These are short stories put up each Friday that you can read for free. By the next Friday the post will be taken down and a new one will go up.
Note: This is the fifty-seventh post in Free Fiction Fridays.
These are short stories put up each Friday that you can read for free. By the next Friday the post will be taken down and a new one will go up.
Post Removed 04/17/15...thanks!
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This is the fifty-third post in an ongoing series of useful and interesting content that goes up each Wednesday.
Here you can find links to different SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, self-publishing, and other various articles from the past week that I think you might like. This week there are 23 articles…enjoy! Post removed 05/06/15---
This is the 500th post on this Writing Blog.
I’m not going to go into a big retrospective, and I’m not going to toot my own horn – I don’t want you to leave. What I do want is for you to get your blog to 500 posts, or more. Maybe this blog’s timeline will help you with that:
So in less than a year I’ve gone from 200 posts to 500 posts. That’s 300 posts in one year…and just on one blog. Don’t forget that I have a Montana blog on this site, had a Montana Political blog, and still do an ESL blog on my other site.
How can you do this too? I’ve gone through the idea of getting up into the hundreds of posts on your blog before. You’ll find them on all my ‘milestone’ posts. In my 3,300-word post How You Can Get Your Blog to 100 Posts Fast I put these tips down:
One hundred posts later I included the following advice for bloggers in another 3,300-word post, How Do You Get Your Blog to 200 Posts Fast?
By the time I got up to 300 posts and then 400 posts I was sick of writing about getting up to hundreds of posts. If you look back on those articles, they’re pretty short. Sometimes you have to do that – just put up short stuff. After awhile it’s just keeping yourself going. I mean, how many times can you keep offering the same advice? It gets old, and that’s why so many sites fold. Even if you do get up to 500 posts, what’s to stop you from throwing in the towel one day? After all, what else do you have to prove? These are things you need to think about, and oftentimes indifference and apathy become the biggest obstacles to blogs that have been up and around for awhile. I see this often, and symptoms include:
Those are all things you’ve seen before, I know it. We all have our favorite sites, but sometimes our favorite sites lose their edge. This is easy – most blogs aren’t big businesses that can rely on a team to get the job done. Usually it’s one person, and people get worn down.
So what can you do? Well…follow those tips that I put up in my 100 and 200 posts. Other than that…figure it out!
I mean, really, how long are you going to keep asking for advice, looking for what the other guy is doing, or waiting for someone to hold your hand? I know there’s no one to kick you out of the nest, but hasn’t your 100th or 500th or whatever post done that for you already? News Flash: Most of this comes down to sitting your ass down in that chair and doing the work! You’re not going to find the magic pill that keeps you going day in and day out – you won’t find that anywhere but within yourself. There will always be posts about perseverance and inspiration, but there will always be people quitting each day too. Remember what advice is – “guidance or recommendations concerning prudent future action, typically given by someone regarded as knowledgeable or authoritative.” It’s helpful, but it’s not the end-all end-all. Go forth and find your way – we’ll all be better because of it. You Might Also Like
How You Can Get Your Blog to 100 Posts Fast
Planning Your Blog 50 Days in Advance Claiming Your 2014 Blogging Authority Always Be Increasing Blog Traffic Why’s Your Website’s Most Popular Blog Article So Popular?
Two years ago I had the idea of writing an SEO guidebook for employers whom I was writing content for. This would help them figure out what they needed so they could better tell me what they needed. That would save everyone time and money.
Instead of writing that for employers, however, I wrote it for everyone that’s struggling to put up a new website. I laid out those principles, and I’ve been following them ever since. So if you want to know how I got to 500 posts, you’ll find a lot of it in there and my other SEO/Content Marketing books. Thanks!
I love using Createspace.
I can’t believe I’m saying that. When I first started making print books with Createspace I hated it.
Yes, using Createspace when you’re new is tough, but it’s like that with everything. I decided to stick with it, and now I have close to 20 of my books in print format. What’s more, some months my print book income exceeds my eBook income. Pretty cool! So how can you get your eBooks into print format, and is it really worth it? In this post we’ll discuss Createspace for print books and if it’s a good idea for you. I’ll talk about some of my earnings, as well as some of the headaches I have. In the end, however, I think you’ll see that print is a good option for you, and using Createspace to get that option is a good fit. To get the best fit, however, you need to maximize your Createspace earnings. That’s the real function of this post – to convince you to get your book in shape so it makes the most money it can for you. Let’s get started.
Here’s an image of what some of my Createspace earnings looked like for a couple months:
Here’s what they looked like for a single month this year:
As you can see, I’m making some money. A lot of that money comes from just a few books, and one of the things you need to figure out are which books are making you that money. But don’t stop there! You also need to figure out how you can maximize those earnings.
Whoa, maximize Createspace earnings? How do you do that? One of the things I like to do is formatting. I wrote about formatting my Montana print books awhile ago, and that posts shows you how I increased my royalties by around $1 on each title, just by reformatting. I encourage you to read that post to learn more.
One thing that I do when I work with Createspace is to order a proof copy. I like to do this before I put the book out there for anyone to buy. I enjoy sitting down in my chair and going through the book, finding typos, captions that aren’t centered, page numbers that are off, or other little things. Maybe there’s a sentence on one page. Sometimes I’ll take out a space under the chapter number to get rid of that.
The point is, there’s lots of little things you can catch when you do a proof review on Createspace. What’s good about this too is that you can get those proof copies sent to you in just a couple of days. It costs about $15 to $20 for shipping, but if you want to get a book out quickly, this is the way to go. I did that when I released Hustlers and Homesteaders last fall, and it was well worth it.
I want to get back to the idea of price, however. I really think it behooves you to get your book cost down, both to benefit customers and yourself.
Here’s a look of what I did with my book English Rocks recently. This is one of my best sellers, and if it’s going to get 20 sales a month, I might as well get as much from that as I can, huh? Here’s what it looked like before I reformatted it and after:
Alright, maybe $0.51 isn’t that much, but when you do the math it can add up. Twenty sales is an extra $10.20 a month while 100 sales is an extra $51 a month. Let’s say I did that with 20 books, getting 20 sales a month. That’d give me an extra $204 a month with no work besides that initial reformatting. Over the year that’s $2,448 in extra income – all from the same books!
That’s what lowering your font size, changing your spacing, and decreasing image size can all do. It’s about getting that book to have fewer pages so it costs less to print and ship. That means you make more money as an author.
Now, just because you can do this…should you? What if your book is already 100 pages? Would getting it down to 80 pages help you?
No, because it’ll turn off readers. Who’s going to pay $9.95 for an 80 page book…and I’m sure you’re charging more than that. I’ll tell you who will pay, no one. I know this because I have books like that (Ale Quest & Black Walnut). The point is, you have to balance the page count of the book with your need to make a profit. I decreased my book English Rocks by about 50 pages, but people keep buying it because it’s useful. But if it was 101 lessons in fewer than 101 pages? Well…I don’t think I could charge $19.95 for it, do you? So balancing price and profit is a key part of being a successful POD author on Createspace, especially when you’re doing all the work yourself. But if you do it right, Createspace books are the gifts that keep on giving. They really do require little maintenance after being published, and each month you’ll get a few paychecks depending on how many countries you sell to. If you’re still on the fence about Createspace, you shouldn’t be. Get your book out there to a wider audience – go POD today! You Might Also Like
Note: This is the fifty-sixth post in Free Fiction Fridays.
These are short stories put up each Friday that you can read for free. By the next Friday the post will be taken down and a new one will go up.
I’m not really sure who to tell this to, or who I’m writing to, but I feel like I just have to write it all down. Maybe sometime in the future someone will read this and they’ll understand what happened, and how to prevent it from happening again. Since we lost about 90% of the world’s population, however, I’m not sure it can happen again.
Some might argue over how it started, but I remember pretty clearly because I followed the news. It was the corruption scandal involving Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. After he was found guilty the whole house of cards just collapsed. Probes found more bribery and corruption and then the vast network that funded it all. By May nearly half of Congress had resigned or was under investigation, and in their place came a bunch of Tea Party politicians from the various states. They proceeded to gut the federal government’s budget in the form of tax cuts and model ALEC legislation. That set up the next stage of the disaster. Around the time that Menendez was under investigation, Governor Jerry Brown in California had mandated water rationing. What he didn’t say a whole lot about, however, was that the state had just one year of water left. And what he didn’t tell anyone was that this wasn’t true – the state had six months left. Around the time the Tea Partiers in Washington were putting out their first tax breaks in time for the summer driving season, the California wildfire season had begun. It was the worst that anyone could remember, and that was brought home real quick in June when the city of Palm Springs burned down. No one thought it could happen in 2015, but it did, and 46,000 were burned alive in a matter of hours. Unprecedented levels of water were used to fight the fire and keep it away from the city of San Bernardino. They succeeded in thwarting it, though it was the wind more than anything that spared the 200,000 people there. Unfortunately it blew right to the west, up into and then over the mountains. A wind shift threw it north across the bread basket of the state. With a one-two punch, California was left without both food and water. That’s when the exodus began. It was the rich and unemployed first, and they left in droves. Estimates for late-June put the number that left the state at 10 million. They went to Oregon and Nevada and Idaho and Washington, and just about every other state as well. The $2 trillion economy of the state collapsed. After a week every single supermarket in California had run out of food and that’s when the gunfights began. In a matter of days more than 5 million were killed, saving them the slow death from starvation. More left and by July the population of the state was estimated at just 8 million, a 485% decrease from just three months before. Neighboring states were quickly overwhelmed. Nevada and its shaky economy was the first domino to fall. They’d been stretched on water as well, and Las Vegas wasn’t giving the state’s coffers enough money. Whatever reserves the federal government had had leftover from the Tea Party spending spree were then used up fighting the fires and the exodus in California. There was no money to prop up the same problem in Nevada, or Oregon when it spread there. By mid-July the federal government was $24.2 trillion in debt, an increase of nearly $8 trillion in just one financial quarter, and most of that from the Chinese. At the end of July they called their notes in, and when America couldn’t pay, backroom deals were worked out between the Saudis and the Russians – America would have no oil. The country went into a panic and the economy went into a tailspin. All resources that were left to the federal government were put into two things – domestic oil production and FEMA. Large camps that had been secretly constructed over the years began to fill up, secretly at first, but then out in the open as the numbers increased into the millions. In early-August both Idaho and Montana broke away from the union, seeing the writing on the wall. They declared themselves independent states and closed their borders to the rest of the country. Vast citizen militias appeared at all highway entrances to the states, and the pitched battles that took place were some of the bloodiest in the nation’s history. Without the resources, however, the federal government could do little. They couldn’t even pay their own troops anymore, at least not with anything that was worth anything – they didn’t even have enough food reserves, and at that point currency was worthless. Inflation at the end of July had increased by more than 5,000% it was estimated, and many people were burning money instead of spending it. Increasingly, there was nowhere to spend it. The last day came on August 8. What happened I can’t be sure, but that’s the day the power went out, the grid went down. It could have been an EMP, it could have been a sunspot. Most likely it was a nuclear attack, probably in New York or somewhere else, maybe even overseas somewhere…who knows? Here in Montana we’re safe, for now. The militias are keeping the borders closed and citizen councils are rising up to organize farming and resources. There’s even talk of getting some of the dams running again…though that’s just talk at this point. I’m not really sure who I’m writing to, but I hope you don’t have to go through what we did. Good luck. THE END
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