What are You Going to Do With the Last 100 Days of the Year?

September 22, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Tomorrow begins the last one hundred days of the year. What are you going to do with those days? Will you finally get around to the New Year’s resolutions you made and promptly forgot? Are you going to slack off, giving yourself permission to take a break from the breakneck speed of your life? Are you going to get going on that novel you wanted to start, continue, finish, or edit? Are you going to make inroads in the pile of books on your nightstand, or finally read some of those ebooks you downloaded? Are you going attempt the photography project you always wanted to do? Are you going to make a commitment to blog every day?

That’s what I’m going to do — make a commitment to blog every day. I’ve been blogging every day for the past 364 days, and I intend to extend that commitment to the end of the year. (I’ll try to make the blogs interesting because posting something just to post something sort of negates the “challenge” part.) Feel free to join me! We can help each other, offering encouragement or topics when the will begins to wane.

Just to make things fun, I’m also going to give up sugar (and sweets of all kinds). I used to forego sugared products except for occasional splurges of chocolate, but after the death of my life mate/soul mate, I got on a sugar jag, eating all sorts of sweets I hadn’t eaten for years. When one is grieving, it always feels like three o’clock in the morning — your mental and physical defenses are down and your blood sugar feels as if it’s at a low ebb — so I got in the habit of treating myself. I stopped eating sugar and flour a couple of weeks ago, and I intend to continue doing so. (Sugar is a poison, screwing up the system, causing myriad problems, including weight gain. This has been known for many decades despite the front page news this morning that “new research offers the disturbing suggestion that regular consumption of high calorie sugared beverages may turn on genetic switches that incline our bodies to becoming fat.” Duh. Can you believe researches actually got grants for that? And artificial sweeteners are even worse — true poison! Besides, they make you crave sugar, and have been implicated in obesity, so I won’t be substituting artificial sweeteners for sugar.)

And a final challenge (the hardest of them all) — I’m going to stop obsessing over things I cannot change. When things happen that I have no control over, I tend to work them over and over in my mind, trying to make them come out right, but that only puts me on the treadmill of circular thinking. As I wrote once a long time ago (showing that I’ve always had this tendency):

it is real, yes
and it does exist
but that does not mean
i should have given it
so much of my reality

So, have I shamed you into taking a 100-day challenge?

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Using Twitter the Wrong Way

September 14, 2012 — Pat Bertram

People tell me I tweet wrong. I use Twitter.com like a bulletin board, mostly posting links to my blogs, sometimes retweeting my publisher’s book links, and occasionally posting links to samples of my books. All that is considered spam, though what I post is closer to ham than spam — it has a bit of meat to it. But of course, it’s all in how you look at it. (Are unwanted posts really spam, though? When you are spammed in your email, you often have no recourse, but if someone posts things you are not interested in at a social networking site, you can unfollow or unfriend.)

Most people seem to post the same sort of things I do, though some are heavy on quotes, some are heavy on retweeting, and others push their agendas (and books) incessantly, posting every few minutes. Yikes.

I once participated in a reciprocal promotion where each of us authors agreed to tweet everyone else’s book links several times a day every day for two weeks. Now that embarrassed me. I felt like a shill, particularly since I had no interest in the books. Still, I try to follow through on my promises, so I tweeted and tweeted and tweeted until I discovered that most of the others weren’t doing anything at all. That was the last time I ever did anything of the sort.

I’ve tried to do different things on Twitter, commenting on other people’s posts, joining in on discussions or starting discussions of my own, but I don’t see the fun in it, especially since few people ever respond. Those who do respond generally know me from Facebook, so it seems a duplication of effort.

So, if I’m using Twitter the wrong way, what is the right way? According to Twitter help, they are an information network, and “reading Tweets and discovering new information whenever you check in on your Twitter timeline is where you’ll find the most value on Twitter. Some people find it useful to contribute their own Tweets, but the real magic of Twitter lies in absorbing real-time information that matters to you.” They also suggest that you retweet and reply to other people’s tweets rather than tweet your own, especially those of celebrities you admire.

Truth be told, I often unfollow those who use Twitter “correctly.” I have no interest in “news” in 140 characters. For all the talk about grassroots news and news from the people themselves, most of the news articles that get retweeted into virality originate from the major media.

I also have no interest in celebrities, in pithy sayings, or one-liners. And I certainly am not interested in following private conversations. (Some people use twitter to keep in touch with their friends and families rather than text. Reading those texts makes me feel as if I am at a party where I know no one and no one knows me. Do people have no sense of privacy anymore?)

Hmm. Doesn’t leave much, does it?

I guess I’ll continue to use Twitter wrongly. After all, if anyone doesn’t like what I tweet, they are free to unfollow.

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I’m going to Blog for Peace. Will You?

September 12, 2012 — Pat Bertram

On Sunday, November 4, people all over the planet blog for peace. This year, I’m going to join the the Blog Blast for Peace, and you can join the movement, too. You make your own peace globe/statement or simply choose one pre-made at blogblastforpeace.com, and become – a peace blogger. http://goo.gl/wOaGs

Peace bloggers believe that words are powerful, and that this matters. http://goo.gl/b01KH

So, check out the website or check it out on Facebook.

How To Blog For Peace The short version:

1. Choose any graphic on this page. http://goo.gl/4xepL Right click and Save. Decorate it and sign it, or leave as is.

2. Send the finished globe to blogblast4peace@yahoo.com

3. Post it anywhere online November 4 and title your post Dona Nobis Pacem (Latin for Grant us Peace)

Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

Posted in blogging, culture, How to, internet. Tags: , , , . 7 Comments »

Putting a Good Face on Facebook

September 11, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Apparently, this is Facebook Week on Bertram’s Blog. This is the fifth in a series of posts I’ve written while trying to make sense of the clamor called Facebook. If you’ve read any of the previous posts (Why Facebook is Not the Great Promotional Tool It Once Was, Feeding the Facebook Beast, Trying to Be Heard Above the Facebook Noise, Unfriending Facebook Un-Friends), you might think I hate Facebook. The truth is, I am fascinated by the site. What I don’t like is how I’ve used it, in the beginning by sending friend requests to strangers and then later by accepting all friend requests indiscriminately and now having to fix the unwieldy mess by unfriending those who don’t engage with me. (I worry about offending people, but truly, if they have 5,000 friends, will they even notice I am gone?)

In a perfect world, being connected to what amounts to the entire population of a small town should create book sales, but it doesn’t. Just like with any town, most people you’re connected to don’t know who you are. I once lived in a town with a population of five thousand people, and after living there a couple of years, there were only a few people who even knew my name.

Being connected to so many thousands of people should create a community of people who are truly connected to each other, supporting each other through good times and bad, but it doesn’t. In fact, FB often works to isolate people. If you’ve lost your spouse, for example, seeing a constant stream of anniversary announcements, photos of happy couples, and travel plans for romantic getaways makes you feel even more isolated than you already do.

Being connected to so many people should help dispel loneliness, but it doesn’t. For the most part, facebook is about being upbeat, about bragging of all the good things that come your way, (one person’s “sharing” is another person’s “bragging”), about putting on a good face. (Well, of course. It is Facebook, after all.) But if your life isn’t going great, if you’re experiencing loss or failure, then you feel doubly alone.

Still, Facebook is a microcosm of life (though to be honest it more often resembles the worst of high school). Voltaire wrote, “Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her, but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.”

Like life, Facebook deals out a lot of cards everyone rails against, such as adding features we don’t want and taking away features we do. If we stay on the site, we have to accept those “cards,” but it is our choice how to play them. Like life, we reap the effects of bad choices made on Facebook (such as my indiscriminate “friending”). Like life, we have to deal with knowing we have unintentionally hurt some people. (Such as the guy who blocked me because I said something he took to be an insult, when the comment had nothing to do with him and everything to do with my philosophy of writing. See? High school.) Like life, we have to take responsibility for moments of tactlessness, and either repair the damage or take our lumps and move on. No matter how much we want everyone to like us, there will always be those who don’t.

But . . . and this is the key. Our life is our life to do with as we wish within certain parameters, and our Facebook is our Facebook to do with as we wish within the site’s parameters. With life, we have to decide what game we are playing so we know how to play our cards. With Facebook, we also have to decide what we want with the site and play our hand accordingly.

And me — I’m still trying to figure out what the game is, both with life and Facebook.

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Unfriending Facebook Un-Friends

September 10, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been doing a series of posts on the effectiveness of Facebook as a promotion tool for authors, based on my research and my experiences. Some people have taken these as complaints and negativity, but I’m just trying to make sense of a confusing world.

There are four billion users on Facebook, yet most authors seem to be shunted off into a corner of the FB world with other writers. While I’ve gotten to know a lot of great authors this way, I’ve found few readers, which makes sense when you think of it. Authors want something — readers — so we frantically add friends in an effort to reach readers. Readers, on the other hand, don’t frantically friend unknown authors. Most readers stick with previously read authors, or find books by word of mouth, blog reviews and book websites, local bookstores, online stores, the library. (This information is from an informal poll I once did: How Do You Choose the Books You Want to Read?)

When I first joined Facebook, I was guilty of adding as many friends as I could since I thought that was the purpose of social networking. In fact, I almost reached the cut-off point of 5,000 friends. (I’m sure you’ve noticed that some people have more than 5,000 friends. That’s probably because of inactive accounts. I go through my friend list periodically and delete inactive accounts. The only serve to swell numbers and make FB even more unwieldy than it already is.)

When I realized that social networking is about being social, I stopped sending friend requests, and started trying to get to know the people I am connected to. In the process, I am gradually culling my friend list. If someone has four or five thousand friends and has never once bothered to respond to anything I have done on Facebook, I unfriend them. If someone whose friend request I have accepted (I have not sent a friend request to a stranger in over three years, so I know that any friends made in those years are at their behest) spams me or ignores me, I unfriend them. If they are multi-level marketers or any other such blatant scammers, I unfriend them.

This sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But if Facebook hasn’t created a mass of readers for me, then it’s mostly for fun, and if it’s mostly for fun, there is no point in being connected to people who do not enrich my life. (I hope you don’t think I am unfriending everyone. I still have almost 2,000 friends, a good percentage of whom I actually talk to.)

Of course, some people think unfriending is silly, because what difference does it make how many friends you have, especially since you see so few of them anyway, but it does make a difference. When I had close to 5,000 friends, every time I tried to individually invite friends to an event, it crashed my computer. (Except for the Suspense/Thriller Writers Self-Promotion Extravaganzas on Saturday, I don’t bother to do events any more. Where hundreds of people used to respond, now only a handful do.)

Also, too many friends clogs the news feed with posts I have no interest in. It is possible to hide those posters from my newsfeed, but if I have no interest in people’s posts, why am I connected to these un-friends? Why not just unfriend them? So I do.

People do the same to me. One woman told me she unfriended me because I never participated in any of her events. It was a valid observation. At the time, I had 4,000 friends, and couldn’t keep track of them all. All I did on Facebook at the time was keep my writing discussion going, so the people I was most interested in were the people who participated in my discussions. (I hate to admit it, but I still don’t participate in other people’s events; there are simply too many. And anyway, I still prefer to spend most of my time with my discussion group. It’s a small space of sanity in the choatic FB world.)

Perhaps none of this matters. Perhaps unfriending is just a game or a phase I am going through. But the truth is . . . hmmm. I don’t know what the truth is. Maybe I don’t like being ignored. Or maybe I have had a surfeit of inanity and negativity. (What many people consider as positive thinking, I often see as inane, and inanity feels to me like negativity.) Or maybe I’m fighting a system I have no way of beating. Or maybe I’m getting curmudgeonly. Or maybe I’m trying to do FB over, and do it right this time. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m positioning myself for success, making room for the thousands of new friends I am going to make through my writing.

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Trying to Be Heard Above the Facebook Noise

September 9, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’m sure it seems as if I’m obsessed with Facebook, considering all the posts I’ve been writing about the site lately, but the truth is, it confuses me. What’s the point of having thousands of friends if only a few of those “friends” show up in our news feeds, and our posts show up in only a few of theirs? Why do we have to post silly sayings and quotes by other people to attract attention to our own writing? Why are we supposed to upload colorful images and share cute pet photos? What does any of that have to do with our books? Shouldn’t the books be enough to attract attention?

I do know the answer to that last question. If you are James Patterson, mention of a book is news, but if you are Pat Bertram, it’s blatant self-promo.

There is so much noise on Facebook, with everyone screaming “Looka me, looka me,” like kids on a playground, that it’s almost impossible to hear the quiet writers who just want people to check out their books.

I thought if I posted intelligent questions, I’d attract intelligent friends, and the ones I interact with are exceedingly intelligent. The trouble is, they are in the same position I am in — looking for quiet readers in a noisy world.

I’m a writer, right? I should be able to think of witty things to say that will make people want to get to know me and my books, but my wit deserts me when it’s most needed. When I do think of something witty, it’s at three o’clock in the morning. I’m not about to wake fully, turn on the light, write down my witticism, and then lie there for hours, waiting in vain for sleep to return. (My wit centers more on puns, anyway, such as: Waiting in vein. Is that what vampires do? Well, maybe “wit” is a bit of an exaggeration.) So what passes for wit, passes with the night, and in the morning I don’t remember. (Probably just as well if “waiting in vein” is the best I can do.)

One of my favorite people on Facebook, who manages to be intelligent and witty and post cute pet photos, is Malcolm R. Campbell. (He also happens to be a darn good writer.) Malcolm once said that he’s written more to promote his books than he did to write them. (See? I told you he was witty. Or at least truthful.)

It’s kind of pathetic when you think about it — you rip out your heart and throw it into your book, and then you have to take what’s left of you and spent it on sites like Facebook. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. For a long time, I thought it was. I was having fun, and there was always the hope of hitting some sort of friending jackpot. But now? It seems like . . . noise. Something to block out.

Still, wit aside, I do have a modicum of intelligence, a bit of computer savvy, a tinge of knowledge about the workings of the human psyche, so I should be able to make my voice heard above the noise, right? But in the back of my mind is the small question, what then? My books aren’t the next erotic vampire bondage serial killer novelty, so will my being heard make any difference?

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Feeding the Facebook Beast

September 8, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday, I talked about how Facebook is not the great promotional tool we authors had been led to believe, and yet some people do exceedingly well on the site. The truth is, Facebook is a beast that feeds on content. It needs a never-ending source of funny, inspiring, informative, controversial, topical, and brief posts that engage users and keeps them liking, sharing, and commenting. The more a post is shared, liked, and commented on, the more visible the post becomes. (Facebook uses something called EdgeRank to keep track of all this, which seems similar to Amazon’s algorithms. Amazon, like Facebook, rewards those who are doing well with additional visibility. In the same way, rich celebrities who already have everything they need, get free perks just because they are rich celebrities.)

When someone interacts in any way with a post on a fan page, for example, it shows up the feed of their friends, but the originator of the content gets the credit. And so the content provider gets more reach, and because they get more reach, Facebook will ensure that this continues by letting more and more fans see the posts, which increases the page reach of the content provider. Because, of course, without content, FB will starve since its users will go where they can find funny inspiring, informative, controversial, topical, and brief posts — places such as Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, or whatever the next big thing will be.

If you don’t have such engaging posts, then even if you have 1500 fans, only about 1% will ever see what you post. If you want to know what attracts attention, look no further than your own feed. What do you see that has been shared a hundred times, a thousand times? What have you laughed at, commented on, shared? Photos with funny, inspiring, informative, controversial, topical, and brief commentary, that’s what. (Well, you do unless you’re a curmudgeon like me, and then such content simply annoys you. If I see one more animal with baby-talk captions, acting like a human, I will probably scream so loud, it will reverberate through the center of the earth and cause earthquakes on the other side of the world.)

All this research the past couple of days into the workings of Facebook has given me a few ideas of what to do with my fan page — contests, questions, quotes from my books, even . .  gasp . . . photos with captions.

Posted in culture, How to, internet, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 14 Comments »

Why Facebook is Not the Great Promotional Tool It Once Was

September 7, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Are you one of those authors who joined Facebook, hoping to find fame and fortune, and have only found . . . Facebook?

After my books were accepted for publication, and while I waited for them to become available, I spent a lot of time researching how to promote online. The first unanimous suggestion was to get a website, the second was to maintain a blog, and the third, of course, was to create a presence on social networking sites. I’d already done the first two, so that left the third option. How hard could networking be? Add the maximum number of friends, post status updates and blog links, create discussion groups as a way to get to know other authors. Sounded like fun.

At first, it worked the way it was supposed to — I made a lot of friends, had some great discussions, promoted my online release party via Facebook and MySpace. I even sold some books.

And then . . . nothing. Sure, I still had friends, but sales dropped off, and when my next release party came around, almost no one stopped by. (By then, MySpace was practically defunct — everyone I met on MySpace had migrated to Facebook.)

Many authors have had the same experience as I did. So what happened? Why, after all those articles about how great Facebook was for promotion, didn’t we get the results we hoped for? Because of the ever-changing face of Facebook, that’s why.

When I joined Facebook, it was at the tag end of the free-for-all, where anyone could post anything and all of your “friends” would see it. Events and requests to “like” a page weren’t hidden in your notifications as they are now, but were almost impossible to miss. You pretty much had to respond one way or another. Groups were much more effective than they are now. Group administrators could send a message to everyone in the group, and there were group discussions boards (which is what I used the group messaging for — to announce the weekly discussion).

One by one, all the functional parts of Facebook (those that worked best for promotion, that is) have disappeared, to be replaced by . . . not much of anything, actually. If you post something on your fan page, it shows up in the news feed of only a small percentage of people. They say 10%, but it’s more like 2%. My current reach — the maximum number of people per week who could have seen my posts — is 285. Considering that I post something every day, that means FB shows each post to only about 40 people a day, which is a very small fraction of my 1487 “likes.” If I want more people to see my posts, I can pay to get more views. Bizarre, isn’t it?

I don’t know the statistics for profile views since they aren’t posted on the site, but going by my own feed, not many people at all see anything — just the same few people every day. And now that anyone has the ability to shut off the posts of anyone they want, you could be seeing their posts, and they won’t see anything of yours.

Apparently, Facebook read the same books and articles we did about how to promote on the site, and they are doing everything they can to prevent our promotion efforts from being very effective. (They want to be the only ones making money.)

The first self-published millionaire who subsequently wrote the book about how to make a million via FB, cheated by maxing out multiple accounts — you can only have 5000 friends, so he had more than one account going at the same time. But that should come as no surprise now that he has been outed as having purchased scads of reviews.

So, if you are not getting the results you hoped for by promoting your books on Facebook, don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not your fault at all. It’s the fault of all those who came first and scammed the system before you had a chance.

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A Dream Come True For Bibliophiles

September 6, 2012 — Pat Bertram

My publisher, Second Wind Publishing, is going to be at the Bookmarks Festival of Books in Winston-Salem on Saturday, Sept. 8, 2012 and I’ve been trying to get information about the festival to write a promo for the Second Wind blog. It’s hard. I don’t want to mention all the big names that will be there because . . . well, because it’s a Second Wind company blog, and it just doesn’t seem right to promote non-Second Wind authors, especially when they don’t need the promo. A lot of new Second Wind authors will be there signing books, but since they are so new I don’t know yet who they are, and since I’ve never attended the festival, it’s difficult to write an exciting article.

I must have been more focused on the article than I realized, because last night I dreamt I was at the festival. (Well, a festival anyway. Mine was a nightmare, and I’m sure the real Bookmarks Festival is a dream come true for bibliophiles.) I set up my computer at a side table, and left it there while I busied myself with other tasks, and whenever I turned around, someone was using my computer. The last time I turned around, the computer was gone. Someone had taken mine and left a piece of junk in its place. Of course, since this was a frustration dream, I dashed around, looking for the computer, getting more and more lost nd frustrated by the minute. Every time I found someone to tell of the theft, they’d make scathing comments about leaving something so valuable unattended. My response, “But it’s never happened before,” sure didn’t win me any friends.

I woke up thinking that the sleeping me sure was stupid. I would never in a million years leave my computer unattended in a crowd. I would never even set it up in a crowd. It’s too valuable to me, being an eye into the electronic world where I have friends and even a smattering of respect.

But all’s well that ends well. Despite the frustration of the dream, I awoke rested, I did not get my computer stolen, and the Bookmarks Festival will carry on without me.

Even though I will not be at the festival, my books will be. So, if you are going to be in Winston Salem this Saturday, be sure to check out the Bookmarks Festival of Books. It’s from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. in the Downtown Arts District in Winston-Salem, centering on Trade and Sixth Streets. And don’t forget to stop at the Second Wind Publishing booth and check out my books. Even better, buy one!

(In case you don’t know what books I’ve written, check out the right sidebar of this blog. They are all listed.)

Posted in books, culture, life. Tags: , , , . 2 Comments »

An Incidental Tourist

September 5, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’ve watched thousands of movies over the years, but I’ve never considered myself a fan so much as a student. I don’t gush over movie stars, though I have paid attention to how they act, the way they deliver their lines, and the characters they play. I’ve never felt any desire to see places where movies were filmed, such as the field from The Field of Dreams. (In truth, I don’t understand the attraction. The field in Iowa is not a magical field as it was portrayed in the movie. It is simply a prosaic place where the magic of filmmaking once happened.)

Still, quite incidentally during my travels the past couple of years, I’ve seen several places made famous by movies: Monument Valley, Ridgeway (where much of True Grit was filmed), the LaBrea tarpits, Bagdad Cafe, the house where Sam Baldwin lived in Sleepless in Seattle, and the Bradbury Building. I’m sure I’ve passed by dozens of other film-famous settings without being aware of their significance, so it’s amazing to me that I recognized as many places as I did.

One of the hardest things about having lost to death the person connecting me to life is that when I see such places, I can’t tell him what I have seen. He was the one I watched all those movies with, and he would have appreciated seeing those settings way more than I did. The irony is that when he was alive, we couldn’t travel due to his health, so it’s only his death that has brought the world to me (or do I mean me to the world?).

One movie he enjoyed was Wolf, and he was especially taken with the office building where Will Randall worked.  On a recent excursion to downtown LA, I stopped in to see the Bradbury Building, which had been described as an architectural marvel, and there it was — the office building from Wolf.

I thought I’ve been keeping a scrapbook of my excursions to prove to myself that I am real, but the other day it struck me that I’m really keeping it for him — my deceased mate. I can’t tell him in person what I’ve been doing (as I always did), so the photos are a way of sharing my experiences in abstentia. He would have loved seeing the Bradbury Building — it’s even more incredible than in the movie — light-filled, soaring ceilings, ornate iron grillwork, marble stairs, and cage elevators — so I marveled in his stead.

(If you don’t know the name of the building, I’m sure you still recognize it. The place has been featured in many television series, music videos, and movies, most notably, Blade Runner, Chinatown, Murphy’s Law, Lethal Weapon 4, and of course, Wolf.)

Posted in culture, life, relationships. Tags: , , , , . 5 Comments »
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