Step Into Another Life

Last night I dreamed I was putting a new website together. It was called Step Into Another Life. People would click on a link and be transported to a place where things made sense, where they were encouraged to be useful and good, where beauty surrounded them.

Not like modern life as we know it. When I opened the paper in the morning I was struck by the way everything was fifteen degrees out of true. They say Congress is now carrying on its own foreign policy in disregard of the executive branch and the State Department professionals, messing about in very sensitive places, all at the instigation of the head of a foreign power. Has this ever happened before? Nobody knows, because American history is no longer taught in the schools. Snookie from The Jersey Shore is on her fifth book tour, proclaiming to the press that she means to keep out of the public eye. They just passed a law in Florida forbidding the utterance of the words, "climate change." One crazy thing after another.

So, Step Into Another Life. I haven't worked out the details yet. How much would be fantasy, how much real? Ideally, I would be able to make money out of it. In my dream my sister and I were collaborating on how it would work, she being the beauty person, the artist, and I the technical one. We would all wear maroon-and-olive-green striped sweaters. How that would pull the world together into some semblance of sense I don't know, but in my dream the two of us thought that would be a start. You could order the sweaters. Then you could contact a company to install solar panels on your roof, thereby reducing dependence on foreign (and domestic) oil and gas. No more pipelines. No more kissing the feet of the Saudis. Then you could order a Tesla. Let the Koch brothers tremble. Oil would be dead.

After that—or maybe before that—the site would put you in touch with the church, synagogue, or ashram of your choice, where you could study peace and get right with God. I personally recommend the teachings of Christ, His real teachings, that is, not the fake ones made up by some hate-filled demagogue. Step into another life.

Oh, yes. And you could hire a reliable maid. Maybe also a gardener, if you had a garden.

My website would be a little bit like HomeTowne, the online game featured in Monkeystorm, except that Hometowne is entirely fantasy, with no links to the extensional world. If you haven't read Monkeystorm, you should. It's all about madness, greed, computer applications, family relationships, vampires, and the salvation of bad dogs. Also it takes place in Lambertville, whimsey capital of the Mid-Atlantic States. A very cool book, if I do say so myself.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Marketing to Teenagers

Today is the last day you can have MONKEYSTORM for free, if you have a Kindle. I've been giving it away all week, so you probably have it already if you want it, but in case you don't have it, and you have a Kindle, and you think you might like to read MONKEYSTORM (which is a lot of fun), click HERE.

You will notice that I changed the cover again. No more scary monkeys. Ever since a writer I ran into at a conference mistook it for a horror novel I've been trying to hit on a way to make the cover reflect the tone of the book, which is quite funny (if dark). So, starting from scratch, I made a plain cover in my favorite color of yellow. Then I found a charming, zany font to use for the title, and after that I bought a picture of a briefcase full of money (important plot point) from one of those sites that sell the royalty-free images. Pleased with the result, I decided to take Amazon up on their free promo plan while running ads on Facebook and wildly tweeting about it on Twitter.

Now, MONKEYSTORM was intended more or less to be a Young Adult novel, although I couldn't get the Lambertville Free Public Library's children's librarian to carry it on her shelves for some reason. For my part I would have read it with keen enjoyment when I was thirteen. It's less violent than THE HUNGER GAMES and not sexy enough to frighten the horses. So when Facebook wanted to know who I wanted to see the ads, I selected females between thirteen and thirty who like to read books or watch movies. I wanted to run the ads for the whole five days of the free promo, but the ads are no longer ten dollars a day. They are thirty dollars a day. So three days was my limit.

The first thing I did after designing the new cover and arranging with Amazon for the giveaway was to announce it on the DorothyL Facebook page, since those folks like to read mysteries and a few of them are still fans of mine. They downloaded maybe twenty copies. Then I sat back to watch what the kids would do.

It was gratifying. A lot of them "liked" my ad. One of them appended a little horror story in the comments. (I had no idea you could comment on a Facebook ad.) It started out, "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS OR YOU WILL DIE," and went on to tell the story of a little girl who murdered her parents and died horribly in a mental institution, and how she would come around tonight and cut you in small pieces if you didn't forward this story to ten people, but if you did, tomorrow would be the best day of your life. I hate chain letters. I looked around for some way to delete it, but Facebook didn't seem to offer any. Then I thought, wait. Leave it. This is a good horror story. Kids love horror stories. So I commented on the comment, praising the story but saying that I never forward chain letters, and in spite of that I've already lived to a ripe old age, which proves you don't have to, and that tomorrow is always the best day of my life.

I haven't yet been reduced to threatening readers with death if they refuse to read my work, though I've considered saying, "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS OR I'LL KILL THIS PUPPY."

The upshot of the Facebook ad story is that the statistics they gave me showed that most of the downloads resulting from the ads went to the teenagers rather than the 20 to 30 group. I may finally be connecting with my audience. I suppose this means I'll have to write a sequel.

© 2013 Kate Gallison

Fooling Around with Covers

New Cover

The upside of self-publishing is that one has complete creative control over the product. If one doesn't hire an editor or a proofreader, or engage a professional artist to design the cover, the product is all one's own. This has its advantages and disadvantages, as my old history teacher, Mrs. Wilcox, used to say. The downside is that one runs the risk of standing revealed in public as a complete horse's ass.

I flatter myself that my copy is pretty clean. Over the years I worked with one of the best copy editors in the business, now gone to the big publishing house in the sky. She taught me much. As for the plotting, well, I do the best I can, and I won't take advice from anybody anyway so it might as well go out the way it is. Hey, I'm an entertaining writer. But, the covers—!

Take MONKEYSTORM. (Please.) I designed what I thought was a killer cover for that book, replete with a picture of a raging monkey, although there were no actual monkeys in it, but only virtual monkeys appearing in a videogame. Harold liked the cover with its fierce monkey face; he said it would grab people's attention; I had to agree. But at a recent conference another writer took a gander at it and asked, "Is it horror?" Well, no, it's mostly supposed to be funny, though it's full of grisly murders and more or less pitched to a YA audience. Who haven't discovered it yet. Truth be told, I haven't sold very many copies to anybody at all.

Old Cover

Maybe the problem is the cover.

I'm taking another shot at that now. Behold the new cover (above). If that doesn't persuade anybody to buy it, my fall-back cover will have two thinly clad teenagers making out in a graveyard. I understand that this sort of thing is a big sales booster. FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY had only a nice silk cravat on the cover, as I recall, but they say the hot stuff was all on the inside.

What do you think of the new cover? Of book covers generally? Please advise.

Kate Gallison

Facebook and Me

First of all, let me say that my birthday is not listed in Facebook. I notice that many of my friends list their birthdays on Facebook. Happy birthday to them, but I think it's a bad idea, like announcing your vacation plans on Facebook. Or mentioning your mother's maiden name, or your high school mascot, or the name of your first pet. Or your Social Security number.

Having said that, and revealed (or perhaps only hinted at) the depths of my personal paranoia, I will now say something nice about Facebook. Facebook will sell you absolutely the cheapest ads imaginable.

Yes, I bought an ad on Facebook last week. I was delighted with it. I ran it for two days at ten dollars a day. It was by way of announcing that I had successfully published Monkeystorm on CreateSpace as a paperback.

That was pretty much all I did the week before last, prepare the book for publication and make a cover. As I have surely mentioned to you until you're sick of hearing it, Monkeystorm went up as a Kindle a couple of weeks ago. But some of my friends complained that they had no Kindle, that they in fact detested reading on an electronic device and wanted a paper book.

How hard could that be? I asked myself. Not all that hard, as it turned out, given that the folks at CreateSpace were willing to work with a docx file. Formatting text is for me a little like cutting a movie together. It's satisfying in almost the same way. Word has a command for drop caps! I could put drop caps at the beginning of each chapter! Elegant! In the end I was able to use Word to submit the whole thing, even the cover, which has to be a PDF. I did the cover art with GIMP and inserted it as a picture file. All you have to do is set the margins to zero.

But enough of this technical jargon. The point of the story is that I made an actual book out of my virtual book, which CreateSpace now offers for sale. I set the price at $8.99, as cheap as I could make it and still see a tiny little royalty. Now to get the word out, I said to myself.

So I made an announcement on my Facebook page, with an image of the cover, the angry gorilla face. Facebook said, this could be an ad, Kate Gallison. I said, yes.

They give you options of whom to show your ad to. By age. By sex. By geographical location. By education level. By interest (everybody has entered their interests, right?) By whether or not they already know you. They say, okay, you have chosen a universe of 75,483,221. These people will see your ad. (Actually not all of them will see your ad. Some of them will see your ad.) You tell them, run the ad for two days at ten dollars a day. Within those parameters, they charge by the click. A Facebook patron clicks on your ad, and Facebook charges you, up to ten dollars a day. So now I am a predator instead of the preyed upon. I have bought into their business plan, that of selling their patrons.

Here are my ultimate statistics, according to Facebook:

5,196 people saw the Facebook post that was the ad.

57 people clicked on it.

31 people liked it. Perfect strangers, most of them.

One guy in Utah (Say, I wonder if he knows my nephew Tim) left me a comment.

Of course, nobody bought the book. But, hey. You can't have everything. When I mount my campaign to sell Bucker Dudley I'll have a handle on how running an ad on Facebook works, and I'll try it again.

Kate Gallison

More Advice from Grandma Kate

…Unsolicited advice, too, I might add. But if you're sick of hearing about the weather right now you can come back and read this later, in the spring, maybe, when the birds are sweetly singing, the flowers blooming, the last hurricane a distant, ugly memory and the next one a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man's hand. Just do one thing before you tune out. Make a list of the things you wished you had when things were darkest. Then go out and get them as soon as the stores restock.

Because we're going to get hit again, one way or the other. That's life. That's the grandma part of this advice. Most people are younger than I am, it occurs to me, and haven't been around long enough to realize that serious grief and privation can strike anyone at any time.

What can't you stand to be without? I'm thinking, clean water, good books, a flashlight and lots of batteries, a bathtub full of water and a bucket to flush the toilet if you have no tap water, wooly blankets and comforters in cold weather, and if you can manage it a nice warm bedfellow. You will have your own list, of course, but surely these things will be on it.

Everybody goes out the day before a storm and gets milk and toilet paper, they say, but you and I keep a backlog of toilet paper on hand anyway, right? Who waits until there's half a roll in the house before buying more? and the milk you stock will go sour without refrigeration. Unless it's shelf milk.

What I missed the most sorely besides light and heat was the gizmo I bought in Mississippi to plug into the USB port and connect my MacBook to the internet via 3G. I seem to have lost the @#$%^ thing. The first few days we were without power I went through every drawer and hidey hole in the house, flashlight in hand, looking for it. I was amazed at the things I found! But the gizmo was not one of them.

So make your own list, for future reference. An airline ticket to Bimini would be useful. A big generator. A generator big enough to save our bacon looks like it would cost five grand or so, and that's before the electrician gets paid to install it. I told Harold we could get one when I had a best-seller. You can help there. Buy a copy of Monkeystorm when it comes out, whenever that is, and you can come over to my house when there's a storm after the generator is installed. We'll all sit around the hot radiator having Vienna sausages and shelf milk.

Kate Gallison

The Craziest Thing You've Ever Done

In one of those charming articles on true love in the Sunday Style section of the New York Times I read of a dating couple playing a question game where each got to ask the other a question. The boy asked, "What's the craziest thing you've ever done?" The girl confessed that she had gone to Assisi and worked with a wedding planner to concoct her dream wedding, without ever having met the right man. The relationship blossomed and the two were married the following year, in Assisi. (It was an article on true love, after all.)

The piece got me thinking. Could I answer such a question? No. I don't do crazy things. I do ill-advised things, but seldom impulsively. When disaster strikes I tend to freeze like a mouse under the gaze of a snake. I'm paralyzed until I understand what's happening. Sometimes this takes years.

Carina Nebula, the protagonist of Monkeystorm (the book I just finished), is, on the other hand, all impulse. She is so crazy that she had to break out of Trenton Psychiatric, and the craziest thing she ever did was whatever she just did two minutes before. It was interesting to write a character like that. I had to find her inside my stodgy self, where all of us find our characters, if we are writing honestly. But it took a long time. Carina could decide in a heartbeat to torch a building or cut herself on the hand, but I had to mull it over for days before I realized it was what she would do.

So what's the craziest thing you've ever done?

Kate Gallison

Suitable Topics for a Blog Post

I find myself staring at the blank computer screen once again, with Friday on the way. I turn my eyeballs inward, seeking a topic to bloviate upon for a few paragraphs. What to talk about?

Dinner. I could talk about what I expect to serve for dinner. Alas, I have no idea, except that a can of beans will be involved.

Politics. No, I have sworn off talking about politics until after the election. You all know who you want to vote for, you all know what's at stake, and nothing I say will have any effect. I will remind you to be sure you're registered, and to be sure to show up at the polls on election day. That's all I have to say about that.

Movies. I've seen some corkers since I got Turner Classic Movies up and running again. I'll tell you about some of them later. Not right now.

The triumphs of the writing life. Yes! I finished Monkeystorm (huzzah), and to my eye at least it is good. Harold, a connoisseur of trash fiction, tells me it fulfills all the requirements for a thriller. One of my other first readers found a plot hole which I quickly filled up with blood and gore. But it's short, a mere 55,000 words. I'm not sure I have the nerve to send it to my agent like that.

And yet it occurs to me that Monkeystorm, a story about a video game (among other things), might be packaged with a copy of the actual video game. That way 55,000 words would be plenty. Or not. I'll see what my agent has to say.

Kate Gallison

Losing It

You will recall how a few weeks ago I declared my intention to go crazy in the service of Art, in order to better understand my protagonist's usual frame of mind. It worked pretty well, as methods go. The first draft of Monkeystorm (current working title) is just about finished. Carina has managed to elevate her craziness to the level of a superpower.

The problem with mental exercises of this sort is that they tend to distract a writer from important details of her own life. There are things I haven't been attending to. There are things, in fact, that I have out and out lost this summer. My mind may be one of them, or not, but I certainly can't find, for example, the new camera. I know we brought it back from Mississippi because I downloaded pictures.

Or my summer clothes from last year. A divine bathing suit I bought in the Florida Keys. Two pair of white jeans that fit me. That suit with the bright-colored flowers that everybody likes. Gone.

Most likely I packed the clothes away last fall and forgot where. But I've looked all over, to no avail. I tell you what. If you see some woman about my size wearing a skirted suit with big gaudy flowers and using a little black Canon digital camera to take pictures, and she isn't me, drop me an email. There may be a reward. Or my mind. If you run into my mind (I know, I know, it's too weak to get very far) hang onto it and give me a call. I'll be most grateful.

Kate Gallison

Update, Saturday morning… I found the camera just now, you'll be happy to know. In searching the house for it, however, I uncovered many levels of chaos. Next Friday I hope to be able to report that my office is clean, my clothes are in order, and five bags of trash have been put on the curb.