Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society
Well, as I noted the other day, we crossed the threshold of 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams sometime last Friday. This after a bit of a slow crawl the last couple of months to reach that number.
Of course, what happens this weekend? Another 500 downloads.
Because, clearly, 9,775 downloads doesn’t indicate that something is popular. But 10,000 does, and so other people want to check it out.
Man, I love marketing. We hairless apes sure have some funny quirks.
But thanks to all those who decided to check out the book this weekend. And, again, thanks to all who downloaded it previously and helped to spread the word about it.
Jim Downey
*with apologies.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Daily Kos, Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Huh. It finally happened, a week after I turned 50. Over 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams.
I’ve posted a ‘thank you’ to both UTI and dKos, but I want to extend a personal thanks to all who follow the blog and have helped to spread the word of the novel. As I noted on dKos:
When I set up a website to allow people to download the novel early last year, I thought that I would just make it available until I got around to finding a publisher for the book. But then my life became completely preoccupied with the deteriorating condition of my mother-in-law (see my diaries here tagged “Alzheimer’s”, or go to my blog), and just didn’t have the time/energy for doing the legwork of finding an agent or publisher.
So the book remained available for download. And surprise, surprise, word of it spread. The most I ever did to promote it was to put a link in my .sig file here and a couple of other places where I post. The whole thing took on a bit of a life of its own, to be honest, and watching the numbers of downloads slowly climb helped to bolster my spirits during some very dark and depressing times.
OK, that’s not entirely true – I did start this blog with the goal of promoting the book and documenting the process of finding an agent and then landing a publishing deal. But the part about watching the numbers climb helping me through those difficult times of caring for Martha Sr are certainly true. The same for the feedback I have gotten through this blog. Thanks to one and all for your support, criticism, and friendship.
Huh. 10,000. That’s kinda cool.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Well, I just checked the stats, and according to my calculations we’re closing in on the elusive 10,000 downloads goal. About 110 to go, way I figure.
That’s really cool. I suppose I should go pick up a current edition of the Guide to Literary Agents or something. Rework my contact letter. Select a half-dozen or so agents and contact them, tell them what a great opportunity it would be for them to represent me and Communion of Dreams.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just rework the homepage for Communion a bit, freshen things up in celebration. Because contacting agents has been so effective in the past.
Gah.
Anyway, chill the champagne, order the cake, let’s get ready to party!
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, Daily Kos, Failure, Feedback, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Guns, Health, Hospice, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Well, we didn’t make the “10,000 downloads before I turn 50” goal. Still about 225 shy of 10k. Which is OK. It’ll give me another reason to celebrate when it happens!
I did get a nice comment over on dKos in the cross-posted diary there yesterday:
Happy birthday Jim, read your book again the other day, liked it as much as the first time. When’s the prequel describing the fireflu and the sequal where we actually have contact?
As I’ve discussed here often, the recovery period from caring for Martha Sr is taking longer than I had initially expected, and as a result I haven’t been as quick to return to writing St. Cybi’s Well as I hoped. But that’s OK, too. I find that I am feeling somewhat energized by crossing the threshold* of turning 50. It has helped that we’ve got a lot of the household stuff packed up and sent off – now my wife and I can start rearranging things here to suit our preferences. It’s funny how little things can clear the slate, allow you that wonderful feeling of starting something fresh. It also gives me more focus and enthusiasm for finishing other projects – the ballistics testing website, working on the book about being a care provider for someone in the last year with Alzheimer’s, even just my conservation work.
So it’s an exciting time, a good time, even with the mild disappointment that I didn’t get all I wanted for my birthday.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Threshold, by the way, was the original working title for Communion of Dreams, playing off not just the impending revelations of the reality of the universe and our place in it, but also on the idea of crossing the threshold of the dimensional boundary layer which has isolated us and therefore explains Fermi’s Paradox. Unfortunately, as I discovered, there were already several uses of that title in SF alone. Ah, well. I like Communion of Dreams even more – it’s more evocative, if less succinct. – JD
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Astronomy, Ben Bova, Feedback, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, Writing stuff
I discovered a couple of years ago that someone had created a Wikipedia entry for me. It was weird to stumble across that when I was looking for something else (I no longer remember what). Particularly since it seemed that the initial entry was made by someone for whom English was not a native tongue, and who only had some of their facts right. In other words, it wasn’t a friend who did it, laying the foundation for some kind of joke on me. My wife and I cleaned up the language a bit, got the facts corrected, expanded the entry to include stuff which had been missed.
But it is still a weird feeling.
And something similar happened again today.
This morning, I was doing my routine check on the stats for the download of Communion of Dreams, and saw that there had been another of the periodic spikes. As I have mentioned previously, when this happens I will sometimes check to see if there is a referring site where a link to the novel has been posted. I’m just curious as to how word of the book spreads, and whether someone has some commentary or criticism that I should know about. And this morning in the ‘referring’ stats was a link to a Wiki page titled “Titan in fiction“, explained by this simple single sentence:
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn. It has a substantial atmosphere and is the most Earth-like satellite in the Solar System, making it a popular science fiction setting.
And there, next-to-last in the ‘Literature’ section, just two entries after Ben Bova’s novel Titan, was this:
Communion of Dreams (2007), a novel by Jim Downey. An alien artifact is discovered on Titan that has strange effects on anyone who observes it.
I could quibble with the description, but I won’t. I’m too weirded-out by seeing it. With almost 10,000 downloads of the book, it is unsurprising that someone who has read it would think to add links in Wikipedia about it. Unsurprising, that is, unless you’re the one it happens to.
I do not have ‘false modesty’. I’ve got an ego, as any of my friends will attest, and I’m not afraid of a bit of self promotion. But in the face of repeated rejections from publishers and agents, it is more than a little odd to see that Communion is slowly creeping into the culture this way. It’s just plain weird – a touch of dissonance.
Well, anyway. As always, if anyone knows of places where Communion has been recommended, and now I suppose where it has been linked in another context, please let me know.
Jim Downey
My monthly update on some stats . . .
Communion of Dreams has now been downloaded over 9,500 times. I would like to thank the three people who have been busy downloading so many copies to make my stats look good. 😉
No, seriously, this is still really cool. Like April, May saw about 500 downloads – a little bit slower pace than in some earlier months, but still very heartening. Particularly since it still seems to be completely word of mouth. We should cross 10,000 downloads sometime this month.
The blog is now just under 20,000 hits, and the average is still running about 70 unique visits a day. Thanks to one and all who visit regularly.
And bonus points to anyone who can ID the source of the title quote without having to look it up.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, General Musings, Hobbits, movies, Promotion, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Nah, other than a mild cold, things are going OK. But since it is the first of the month, thought I would post a quick note about how stats look hereabouts.
April saw just under 500 downloads of the .pdf of Communion. This continues to happen in clumps, for whatever reason. Comparing it to over 1,100 in March, you might think that things have slowed down – but that’s just the clustering effect, I think – there was a substantial cluster right at the end of March. Had it been a few days later, the stats for both March and April would have been almost the same. We’re now at about 9,000 total downloads.
About 50 people downloaded the MP3 of the novel last month, bringing that total to just under 100.
I still have a hard time getting a handle on how people find out about the book, or this blog. In March I signed up for some additional stats/information about the Communion of Dreams website, which gives me all kinds of data, but it still seems that the majority of people who find out about the book do so by word of mouth. Not a bad thing, just a bit odd. Particularly in that I get very little feedback or commentary from people – yet they seem to be passing on a recommendation to others to download the book. Goodness knows that I haven’t done anything remotely approaching a real effort at promotion, so something is happening of its own accord.
This blog is now at 18,000 total views, averaging upwards of 70 views a day. The somewhat odd thing is that there is a consistent bit of traffic to look at one post: Welcome to the Hobbit House from almost a year ago. That gets 20 – 25 people a day. I think that the secret to getting a lot of traffic would be to write about Hobbits. At least until the new movie is done and out. So, if you see me mentioning Hobbits just randomly in posts, you’ll know that I am just blog-whoring, trolling for hits.
But hey, Hobbits are cool. Right? Just saying the word is somehow comforting: Hobbits.
Uh, sorry.
Anyway, that’s just a brief look over the current stats. Something more meaty later, or tomorrow.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Flu, Heinlein, movies, Pandemic, Religion, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Writing stuff
A discussion over on UTI about a post I made there took a bit of an odd turn, engendering some interesting discussion about polygamy. This morning I made a comment that I thought I would share here, since it does relate directly to some of the things I do in Communion of Dreams. You’ll see what I mean.
Heinlein’s use . . . of non-standard family structures got me thinking about many of these issues when I was very young, and helped me form my opinions intellectually before getting into emotional commitments.
I tend to think that the serial monogamy that we see as a default in Western countries reflects the differences between societal conventions and evolutionary inclinations, with a big helping of “we live a whole lot longer now than early humans did” thrown in for good measure. It is rare to see a marriage last more than ten or fifteen years these days, and I think that makes a lot of sense – when most humans lived until 30 or so, it would make sense that pair-bonding would be a good strategy to raising and protecting children into early adulthood. That would mean a “marriage” of about the length I mention above.
But we live a lot longer now, and people grow and change throughout their lives. So it is unsurprising to me that divorce is common (something like half of all marriages end in divorce) as a way of dealing with these changes. Some people find a way to grow in tandem with their partner, and some find ways of allowing a certain freedom of definition for each partner within the structure of an ostensibly conventional marriage (some, of course, do both). Different cultures have found different strategies to accommodate these stresses – some allow for polygamy of the ‘conventional’ sort (think the Mormon or Islamic variety), some make divorce easy, some de-emphasize marriage itself, some ‘look the other way’ when one or the other partner in a marriage cheats or has a formal concubine system.
A fairly recent development in all of this has come to be known as polyamory – defining relationships as being more open and less “possessive”. There are some fairly well-known practices and practitioners, such as Penn Jillette. This attitude pretty well covers most of Heinlein’s alternative marriage structures and can work for some people, though it would understandably require a different sort of approach and mindset than what is commonly considered about marriage/love/relationships. In an homage to Heinlein I had originally used alternative family structures as the “norm” in my SF novel set about 50 years from now (a survival-strategy response to environmental conditions), but early readers of the book got too hung up on that so I changed it. Perhaps if/when I am an established author I can get away with it, as RAH did.
Children? I dunno – don’t have any, by choice. Not an issue for me, in several senses of the term.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
To me, the novel actually does work better the way I had the family relationships defined before, with a group marriage built around a small number of adults who have just a couple of fertile people at the core. This would allow for those precious few who are able to have children (remember, the fire-flu plague had not just killed vast numbers – it also left most people who survived it sterile) to do so with minimal stress, the rest of the family caring for them and the children born into the family. Think how it would be otherwise: the few fertile couples trying to have and raise children in a society desperate for kids, maybe even willing to steal them or force child-baring couple to give their children to others.
But this change was just too hard for some people to wrap their heads around comfortably – they wanted to turn it into something about sex rather than about children. Maybe they felt threatened by the idea, since the time-frame of the novel was so close to our own. I dunno – my head doesn’t work that way. So I made the change, and tried to work in enough explanation for the type of ‘family’ that exists in the book, while removing the polyamory element. So far no one has commented on the current version as being a problem for them, and that is likely how it will stay.
Jim Downey
(Again, if you didn’t recognize the quote used in the title, shame on you. It’s from this.)
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
In the month or so since I posted this, there have been more than an additional 800 downloads of Communion of Dreams. Meaning that we’re now approaching 9,000 downloads altogether. This tends to happen in ‘clumps’ for some unknown (to me) reason, where there will be a baseline of 5 – 10 people a day downloading the thing and then it will suddenly jump to a seventy-five or a hundred or a couple hundred downloads for a day or two.
Anyway, it’s likely that sometime in the next month or two, total downloads will cross the 10,000 mark. Going to 5 digits seems like a cool threshold, and I’m thinking that I should do something to note/celebrate/mark the occasion. But I have no idea what. So if anyone has any suggestions, leave a comment or drop me a note, OK?
Oh, and that contact of the agent mentioned in the post a month ago? Still haven’t heard back from them. Because of other things I’ve mentioned being busy with here, I haven’t gotten around to contacting any other agents. I suppose I should do that. Ah, well.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 