When I got my assignment this morning from the blog tour class, I had an epiphany about what we were being asked to do. I shared it in excruciatingly boring detail today.
Yesterday’s Word Count: 0
Today’s Starting Count: 11,674
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1) If your book is being pirated on an individual basis – consider yourself a major author! Generally, files as small as books are aggregated into bundles on the Web and on BitTorrent. IRC is a slightly different matter (which happens to be where I’ve seen your books available in pirate format, Sar!)
2) Google is too effective – it’s not very likely you’re going to find legitimately pirated copies of books via Google, as it just crawls the web too damn well. If you’re going to find those kinds of books, it’ll be mentions with links in forums and such, hidden behind database driven sites that Google doesn’t index effectively. If it’s stored on one of the file locker websites, you’re going to find a direct link to it, not a pointer to the front page and a search engine.
Nate, your ruminations on that blogging class remind me (in a skewed fashion) of the dot-com bubble bursting. The bursting of so many hopes and dreams, all pinned on the idea of merely having a web site with expectations of traffic and/or growth in viewing numbers (to generate expected multi’s in profits from sale of said web sites) which seemed to be floating around in the ether loose from any grounding in the idea that a web site exists to promote either product and/or concept. Your web pages work because we, the viewers, are interested in you and your writing (the product). You might spend time making your web site prettier and/or more accessible, but that wouldn’t really change the dynamic between you and your audience. And as for unneccessary widgets…. phttt-t-t-t-t-t! (Ignatz blows the raspberries!) 🙂
+1 here I couldn’t agree with you more!
Agreed – I’ve been so tempted to host-block GoogleAnalytics and a half dozen other social media widget sources, because if a page is hung up loading, I can almost guarantee it’s either one of those widget sites, or some site’s “content distribution network” URL that will be showing down in the status bar as “waiting for …” Is it just me, or was the Internet so much faster before we started getting all these CDNs?
One of the unofficial “best seller” lists amoung the German publishers at the Frankfurt bookfair is the “Most Stolen” list. They have huge displays of their books, and some people seem to think that it’s okay to just take one because it’s a bookfair. Still, it’s considered something of an honor to be at the top of the list, because it means people are actually interested in your books.
The blog exemplar you mention actually reminds me of earlier websites designed to collect “eyeballs” or link hits, where the site owner got paid a few cents for each click. Nowdays such sites are often shadow-banned as blogspam by the meta-communites such as Reddit.
I’m guessing that your judicious use of critical thinking skills, common sense, and life experience make for a student that a lot of “expert” subject matter teachers wouldn’t want to deal with 😉
Ha ha ha. This.