Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Feedback, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Well. Post 999. Who woulda thunk it?
I started this blog one month short of 4 years ago, ostensibly to discuss the process of revising, then submitting for publication Communion of Dreams.
Of course, along the way it became something much more than that. Another book emerged from it. I made a lot of friends. I connected with old friends. I documented the twistings and turnings of my life and fortunes. Stared into my navel far too much. Stared into the bright sun upon occasion. Started a new project, and watched it become insanely popular (though not exactly remunerative.)
I’m still waiting for final confirmation of the publication date and details from the publisher who is interested in CoD – even at this late date in the whole process, things could fall through. But with a little luck, the book will actually be out sometime in the new year, and we’ll see whether the over 29,000 downloads it has had since I first launched this blog translate into actual sales.
Wow – 29,000 downloads. That still amazes me, given that it has all been word of mouth and informal promotion.
So, thanks for the ride, everyone.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival
Well, well, well. For the last couple of months the totals have been slowly approaching our all time high of 303,000 hits in December 2008 – the first full month when we launched BBTI and made a big splash in the firearms world.
November 2010 blew that number right out of the water. We had a total of 384,578 hits last month.
Wow.
As I noted last Friday, I was pretty confident that we would break the all-time high in November. But a big surge at the end of the month, in part thanks to the article in Concealed Carry Magazine but in bigger part to an article which showed up on the popular Survival Blog which cited our data. Thanks, guys!
News on Communion of Dreams is less dramatic. Things are still pending with publication, and I don’t have much info to share about that yet. Downloads, which had jumped in October, have dropped back to their usual range of 600+. As soon as I have details to share with everyone about the publication date, I will definitely post it here and on FaceBook.
All in all, the continued success of both of these endeavors amazes and pleases me. Now we just need to add in similar success with the care-giving book . . .
Happy December, everyone!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Welcome to November. And that means it’s time to crunch some numbers.
For Ballistics By The Inch, we had a total of 293,427 hits in October. That beats September by about 12,000 hits, and puts us within about ten thousand of our all-time-high month when the site first launched – that amounts to about one day’s hits. The total overall hits is now 3,818,460 – we should break four million in about three weeks, about the time of our second anniversary. Wow. Thanks everyone!
And a personal note: I’ve mentioned in passing that sometime in the very near future I will sign the final contract for the commercial publication of Communion of Dreams, with the book to be rolling off the presses in just a few short months. When I sign that contract, we’ll need to pull all the downloadable content from my homepage – but no worry, because the book will be available in electronic formats for different readers at a very reasonable price, as well as being available in both hardcover and paperback versions. Word of this has helped prompt a surge in downloads in the last month, and October’s totals were double that for September – overall, some 1,200 downloads of the complete novel. A nice affirmation, and puts the total downloads of the book at something approaching 29,000. Thanks, everyone – I hope you decide to get the updated version and/or a hardcopy of the book when it comes out soon!
So, happy November!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
OK, I don’t actually think I know everything. About anything. Even things I know a lot about.
But every once in a while I find out I don’t know something that I should. Like there’s been a deliberate plot to withhold information about something from me.
Ha Ha Tonka is one such piece of information.
I grew up in Missouri. I was born here, raised here, and have spent most of my life here. And I thought I knew the state reasonably well, even the parts of it that I don’t know. If you know what I mean.
Then, I was in the SCA for a long time. Still have a bunch of friends from that time.
And I have traveled to Europe multiple times, in large part to enjoy the castles and other historic buildings/ruins. All my family, most of my friends know this, and a fair number have even been subjected to slide shows of our trips.
We own property south of Columbia, adjacent to a State Conservation Area, part of which features an interesting geologic area known as a Karst Plain. One of my favorite places on our property is at the edge of a wonderful 300′ cliff, looking down into Three Creeks. There’s an old cabin there, which we use as the backstop for the BBTI tests, and my wife and I would love to build a getaway home there. The whole area has caves, sinkholes, and wonderful exposed rock.
Lastly, I appreciate the eccentric. Particularly people who have slightly mad ideas and dreams.
So, for all these reasons, you’d think I would have heard of a State Park in Missouri with beautiful scenery, 80 acres of Karst formation with caves and sinkholes, stunning views, and the ruins of an honest-to-god stone castle (of the ‘mansion’ variety). But prior to late last week, I had never heard of Ha Ha Tonka.
See, my wife had an AIA thing down at the Lake of the Ozarks this weekend. That was just Friday night, and then Saturday until early afternoon. But since Saturday was also our anniversary, we decided that we’d stay over, find something else in the area to do for a bit of celebration. Now, we’re not the sort to “paint the town red”, so one of the things she suggested to me was a drive a few miles to Ha Ha Tonka.
I had never heard of it. She told me some. I wondered. Racked my brain, trying to think of when I might have heard of it. Nothing. I looked at the websites she sent me. Still didn’t ring any bells at all.
Weird.
But yesterday, after her other obligations were done, we jumped in the car and headed down to Ha Ha Tonka. Here are a couple of images:
As you can see, those are from the ruins. For the full set of images, including some great scenic vistas, check out my Facebook album.
And I still say it’s weird that I never heard about this. It’s like I’ve been abducted by aliens and that part of my memory has been excised.
Uh-oh, now I’ve done it, haven’t I?
Jim Downey
Happy October, everyone!
And since it is the start of the month, it’s time to talk numbers.
For Ballistics By The Inch, last month we had 281,920 hits – putting us about 20,000 hits under our all time high of December 2008, when we first launched the site and word spread. That’s not much – at current hit rates, it’s about 2.5 days or one good link at a big gun forum. Whew. And the overall total of hits we’ve seen is 3,525,033 – at this rate, we’ll break 4 million by our second anniversary.
For Communion of Dreams, last month 515 people downloaded the full original novel, 56 people downloaded the revised version, and there were over 160 downloads of at least one of the MP3 files. That puts total actual downloads over 27,000, with something like another 3,000 downloads of at least one of the MP3 files.
Thanks everyone for helping to share the info about both sites!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted on the BBTI blog.)
Well, it was a fun couple of days this week out at Camp BBTI – doing a new round of testing, primarily focused on the .380 ACP cartridge (9x17mm). This has become an increasingly popular cartridge used for small self-defense guns, so we decided to expand the different ammos we tested using the BBTI ‘chop tests’ as well as a dozen real world guns. You can see the guns here:
And here’s a great pic of Jim K and Keith at the shooting table, getting ready to shoot the 4″ barrel:
We also did the full chop tests (as well as a real world gun) on 9mm Makarov and 9mm Ultra – two cartridges which are between a .380 and the 9mm Parabellum in terms of power/performance. We’ll post the full data on the BBTI site as soon as everything is crunched and ready – but for now let me just say that heretofore I haven’t been a big fan of the .380, but with the right ammunition I’d consider carrying a gun in that caliber. We were all surprised at how well the Buffalo Bore rounds performed at even the 2″ barrel length.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to the BBTI blog.
Filed under: Ballistics, Gardening, Guns, Habanero, Health, Publishing, Writing stuff
OK, it’s been a while. But not due to anything bad.
First, I am feeling a lot better. I’ve communicated with my doc, and it looks like the last round of antibiotics finally did the trick with the pneumonia. I still have some recovery to do – minor lung pain and whatnot – but I am at least sleeping normally again and have a lot more energy. Now I just have to ease back into getting decent exercise and enough rest, and then I can start on making up for all the stuff that didn’t get done in the last month.
Second, we did another round of ballistics testing this week, focused primarily on a bunch of new ammo types in the very popular .380 caliber. Got some interesting results – more on all of that, later.
Third, got a rejection from the agent who had expressed initial interest in the care giving book. Here’s what she said:
This needs a lot of work. By “this” I mean both the proposal, which is really dry, and the material, which is uneven because of your source material. You need to put more effort into using the source material to tell a story, not sticking it into chapters and relying on it as the primary storytelling device.
Which tells me that she completely didn’t “get” the whole idea of the book. I don’t usually dismiss out of hand any criticism, but I also have enough sense to not over-react to the first response I get. We will continue to look elsewhere for someone else who may be interested in representing the book.
Lastly, got the first harvest of Red Savina habaneros out of the garden. Last night prepped and dried about two dozen. Here’s a pic of them before they went into the oven:
And here they are when I took them out this morning:
Once dried, turned them into about 3 ounces of delicious nuclear-powered spice. Yay!
So, things continue. Now I need to do a bit of yard work.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Health, Promotion, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Odd little thing I just noticed…
OK, let me back up a bit. As mentioned earlier, I’m fighting an annoying and rather stubborn lung infection. I was doing better the first of this week, after a course of antibiotics, but in the last couple of days have started another downward dip. Just got another round of antibiotics from the doc, with instructions to take it easy and see him Monday if I am not feeling better. Because of all this I am feeling a bit pathetic and non-creative, but I am not feeling quite like I just want to nap – I’m hovering over a no-man’s-land between sickness and health, unmotivated to do much. So I read through the stuff that needs work on the care giving book, but am not up to actually doing anything about it.
Anyway. Because of being stuck in this state, the most I feel like doing is poking around a bit. Which I started to do with the stats for Communion of Dreams. Usually, I just check to see how many downloads have occurred and leave it at that. Those are the numbers that I report on here. But a bit ago I decided to see just how many hits the site has been getting.
And this is what I found curious. It’s now running about 10,000 hits a month, and has been for over the last year. Low during that period was 8,500, the high 13,000.
These are not huge numbers – the BBTI site has been getting about 8,000 hits a day of late – but they’re not too shabby, either. And what is curious is that in the first few months of 2009, the numbers jumped from about 1,500 to about 4,000 and then to 9,000 – and they have stayed at that higher level since.
I’m not really sure why. There has been something of an uptick in the number of downloads each month during that time period, but it was nothing like a seven-fold increase. It just seems that more people are coming by the site on a regular basis. I suppose it could be tied to the BBTI project, in that there is a link in my bio there to the CoD site, but I’d be surprised if that accounted for all of it.
Interesting.
Jim Downey
Rolling out some stats for June and July . . .
Complete versions of Communion of Dreams were downloaded 780 times in June, and another 692 in July, putting the total a bit shy of 26,000. Whew.
But the real news is with BBTI. On May 23 I wrote this:
Just a quick note: yesterday we crossed 2.5 million hits – total is 2,505,951. We’re averaging over 7,000 hits a day now, and at that rate we’ll break 3 million hits in about 10 weeks.
Well, we haven’t broken 3 million yet. But we will sometime late today, about a week earlier than I predicted. The total as of yesterday was 2,993,557 hits. That breaks down as 192,007 hits in June and 224,458 hits in July. That puts July as the second-highest all time total, with only the first full month the site was up beating it.
Well. Bit stunning, all in all.
Jim Downey
*Victor ‘Boss Vic Koss’ Kosslovich. Cross posted to the BBTI blog.
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Ben Bova, Constitution, Guns, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, RKBA, Robert A. Heinlein
I mentioned meeting Ben Bova at the Heinlein Centennial a couple years back, and how I was impressed by his grace and humanity in how he dealt with both me and Frederik Pohl.
And I just found out that I have another reason to respect him: his support for the Bill of Rights, and specifically for the 2nd Amendment. I’m not too surprised, given some of the things he has written, but to see him weigh in on this topic specifically is quite enjoyable.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Communion Of Dreams 