Unabashed

There are lessons to be learned over at Whatever. John Scalzi announced the winning entrants (two runners up and one grand prize) for his Zoe’s Tale ARC contest this morning and it occurred to me, as I read the entries (many of which were really good), that it might be better to be published on the Whatever than in a publication dedicated to the exact same type of material. There are a lot of creative types who read Scalzi regularly, so it just makes sense that they’ll write some really good material in response to his request. And this is where it gets kind of interesting: When the contest started out it seemed like it was just a fun little thing; you might even go so far as to call it gimicky. Someone send in something funny, entertain me, and I’ll give you this book. But then I started reading the entries. I saw mostly what I expected to see: nothing you could really call a submission, just little anecdotes and humorous quips people were writing on the fly. But a few of them are good, very good, as you can see by the winners. I began to realize that these weren’t just little humorous quips, these are stories.

As it is, they are published–on Whatever, which is one of the most-read personal blogs on the internet. Not a venue where you’d expect to find good fiction unless the author published something himself, which he rarely does.  What’s interesting to me is that, even though it was a very informal forum, we got to see the whole process unfold right there in the comments section. Every entry (or submission, as it were) is readable by anyone. The three best, as judged by the site owner, got their very own dedicated post right on the front page of the site. There is a curious lack of linkage to their websites, at least for those who provided websites to be linked to. I would have thought a winning entry would get a link on the front page too, but you have to dig back through the comments of the ARC contest post to find out where their websites are (JS must be greedy with his Technorati ratings handouts). (JS advises me this was just an oversight and has been corrected). But even without the link, that’s a lot of great exposure for a writer or blogger.

These entries may not be a fit for SF&F or Strange Horizons, but they’re no less entertaining, and I would come back and read more if I thought more would follow. This is a serious feat that I’m wondering if anyone else will pick up on. It would be interesting to see more contests like this one, basically asking for fiction (I know there have been some of these before, I just haven’t seen many done so well). Most of the time if someone asks for fiction, even if they provide the theme, they’ll get a lot of 3k-word stories that are basically just more of the same. This time, the stories responding to the theme “The evening of August 19, 1994. What can you tell me about it?” were actually interesting (for the most part). And I generally don’t like to read short fiction.

I didn’t write an entry myself, but I did keep checking back to see what was being written. Maybe next time I’ll give it a try. And yes, I’ll go ahead and say that it would be nice to see Whatever do this as a regular feature. I’d do it here if I had half his readership and, you know, some stuff to give away. The results could be looked back upon one day as visionary.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Contest, Fiction, John Scalzi, markets, stories, Zoe's ARC

Tuesday’s post was the first one I’ve ever had a Digg or StumbleUpon go wild. After chugging along for a while collecting between 100 and 300 unique visitors a day, Wednesday’s tally was near 10,000, and today is already up near 5,000. Those are huge numbers for this blog, easily records. It’s interesting, to me, because I’ve Dugg and Stumbled posts a few other times but never really got that much interest. Of course, it’s entirely possible that those posts just didn’t pique the ‘net public’s interest like this one did.

I got the idea for the post in question because I was thinking about cool science fiction gadgets, and couldn’t find a “greatest of” list on the web anywhere. There were tons of lists, of course; best spaceships, best scifi kitchen gadgets, best weapons, etc.; but never a list of the best SciFi gadgets. So I did one. Some agreed with it, and some hated it: as per the norm. The Stumble reviews were half and half good and bad. I’m okay with that, too, because most of the dissenters didn’t really understand the basic premise of the list: that it wasn’t populated with weapons or spaceships, that it was just gadgets. Some took exception to the fact that I only used gadgets from a few books and movies, or that I didn’t include some of the more obscure gadgets from other, older books. I was lambasted on one account for not having included any PK Dick gadgets, but again, I just shrug. It was my list. If they don’t like it or disagree with it, they can make their own list. I’m not saying that to be crude, I’m just saying the way it is. I’m fine with their disagreement. Perfectly. The only bad review that kind of hit me in the chin was one saying that it was “Terribly written and terrible chosen.” No further info, just those five words (miswording theirs).

I wonder if anyone who liked the post will add my feed to their reader, or if they’ll otherwise become regular readers. Time will tell.

Now I’ve got to go pick up my kids from daycare because a serious thunderstorm is rumbling nearby.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, Digg, stats, Stumble, StumbleUpon, visitors

I read somewhere that 75% of blog visitors bounce away from the site within the first 30 seconds of arrival. For me, that stat is higher (this graph is for the month of April):

Wish I knew why. But at the same time I have around 10% who stay for longer than 15 minutes. To those of you who fall into that category, and who keep coming back: thanks. I like you. Overall, traffic was down from March to April. March was a monster month for Unabashed, raking in almost 300 individual users per day (86% of whom bounced without even settling for a full minute). For April, it was down to 196 (but 513 page views, so somebody’s sticking around). No, I don’t know why, but then I can’t explain why I get the number of visitors I do, either. They just started trickling in, and slowly but surely became what they are now.

So, if I was the CEO of a corporation, I’d be chewing the asses off my sales staff, telling the company to get a handle on churn, and I’d be trying to come up with a new pricing scheme and marketing campaign to get the ship righted. But then I’d be making $12.8 million per year, too. But… I’m just me, tapping out 8.6 posts per week and I don’t have a marketing campaign or sales staff, and I think it’s safe to say that any sort of pricing scheme above $0.00 would drive churn up to right around 100%. But I do have churn. 85.6% in the red. Ah, well, thank God I have my day job.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, churn, individual, Matt Mitchell, stats, traffic, Unabashed, unique, visitors

Joel Johnson over at BoingBoing is camping in the woods for a week–er, four days–in Harriman State Park in New York, with the intention of blogging using only solar power while he’s out. Sounds like fun to me. Keep up with his progress (or lack thereof) at BoingBoing.net as well as his Twitter account. He also has a Flickr account, so maybe he’ll photolog his journey as well.

This is an interesting project to me, and finally gave me reason enough to get a Twitter account of my own, even though I’m not much for texting…we’ll see how it goes. Follow me, or friend me if you like, on Twitter (as with every other social networking service on the internets) I am mattmitchell8. 

I’ve got two headlamps from Coghlan’s, the 0843 and the 0841.

I’ve got my Amazon Kindle with a copy of Walden on it. (Which I’ve never read.)

Got my knife. Got good socks. Have lightweight, silkie thermals for the evening. Have the most beat-up ball cap around. Have sunscreen. Have fire. Have cables, spare batteries, and trash bags just in case I need to cover something up.

Got my tent, the Hubba Solo, again on multiple recommendations from readers. I haven’t set it up yet, which means that it’s a certainty it will be missing parts or that I’ll have to do so in a freak Hudson Valley hurricane. Oh well — it’ll be good comedy, right?

I’ve got my camera and the Gorilla Pod.

I’ve got rhythm.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, boingboing, Joel Johnson, solar power, twitter

Interesting note, today I uploaded the picture of the Aurora Borealis to my Flickr account, and then made a post on the blog about it. As it ends up, that was my 200th picture uploaded into Flickr, and my 200th post on Unabashed, which is kind of freaky. As milestones, the Flickr one is dubious, because I only have a free account, and the free accounts are restricted to 200 pictures. So now my earliest pictures will not be visible unless I go through and delete some (since only the most recent 200 are viewable). Frankly, I didn’t know I was close to 200 pics. But 200 blog posts is significant: It was a goal for me to reach 200 pages of content with this blog. Some of the content is good, some bad, some popular, and some has never even been seen before that I know of. 

Now that I’ve reached my 200-post goal, I’m beginning to think long-term. This isn’t a money-making scheme. I don’t post advertisements and I don’t use Adsense. This is just a repository for things I find interesting, ruminations and a log of my path as a new writer. Links to sites I like, other blogs I read, stories I’ve written and/or other projects I’m working on. The only thing I had in mind when I started it, and that I maintain still today, is that I don’t want to give repetitious posts of content that’s already been covered by Boing Boing. I didn’t want to be a carbon copy of other writers who blog, and I didn’t want to post a lot of personal stuff. In those respects, I feel like I’m still right on target. For the future, I expect I’ll be building on what I’ve already done, but writing more ruminations, some longer articles. I don’t see myself posting any more or less than I do now, but I do see my word count increasing because I’m getting better at looking deeper into an idea that I was when I first started out. And I hope to be writing a lot more success stories in the publishing arena that I have in the past.

I hope you’ve been entertained, and I hope I’ll be able to entertain you further as the blog grows. Be seeing you.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Flickr, Matt Mitchell, Unabashed, writer

Kevin Kelly is a long-time internet mainstay, one of the original founders of Wired Magazine, and a week or so ago he posted this bit concerning his “1000 True Fans” theory (P.S.–if you haven’t read The Technium, I highly recommend it):

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

This based on the presumption that the creator in question can produce quality material over a long period of time, and that the True Fan will shell out around $100 a year for those creative works. Voilà: $100,000 per year makes for a decent living. It sounds good, yes; but I’m not so sure this model will work for writers the way it can for creators in other mediums. At least not unless the person doing the writing is already notable for something other than writing. Reason being: In every other medium creators’ works can have an immediate impact on a potential fan (call it the Wham! factor). Whether it’s a song, a painting, a photograph, or even a shirt–when it’s good, and you like it, you’ll know it almost immediately. You might not know why, other than Wham!–you just love it as soon as you lay eyes on it, or listen to the first ten seconds of the opening riff. But with a writer it doesn’t work that way.

Musicians can build a fan base using this principle and do very well for themselves. Rappers do it every day. I think even artists, who can paint their pictures and sell them at trade fairs and such can use this theory. But for writers I don’t think it will work. I’m jealous sometimes of musicians and the power their music can hold over an audience. I can listen to a song from the ’80s (when I was a teenager) now and all at once the power of the music can pull me back in time almost, remind me of sensations and feelings that I hadn’t even thought of since I’d last heard that song. That’s an awesome power to wield, and, as I say, I’m a little jealous of those who wield it. If I’m curled up reading a good book or even a short story, I can fall in love with the characters and I can connect with the story at different levels, but fiction can’t own you like music can. It can’t reel you in and make you its slave. (Or maybe it does for others; maybe it’s just me who can’t connect to it on that level.)

It might take a hundred pages of a novel before someone finds out if they like it or not. I recently picked up a copy of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and, after the first page, utterly hated it. I pressed on though, and found the rest of the book fantastic. But if I’d based my opinion of China as a writer on the first page or two of his book, which took me maybe ten minutes to read, I’d never have read another story by him (the passage in question can be read here. Just start at the beginning and read down about eight or ten paragraphs. To me, this is an awful way to start a book, with the first three or four paragraphs dedicated to the (boring) arc of a basket flying through the air. But the rest of the book is grand). Most books that I like I’ll know within the first chapter or two, but rarely earlier, because in a book the writer must establish things: character, setting, all those good bits that add depth to the story, that pull the reader in.

So what about short stories? Sure, shorts are great, but very few writers are going to cultivate a fan base using shorts alone. Let’s face it: short stories are primarily the entry-level gig most writers hire on for just to get their foot in the door of the big company. Writers want to write books; they don’t generally tend to set out wanting to write their fantastic stories in 3,000 words or less. They want the story to tell itself, and most stories–in my experience–want to be in excess of 25k words. They’re stubborn that way. And a reader has to invest something to know whether they’ll like it or not. That’s not the case with most other creative mediums in which someone can hear a song in passing (Wham!) and immediately fall in love with it. Movies…maybe. But movies still require no effort. They may take a little more investment of time than other mediums, but there’s still no effort required. You just stare blankly and determine if you want to stare blankly some more. With reading, people must invest time and effort.

So how does a writer overcome this obstacle? Well, blogging for one. I know I just posted an article about blog fiction, commenting that I don’t believe people want to read fiction on blogs, but I’m not talking about posting fiction. I’m talking about building an audience with your writing using slice-of-life vignettes, informational stubs, a few essays and some news. Developing that audience with as near to Wham! factor as a writer can produce, and then, once you’re published somewhere, hoping they’ll cross over from your blog to your fiction. It goes back to what I said earlier in this article–being notable for something else first. John Scalzi has a great article about creating a blogging niche:

I think it’s far less useful to put your fiction online than it is to spend some time creating an interesting blog and cultivating an audience for it. This is not an “either/or” situation, of course, as I have done both. But I will say that one of these you should do first, and that’s to work on your blog. 

It would be great if writers could use this “1000 True Fans” concept, go to Fundable and score a few thousand dollars for their next opus, but the medium is just too demanding of its fans for that–at least initially, until they’ve built their fan base beforehand. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d actually like to think that I am.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: artist, blog, creator, fan, fan base, Fiction, journal, writing

In maintaining this journal through the years, along with its many and varied predecessors, I’ve made one small observation about what people want from writers and their blogs. On a blog people generally don’t want fiction. They do want things that are interesting, but for fiction they read books, not blogs. On occasion I think people will read fiction if it comes in a dedicated package built just for carrying the fiction–such as Down in the Cellar, or Southern Fried Weirdness (two sites that just happen to host stories written by yours truly), websites that are built just to entertain people with their fiction. But for blogs, readers seem to want slice-of-life vignettes, informational stubs, a few essays and some news.

One reason I say this is because through the years I’ve posted numerous stories on my blogs, but for some reason, while people will read my work on another site or in a book, they don’t want to read it here. It’s not necessarily that they don’t like it, they never even give it a try. It makes me wonder if building a site just for fiction alone would be worthwhile, if people want it that way.

If you are posting fiction on your blog, I’m not telling you to stop, I’m just saying that in my opinion, that’s not where people want to read it. Maybe I’m wrong; what do you think?

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogosphere, Fiction, story, writing

Okay, all my archives are finally in place, so past articles are available for your reading pleasure again (if you’re into that sort of thing). But–for some reason I lost some formatting in the transition, along with a few images. I’ve got 186 articles on this blog now, and I’ll start working through them gradually, fixing the formatting errors (they’ll still read, but, for example, apostrophes are now little weird blocks).

Unabashed is healthier than I thought it was, too, which is very encouraging. When I suffered the massive format failure when I was with Yahoo! Hosting, my Google Analytics stats dropped–in one day–from roughly 40 unique visitors (UVs) per day to 1. Yes: 1. Some days there were less than one–that being a big, fat, donut hole–and very rarely did they ever creep above the 1. I had no idea why it happened that way, but it continued even after I’d made the switch to Surpass Hosting, and I’ve really started trying to figure out why lately. Primarily because I know personally of at least ten folks per day who were looking at my blog. The stats just weren’t accurate. But along with switching to Surpass I gained a new stats analysis tool which was showing roughly the same results, and at that point I began thinking that I really must suck, that people hate me, and that I should pull the plug on the whole thing.

But (again, another but) then last night, just for giggles, I checked the stats for my root domain: mattmitchellfiction.com, without the subdomain /unabashed, and there I found all my missing little UVs. And even better, since my move to Surpass, my visits have increased. Since March 1st I’ve had 1749 UVs hitting 2264 pages. That’s a record around here. True, they’re not Scalzi numbers (whose are? Not many), but they’re respectable enough for me to be entirely content that at least I don’t suck, and pulling the plug might not be altogether necessary. Some of the traffic has come from Down in the Cellar, where my latest story has been published, but a lot of it just comes through Google and Yahoo! searches. For some reason a lot of people end up at my “Miraculous Coffee Entry.” I guess there are a lot of coffee lovers out there.

So, in response to this, and seeing that a lot more traffic comes through my root domain than I had previously supposed, I’ve revamped my front page with my little mascot friend “Viva the Beaver,” who I drew up about ten years ago. (He’s the little guy with the harpoon peeking out of the right hand column now). It’s not a very professional job, but it’s all I had in me to do last night, and, most importantly, it links to here, where the bulk of my ruminations reside. Check it out and let me know what you think, I would appreciate the feedback, whether good or bad.

So the state of the blog is good. Better than it’s ever been, really. And there are developments coming down the pipe that I hope you’ll enjoy.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, Matt Mitchell, stats, Unabashed

Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers, all from Tor Books. She has also produced two titles through Subterranean Press — Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still (forthcoming). Her first novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, won the first annual Blooker Prize for fiction.

The intent of this interview was to briefly explore the correlation between the Cherie’s blogging pastime and her career as a novelist. Cherie is a sort of visionary, though she may not grasp that just yet. She’s one of those few authors who are successfully utilizing their blogs as platforms to promote their products, providing at the same time an avenue for their readers to connect with them in a way that has never been possible before. It’s a revolutionary concept that more and more writers are taking advantage of; the thing that makes Cherie unique is that she was first successful as a blogger, and then as an author.

A bit of info about her blog: Heretic Spire has a 200 Technorati ranking and a huge following of faithful readers (including me, resident lurker :-) Her digital shadow spreads much farther than LiveJournal, however. Her official website is at Cherie Priest.com, and she keeps an often-entertaining photoset on flickr.

This interview was composed in a simple set of questions I tapped out in an email to Cherie, who very graciously accepted and took a bit of her time to entertain us with her replies.

Unabashed: When did you start blogging?

Cherie Priest: About a week before 9/11. That’s a rough way to keep score, I know, but that’s how I remember it. A buddy of mine online had been snared by LiveJournal (aka LiveCrack), and he wanted to let me see some of his filtered posts … but he couldn’t do that unless I had an account. So I started one. That was back when there were only about half a million LJ users, and you had to have an invite to get onboard.

U: Was Heretic Spire your first blog?

CP: No, the first one I ever had was an LJ with the handle “fourandtwenty” — but it has long since been deleted. I started fresh with my present blog, though for awhile its handle was “wicked_wish.” I renamed it to “cmpriest” a few months ago. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure why.

U: What were your expectations?

CP: I expected to get hit on by creepy internet people, meet a few otherkin furries, and maybe do a little networking. My expectations were met to a full and wondrous extent!

U: When did you first realize you had a dedicated readership which was interested in your writing?

CP: Well, I’d been writing on the old LJ for a year or so when I finally clicked the “full view” option on my bio page … and realized that I had a hundred or so subscribers who I knew nothing about. It wasn’t much of an audience, but it was still startling. The audience I’m presently blessed to enjoy didn’t happen overnight, though; it grew over a period of about seven years.

U: Would you ever classify yourself as ‘topical’ when you write in your blog, or are your posts just random ruminations?

CP: The last few years in particular I’ve given a lot of space to my writing career. It’s hard not to, since that’s what’s mostly going on in my life. I also do a lot of movie reviews and some industry gossip; but I’m equally likely to post kitty pictures or lame YouTube videos. Sometimes I’m just too busy to bother. (Thumbs up to the kitty posts! -Matt)

U: I’ve read that your book, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, could be classified as a “Blook,” and that it was written based on concepts you wrote about on your blog. Can you expound on that?

CP: When I first started working on it, I would occasionally post in-progress chapters online for the LiveJournal crowd. Come to find out, it was being regularly read by an editor for a small press in Georgia — and before long, they’d signed me to a book deal. It was a micro-affair, and the publisher ended up reverting the rights back to me … at which point they were sold to Tor.

U: Did you do anything in particular to build your readership or did they just find you?

CP: Mostly people just found me. For a long time, most of the people in my online audience were people I knew in real life. And I know a lot of people in real life. Over time, it grew to include friends-of-friends (or “social cousins” as I like to call them), and gradually the friends of those friends. And of course, once the books started coming out, people who’d found me in a bookstore could just as easily track me down online.

U: Did you have the idea for Four and Twenty Blackbirds from the beginning, when you started your blog, or did it develop as you blogged?

CP: I started writing 4&20 as part of a graduate writing project. It was largely uninfluenced by the blog medium itself.

U: How has publishing fame impacted your readership?

CP: I’d like to think that writing professionally and blogging in my spare time have fed each other in some respects. Some of my books are bought by people who don’t ordinarily surf the net much — and my blog readers who don’t ordinarily buy many books might pick up a copy of mine, because they read me all the time anyway. The hobby and the career go hand-in-hand at this point.

In the end I can only surmise that Cherie Priest is a writer of rare talent, whose words are entirely readable and entertaining no matter if she’s writing a novel or a label for a bottle of ketchup (although I don’t believe any condiment labels are in her repertoire. Yet). Her blog has risen in popularity without gimmicks, without advertising, but through a simple, wonderful combination of wit and raw ability. In short, Cherie Priest is a writer destined for greatness, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity to interview her (hey, does this mean I’m a social-cousin now? :-). Buy her books. You won’t be sorry.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Cherie, livejournal, lj, Priest