a little more sci-fi in nature, in that like all good science fiction its project is extrapolation. I took a bunch of trends I was starting to see emerging — neuromarketing, holograms, the viral video— and tried to normalize them. That is, I tried to imagine a society where they were the cultural norm. In some ways, I think I failed, because society has already become stranger than I imagined — anime news videos depicting Charlie Sheen rants? Twitter-fuelled revolutions in the Middle East? But we live in an age where the future is happening faster than we can keep up.

In my new book, I’m exploring the idea of the post-future. The characters inhabit a world where they’ve given up trying to keep pace with the future and turn to the past for meaning instead, searching for artifacts and memories that will save them. But that doesn’t stop the future from happening to them. I’m not sure how to discuss it conceptually, because we’re all still struggling to grasp the violent change we’re going through right now, and I think we’re largely unsuccessful at it.