In Common with Humans

That’s what my kitchen window thermometer reads: 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 37.7 Celsius. And it’s only noon! That’s hotter than the “official” temperature down in Fitchburg, but this thermometer tends to be very accurate. It’s only 75 inside the house (and no air conditioning, remember–I don’t even have A/C in my car, which is one reason I get terrific mileage)–I have a small one-story cottage and it tends to stay relatively cool in the summer.

I don’t know if we’ll get any thunderstorms out of this. There is a tornado watch up over upstate New York, stretching into western Massachusetts (and we get tornadoes in Massachusetts). The sky and the radar pictures are crystal clear right now, though.

I’m actually feeling much better than yesterday. A tepid shower right before bed made for a far more comfortable night, and I got some sleep. But I still am not anxious to go run errands! I still have all my weekly grocery shopping to do and my fridge and cupboards are pretty empty. Maybe I’ll go later.

Stay cool, everyone!

It…is…hot. 96 degrees! (35.5 C for my international readers!)

This is the third day of temperatures in the mid-90s, with tomorrow forecast to be the hottest of all. The last two of those days, I was out doing yard work in the late afternoon–mowing the lawns, weeding, even getting a bit done with the chain saw. My mower and chain saw are both electric. The yard desperately needed to be done. The lawn was just about past the point of mowing, because of all the rain we’d had. But there is a section near the house that I planned to do in stages, it was so high, and I just can’t face going out and working more on it today. I should do my grocery shopping, and I don’t even want to get in my car and drive a half-mile to the local grocery store. I don’t want to leave the house! It’s that hot. I don’t have air conditioning, but I do have fans–and all I want to do is sit in front of them! Last night I got almost no sleep at all, and I am beyond tired. At least I feel much better about the yards! I’m not looking out the windows and getting all fidgety. It’s supposed to be cooler on Wednesday. The yards can wait until then.

Of course, I have work to do! It’s kind of hard to buckle down to it when I’m too hot and tired to even think. I did get the laundry done. It was probably dry five minutes after I hung it out, but I’ll go get it later…unless it looks like thunderstorming. And it’s cycling day today. I’ll be doing my cycling late. Very late.

The animals are miserable. I don’t have cats and a rabbit, I have five scatter rugs.

One of the several contests into which I entered Mortal Touch, with disappointing results (or lack thereof), just surprised me. I won’t identify which contest this was, but it’s highly regarded and I paid a significant entry fee for it. I just received copies of three judges’ evaluation sheets for the contest, which I didn’t realize would be sent. As feedback, they’re most enlightening–and somewhat gratifying.

Two of the sheets are identical “editorial” evaluations, giving the book a general assessment–overall appearance, writing, story, production values–and the third was a “Design” evaluation specifically looking at the book’s physical design elements. Each item on the sheet is scored on a scale of 1 to 10.

Two of the sheets are just glowing. The first “editorial” evaluation is straight 9’s and 10’s, and the judge rated Mortal Touch Number 5 in his/her list of the top 10 books in that group (General Fiction). The “design” evaluation is also quite good, almost all 9’s and 10’s. The cover design printing–not the design itself, but the reproduction of it by LSI that I was not happy with–hurt my scores. I will definitely not “settle” on the cover printing again–I’ll keep tweaking it and ordering proofs until it’s up to par. I got minor points off for the small typeface, which is also not surprising. I’m not sure what to do about that, because it was an economic choice as well as a design decision. I knew the type was small, but I’ve got books on my shelves with smaller type, and I think narrow margins look much more amateurish than a small font. But it’s something to think about.

The second editorial judge didn’t like the book quite so much, and that’s probably what knocked me out of the finals. Oh, we’re not talking 1’s and 2’s, barfing-hairballs not liking, but some 6’s and 7’s “eh” not liking (also some 9’s). Comparing this “minority report” to the other two, and the things that were scored down, I suspect this judge just doesn’t like genre fiction. Well, that’s always a risk you run when you write genre fiction and then put it out in mainstream venues. I am puzzled, however, about this judge rating Mortal Touch a 6 on “consistency between the cover and the title page.” The other editorial judge gave that a 10, and I’m baffled as to what inconsistency Judge #3 found between the title information on the cover and title page!

In any event, all the evaluations and comments are extremely edifying, and I’ll consider them all carefully. It’s very gratifying, however, that except for LSI’s printing on the cover and the small typeface, the judges thought Mortal Touch was very well designed. -I- certainly thought so, but there have been people who hated the cover! For the most part, it’s gotten a positive reaction from readers in my target audience, which is the important thing.

Last week I was notified that I didn’t get the Older Writer’s Grant I applied for, either. 🙁 But the chairperson for that complimented my excerpt (from The Longer the Fall) and said he looked forward to my applying again next year.

One of the minor mysteries that has been preying on me for about two years is why my bookstore tanked. I’ve had an Amazon Associates bookstore, named From Shadowed Shelves, on my research website (By Light Unseen) for about ten years now. It earned me a bit of money in commissions, but mostly I maintained it to stay on top of the whole literary vampire genre. I prided myself that my store had every adult vampire fiction and non-fiction work currently in print (with certain exceptions–but I was familiar with those even if I didn’t list them).

Sales and traffic hit a peak in the second quarter of 2005, after which both immediately began a steep downward slide. In August 2006 I did a complete re-design of the bookstore, hoping to make it more accessible and navigable. It had consisted of long lists of books, like catalog pages. I changed it so each book displayed individually in the central panel when the visitor clicked a menu link. Because my research website was still a free “home page” with my ISP, I couldn’t do anything with CGI or databases, so I designed the site with frames to manage the menus. With over 500 books listed, I needed nested menus.

I thought the new bookstore looked and worked fine, although I hated having to use frames, and the bookstore still wasn’t searchable. But the minute I uploaded the new version, the bookstore gave up the ghost entirely. The following quarter, traffic and sales dropped to almost nothing. Since this basically continued the straight-line plummet of the past five quarters, I don’t know if the redesign had anything to do with it. I never got feedback one way or the other from anyone. But obviously, the redesign didn’t help. I finally graphed the quarterly numbers for five years and you really have to wonder what happened after June, 2005. It looks like the stock market on Black Tuesday. I’m not aware of anything -I- did that could have adversely affected the store. I didn’t observe that Amazon suddenly lost the trust of customers. I was utterly baffled. (You can see that version here, if you’re curious.)

Here is the graph if you want a great visual! The blue line is sales, pink is unique visitors.

It seemed highly ominous for my online bookstore to crap out so miserably just as I was starting up a publishing company! For over a year and a half now, I’ve been puzzling and puzzling. I wanted to redesign the bookstore again, and get rid of the frames–somehow–and I also wanted to put both the store and By Light Unseen on their own domains. That way I could trace their traffic, search engine rankings and so on, and I could add a Google search widget to the sites.

But…domains cost money. Hosting costs even more money. And I knew redesigning the store would be a huge, huge job. But then several things happened.

continued under cut to spare bandwidth

Happy Birthday, halfmoon_mollie!

Happy Birthday, thunkerofthunks!

Happy Birthday, majkia!