How embarrassing! I didn’t expect anybody to follow the link to my SL (slang for SecondLife) shop but several of you did! Thanks for doing that. If you’ve been there in the last day or two, you may have been surprised to find a very different place than the one displayed in the photo of my last post. This has been for a couple of reasons.
First, after digging through the vast information available at the SL Wiki, I’ve found a new interest in building objects for resale and/or pursuit of leisure. This of course means that I quickly discovered that I would also need to spend time learning SLS, the programming code used by SL to imbue objects with “life.” After giving this some thought I quickly realized that being a capable builder in SL would allow me to do some things that I’ve been wanting to do in real life for ages, without spending very much money at all. I decided that I would need a private place to work in order to develop the physical constructs and accompanying scripts that will be necessary to make my real world dreams a virtual reality.
After removing all of the products in my “store” with the exception of my book’s promotion package, I boarded up the windows and got to work. It would require several trips to places in SL such as Bromley College and Jopsy Pendragon’s Particle Laboratory to get it right, but before long I had completed my very first creation—a Mad Squid blimp.
It looks fairly innocuous, but it is actually capable of doing quite a bit. It will be capable of even more in its next generation. Right now I only feel comfortable with talking about the advertising possibilities for this device. Built into the MS Blimp is a holographic projector that displays an image up to 4 meters square, which hovers just a couple of meters above the blimp itself. At present, the blimp is stationary, but because the holographic projection is an SL particle, it is perfectly viewable from 360 degrees even though it’s really just a 2-D image.
In the 2nd generation of this blimp, I intend to have included a script that gives the blimp autonomous mobility. Now, because property owners often set their land as off limits to the average resident, and because business don’t want you dropping your creations on their land, permission is needed to enter a lot of places. This is a fact that would severely restrict the mobility of my blimps. But there are “roads” that run through SL which are often lined by tiny little “ad farm” plots which tend to quickly fill up with billboards—something that can very quickly anger nearby residents.
My very first piece of land in SL was (and is) the location of the billboard listed above. It was a picture of my book cover and a list of places to go to find it. Not very daring in terms of SL functionality, but it was my first piece of land. Now that I’ve wandered around “in world” a bit more, I’ve come to see that such billboards and “ad farms” are actively opposed. This one will likely come down soon.
The nice thing about the blimp, however, is that I will hopefully be able to program a course into it’s scripting that will enable it to move up and down the various roads of SL while displaying advertising that clients will be able to sign up for at kiosks on all of my land. They will pay weekly subscriptions to have my blimps displaying their ads while moving quietly up and down the road networks. This way the blimps stay off of private property and never clutter the skyline because they won’t be stationary.
As I’ve mentioned, I have plans for additional capabilities with this device, and other devices, but to get a start in SL and really get a foothold I figured i would need a simple, automated means by which to provide a service that SL residents will find useful and less intrusive to their in-world experience.
Okay, call me a nerd. I’ve given SecondLife a second chance (as prior to upgrading my video card a few months ago I was unable to run the software.) I must say, I’m quite impressed.
I’ve opened up a little shop in the Hewes District of SL which feels very much to me like a Sharper Image sort of store, only much smaller. I have a parrot greeter, a giant fish tank that has a built in, flip down TV monitor (on which will be playing a trailer for my book very soon), an ATM, four South Park novelty avatars for sale, and one final, special little product.
Click to enlarge.
Available for sale in my store, JMK’s Oddities and Gouge, is a special promotional pack for my book Five Years in Hawaii! That’s right, for just a few Lindens (the fake money used in SL) you can buy a virtual copy of my book that includes access to a free chapter from the book and gives a link for more information about the book. I’m particularly proud of this accomplishment. You can see my book hovering in the back of my store as circled in red in the image above.
Cool, huh!? I plan to do much more when I get my hands on some of my own land. I hope to see you on SL soon! I resisted for a long time but now I think it has quite a lot of potential.
Fictitious insomuch as I will be writing fiction, short fiction to be exact. I’ve already had way too much time to finish my first novel and the damn thing is still sitting at 3 chapters long. Why? Well, because the third chapter that I wrote was so corny, so BAD in it’s attempt at police procedure, that I subconsciously chose to abandon it. At least, that’s my theory.
Last night I spent a few minutes as a caller to a fairly popular Internet talk radio show called The Odd Mind. Wednesday is their open mic night, so I was just there for lack of anything better to do. I got a short plug for my book out of it though, and I managed to plug a really good book called Where Hell Freezes Over, so it wasn’t all for naught.
One thing that I quickly realized while listening and talking with the folks at The Odd Mind was that I simply am not writing enough fiction to harbor an honest hope of breaking into that genre. With this blog, and with my book Five Years in Hawaii I’ve been pretty focused on nonfiction topics and related issues. As a result, I’ve done very little fiction writing. It’s time now for that to change.
Because my three ugly little chapters have been sitting in the silicon of my computer for almost a year now, I’ve decided to move on. I still intend to write that story, but I will start over from scratch. In order to make sure that my new attempt doesn’t go the same way as my old one, I’m going to do some writing exercises, if you will.
What this means to you, my brilliant readers, is that I am going to start a series of short stories to develop my characters as they would have existed before the opening of my novel. I will publish these short stories here on my blog, under the heading of Short Fiction. I haven’t decided how often this will happen, or if I really even want to box myself into a schedule (such as one per week), but rest assured it will happen.
Who knows, maybe I’ll garner a meager following for my characters prior to writing the full deal in novel form. This would help with sales later on, for sure, but it would also allow me to get feedback from potential readers before going to press. I’m fairly excited about this!
And so, there you have it. I will be publishing short bits of fiction here on my blog that will involve the characters and settings that will be found in my first novel. These stories will be a sort of fusion between MilFi and SciFi. The plots will deal with government, military, and international espionage—but the vehicles for telling the story will center around high tech gadgetry and technological wizardry.
I hope to see you all on the forthcoming Short Fiction pages in the very near future! Until then, thank you for your time!
Yeah baby, yeah! I feel like Austin Powers on a caffeine trip! No, not because of an illegal substance, but because I finally managed to get some real marketing done with respect to my book. I had ordered business cards from a popular online printer, and they turned out great. But that was as far as my budget was supposed to allow me to go.
Postcards, Fridge Magnets, and Business Cards
Then I got an email from the printer telling me that I could get a lot of really cool shit for free, so I did! Now, this “cool shit” comes in limited quantities as compared to a paid order, and I still had to pay shipping. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t get the makings of a press kit for under $12. Included were 100 postcards, 25 fridge magnets, a crap load of return address labels, and even a car door magnet!
Car Door Magnet
To be sure this was a brilliant marketing strategy on the part of that online printer. They overcharged me, no doubt, for the first order of 250 business cards. Then, they hooked me like a fish with the “free offer” that followed. I’m not complaining though. I think the whole deal worked out pretty well, and you better believe that I’ll be going back to them for more.
Anyway, deciding what to do with the post cards was pretty easy. The ISBNs for both the paperback and the hardcover versions of Five Years in Hawaii are on the card, as well as a direct link to the book on Lulu where the recipients can order at bulk prices beginning with orders as small as 10 copies (as of 28 October 2008). About half will go to domestic (area and regional), independent bookstores who are able to make the carry/drop decision without calling “corporate.” The other half are slated for an audience I hadn’t even considered.
Had it not been for the Bookstore Guide (Europe), a blog written by “Sonja and Ivan,” I would never even have considered mailing out promotional material to bookstores in foreign markets. But, because their blog centers around independent bookstores that specifically cater to an English speaking clientele (and even to Ex Pats in many cases), the opportunity was hard to overlook. Plus, because the dollar is weak compared to the Euro, the purchasing power of these independent shops is comparatively stronger than the average U.S. mom and pop bookstore.
Seeking my 1st trade magazine review!
Finally, I decided also to take the plunge and seek out my first review in a trade magazine. I chose The New York Review of Books because their submission process seemed to be the most democratic, or at least seemed to give the best odds for someone like myself with limited funds for advertising and marketing materials to be considered for review. There is no fee, but there is also no guarantee.
It’s possible that the book pictured above will simply slip into the abyss. Of course, I think that the potential to benefit from this move outweighs the cost (1 copy of my book that is out of my hands), and I’m keeping a positive attitude about the whole thing. Who knows, maybe I’ll get that review—after all, I included a fridge magnet, a postcard, and a business card. Combine those with a hand-written note to Robert Silvers along with my signature to polish the whole thing off and maybe, just maybe, I’ll win the editor’s heart.
