Verbose, Verbosity, Verbusoso

There was a time when I knew how to shave my correspondence with Occam's Razor. As I sent off a third or fourth little note to a publisher today, primarily unsolicited advice about redesigning their website, I realized that I'm getting verbose. I can't get across an idea without doing an introduction, a conclusion, and including at least one personal anecdote. As usual, I blame it all on blogging.

But I'm thinking, if I can't help being verbose, maybe I can be good at it, an artist of vebosity. I'm guilty, guilty, guilty of writing long blog posts. I just decided somewhere along the line that short blog posts are too lazy. Anybody can write:

Wrote three pages of novel today, not sure what to do with the Natasha character. The postman brought three more rejection slips, and the cat spit up a hairball.

As a true Verbusoso, if daily progress was my axe, I'd write something like:

When I sat down to work on my novel today, the long nights mental agony over my Natasha's predicament was foremost in my thoughts. Should she accept Petrov, or join the Siberian Nunnery, as foreshadowed in the chapter titled, "Natasha considers joining the Siberian nunnery." My keyboard clacked away at 120 wpm and was threatening to burst into flame when the postman rang, once.

I leapt to the mail slot like one of Pavlov's mutts, and recovered three important letters from my publishing correspondents. The first delivered their deepest apologies, but they no longer read manuscripts. They included a reference to an Agent directory. The second was very encouraging because it included a personal comment suggesting that I could improve the manuscript if I rolled it up tight, cut it down the middle, and stored it in the bathroom. I'm still trying to figure that one out. The final rejection was hardly a rejection at all. They just didn't have the resources to consider it at this time, but were sure it was a noble effort. Greatly encouraged, I returned to Natasha.

Suddenly, a sound like a Bengal tiger trapped in a well assailed my ears. I cast about the room, and spotted my poor cat Dickens struggling desperately to tell me something. Dickens strained, and coughed, and right when I was sure he was going say, "Send Natasha to the nunnery," he ejected something I'd rather not describe in public. Feeling let down, despite important publisher correspondence, I decided to call it a day.

And that's why I don't blog about my day. Maybe that's why they call a master of verbose prose a verbusoso. Maybe it's just me.

Self Promotion Means Always Having To Say You're Somebody

This week a single page on my website received close to 10,000 visitors from StumbleUpon. I don't know why they came, there weren't any reviews of the page that I could find, just eight or ten people who had given it a "thumbs up." I've never been very active on any of these social tagging networks, I think the only one I ever dug things on was Digg. But self publishing and self promotion go hand-in-hand, and self promotion means always having to say you're somebody. The trick is telling the right people. In the current Google dominated phase of Internet search, nothing is more important than the company you keep, often described as your "neighborhood." Thackery's unforgettable character Becky in Vanity Fair had internet based promotion worked out a hundred fifty years ago with the line:

"One must, my dear, show one is somebody", she said. "One mustn''t be seen with doubtful people."

As we move into the long slow summer and I think about redoing my blog template for the first time in a while, I'm wondering if I should add some self promotion buttons as a sidebar feature. The icons in this post only operate for people who are members of the named services. Otherwise, they'll ask you to create an account.

The blog search site that I occasionally use myself and ping my blog on is Technorati. I only started a feed recently so I have relatively low "authority" but maybe this post will help.



Digg is more focused on news stories, and the need for self promotion in the self publishing world is hardly news. But maybe you dig the blog.

Digg it!

StumbleUpon is really more of a social tagging site, where my impression is it's more about sharing sites with "friends" than creating a new index for the web. As I mentioned above, StumbleUpon and their nearly 2.6 million users can throw a lot of visitors your way, and maybe this will help a couple more trip over me.

Stumble It!

So, this is my version of standing on a bench in a park and yelling that I'm somebody. One way I can tell I'm not real good at it is I had to search around the web for an hour just to find example links, and I don't even know if they'll work. Still, it's important to try new avenues in your promotion efforts from time to time, or you're likely to discover that you're preaching to the converted. So, I'm going to post this now and try out the links.

Microsoft Live Search Books And Print On Demand

When it comes to discussions of Microsoft and Google, Microsoft is usually seen as having to play catch up. This week, it's Microsoft that's jumped out front with a move that's so obvious I've been writing about it since 2004! I actually went to the Internet Archive to check, since I update most of my pages frequently, and sure enough, I thought that the scanning programs represented by Amazon's Search Inside and Google Books meant that one of those companies would put one and one together and offer copyright holders print-on-demand fulfillment and revenues.

As time went on, Amazon bought BookSurge and has moved into print-on-demand in a big way, but if they announced a POD availability option for Search Inside titles, I missed it. Likewise, the long delayed e-book sales option of Google Books seemed like a logical step in the on-demand direction, but somehow got stalled. So Microsoft with their Live Search Books program has leapfrogged the competition by partnering with the Ingram Digital Group. While the ebook side of that particular equation doesn't excite me very much, Ingram will give publishers the option to use Lightning Source for POD fulfillment of digitized titles. Whether they'll expand that option from publishers to rights-holders wasn't clear in the press announcement, but as they say in the intellectual property business, "Where there's a Will, there's a way."

What I really don't understand is why it's taken so long. I suppose none of the major players saw print-on-demand production and sales of out-of-print titles as a big enough business to pursue aggressively. What Google may have missed, despite the huge amount of effort that's gone into the development and legal defense of their Books program, is the opportunity to become the go-to site for books on the web. The knowledge that finding a book on Live Search Books will sometimes mean being able to procure that book on paper may be more than enough to compensate for the differing scopes of the two programs.