![](\"http:\/\/users.net1plus.com\/vyrdolak\/extra\/fssgraph.jpg\")
Here is the graph if you want a great visual! The blue line is sales, pink is unique visitors.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But…domains cost money. Hosting costs even more money. And I knew redesigning the store would be a huge, huge<\/u> job. But then several things happened.<\/p>\n
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Earlier this year, I checked out GoDaddy, and ended up buying a bunch of domain names I’d been wanting to buy for ages, including fromshadowedshelves.com. Then, I did a long-overdue update to my company website, bylightunseenmedia.com, and started designing an author website for myself. While I was doing that, I logged into my Amazon Associates account looking for some images for my websites. I was astonished to see that I had made some money. Someone had clicked over to Amazon from my bookstore, and bought a Kindle! I had made a honking huge commission! I’m going to get paid<\/u> for this quarter!<\/p>\n
That finally gave me the kick in the rear I needed. Money has a way of doing that.<\/p>\n
I hauled out my reference books on HTML, CSS and Javascript and started fussing with design ideas. I finally came up with a plan that seemed to work and didn’t rely on frames. Every individual book page would be directly accessible and could be indexed, linked, searched, and so on. The major downside was that I had to make duplicates of every book file–at least two and for some books, three files. Each file was short, and the menus were in external files so they can be changed and updated separately. I know there are more elegant ways to handle a site like this, but they involve a bigger learning curve than I wanted to commit to right now.<\/p>\n
On May 22, I started checking and updating the bookstore “inventory.” I haven’t done a regular update in nine months. All I can say is…wow. Anyone who tells you the vampire trend is slacking off or “vampires are ‘out'” is just plain full of shit. Typically<\/u>, when I did a store update in the past, I’d remove some titles that had gone out of print. Then I would have slightly more new titles to add than out-of-print titles to remove. The new titles weren’t always newly published books: I’m always finding vampire titles that have been out for a while but had escaped my search keywords. I no longer list subsidy-published books (XLibris, PublishAmerica, etc) unless I know the author and\/or the author has contacted me and requested to be added to the store. I think there is a grand total of four subsidy-press titles listed right now. I do list small press\/”self-published” books.<\/p>\n
A routine bookstore update has two parts. I check every single existing link to make sure titles and editions are still in print–on this round, 572 titles, many with multiple editions–and then I run an Amazon keyword search to find new titles. I also do cross-referencing, check major author names to see if they’ve got something new out, look at the “also bought” listings on Amazon, and so on–because the keyword searches on Amazon aren’t 100% reliable.<\/p>\n
By May 23 I was pretty much spending every discretionary moment on this two-part inventory update. It took me until May 26 to finish. Out of 572 titles, 19 had gone completely out of print. But I was adding 154 new titles! 45 of those represented a new category. I decided to add Young Adult books, which I didn’t use to list, because they’ve gotten so darned popular, even without Stephanie Meyer. That still gave me 109 new vampire-related titles in only nine months! That is little less than staggering<\/u>. And far fewer titles are going out of print now.<\/p>\n
On top of that, I decided to add Kindle links to all the books that had Kindle editions. I don’t list every available edition of every book–I figure that customers can get all that information when they click to the Amazon detail page. But right now, the Kindle edition of Mortal Touch<\/i> is outselling the print edition on Amazon. If a visitor clicks over to Amazon from any<\/u> of my Associate links and proceeds to buy anything<\/u> from Amazon, I make a commission. I’ve made commissions from someone buying maternity clothes! So, I had a long list of Kindle links to add–I didn’t try to keep count. I also<\/u> decided to use some of Amazon’s “widgets,” so those had to be added.<\/p>\n
Now the real grind work started, because I had 572 book files that all<\/u> had to be redesigned and updated, and another 126 new files to create, plus redesigning the menu files. I designed a style sheet, did the menus, and then started plugging through the book files…one by one. That’s the only way I knew of doing them, and even with templates, and using cut-and-paste shortcuts, it was just…such…drudgery. Aside from mandatory chores (daily workout, cook one meal per day, errands once per week) and a day I spent with my dad, I was literally<\/u> doing nothing else<\/u>. It was much slower than I thought it would be. I had hundreds of files to do and I was getting through 10 to 20 in an hour. By Thursday the 30th, I wrote in my journal, “If I do this a third time, I\u2019m going to write a piece of software that runs through and parses all these fucking files and extracts the data!” Then, on Thursday night, the cats knocked all my pages of notes onto the floor during my workout–and one of the pages vanished. I think<\/u> the bunny ate it. I never found a scrap. I was going to have to check all those titles on Amazon again. I confess: I threw a total nutty.<\/p>\n
On Friday, May 30, my Inner Geek completely rebelled. My Inner Geek is the part of myself that says, “never, ever do anything by hand if you can get a computer to do it for you.” I haven’t kept up with programming languages; back in the 80s I designed whole systems for Apple IIe computers in Applesoft BASIC and I know Pascal, and I can program a DEC PDP-11 in Assembly language. (The way the economy is going, that skill may be useful again someday…) Since the early 90s, I’ve been doing all web design stuff. But all I needed was a platform to write simple little text manipulation routines and I didn’t want any<\/u> learning curve. So, I found GW-BASIC online, downloaded it, and spent Friday writing programs to parse book files, which was certainly a welcome break. By the end of the day I had a program running that extracted the key information from every single book file and stuffed it into a data base file that Excel would import, so I could then use mail merge to create all the redesigned book file text–html code and all–from Excel.<\/p>\n
I refined and re-ran the program several times because I kept finding things I forgot to catch, but by the next day, Saturday, I was ready to start creating the new book files from the mail merge files. All that meant was opening a text file, cut-and-pasting the block of text into it and saving it–several hundred times. The file name is the book’s inventory number. Well, I did a bunch of those by hand and by Sunday I was bored to tears and my Inner Geek said, “you idiot! You can write a software app that runs through this entire, 275-page-long mail merged file and create all those individual book files for you! Dummy!”<\/p>\n
So, that’s what I did. By the end of the day on Sunday, every book file was done.<\/p>\n
I still had a few tasks that even my Inner Geek couldn’t think of a way to automate–double-checking all the new book links, and splitting up some of the menus that were too long. I wasn’t ready to “go live” yet, and I still needed to set up the domain hosting on GoDaddy. But now we were into the first week of June, and along with the mandatory chores, my schedule included: transfer station run, New Moon ritual, IPNE Board of Directors meeting, church Parish Committee meeting, IPNE teleseminar, and my dad’s first band concert for the season in Townsend. I also made and sent an anniversary card to my sister and brother-in-law, and birthday cards to my aunt and sister. It took me the rest of the week to finish all the last little bookstore tasks–at least the critical ones.<\/p>\n
The bookstore and the domain arrangement are still being tweaked. Firefox is hacking up hairballs over my style sheets and I haven’t figured out why (I hate Firefox! Alas, lots of people use it). But I wanted to get the website and By Light Unseen up on their new domains, so everything went live last night. I made a few design changes in By Light Unseen but they were minimal compared to the bookstore. If you want to see (especially if you don’t use Firefox), they’re at bylightunseen.net<\/a> and fromshadowedshelves.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n So that is why I have been MIA since May 20! It’s a huge relief to have the bookstore updated, and it’s certainly relevant to my publishing work. I need to be right up to par on the entire vampire genre in literature, and I learn a lot every time I do the bookstore. This time, I noted that a lot of books are now being made available as audio downloads on Amazon, and Amazon Shorts (downloadable e-print short stories, articles, and so on) are getting more and more important, as well. I’m not going to do huge, intermittent updates like this any more–I’m going to update continuously as new books come out. And I now have a fantastic new tool for doing revisions and updates–I can write a piece of software to make global changes in hundreds of files in a matter of seconds. Some day I’ll pick up some more programming languages that are more efficient and up to date, but GW-BASIC does the job! I also changed By Light Unseen so I can easily add new articles, because the menus are all in external files, not embedded on every single page. So, this has been a fruitful use of my time.<\/p>\n Now if I could only get the computer to mow the lawn! \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading