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Mar. 28, 2005 Writer's Digest magazine (an excellent publication) recently had an article suggesting that writers being published by a small press take online tours rather than traditional book tours the publishers can't afford anyway. I didn't know this, but it costs big name publishers six-thousand dollars per city that an author would visit on a professional book tour. Ever wonder why it's so hard to get published by a traditional publisher? Think of the financial risks they take. A typical eight city book tour costs fifty-thousand dollars. Man, how many books do they have to sell to break into the black? My upcoming novel is to be published by PublishAmerica--a small press--and despite claims to the contrary by disgruntled authors, it is understood from the start that the author is the one primarily responsible for the book's promotion. Having some--but limited--funds, I am choosing to primarily make my book promotion an online one. And to start my promotion, I needed to set up a website which I thought should have been a fairly simple task. I did an internet search and found the top listed company for creating one's own website, and I assumed it would be a good one because it was so popular. So I called them up, registered my domain name, and my website took off like a lead balloon. My first problem was a deal-killer; I couldn't even access the webbuilder page where I was supposed to choose the template for my front page. I called technical support and got someone with a foreign accent who sounded like he took half a bottle of barbituates before he came to work. As could be expected, he was no help at all. I had more problems and questions later in the day, and by the time the dust had cleared I had called technical support four times--each time was a twenty-five minute wait. The final straw was when my own password and user name were rejected as invalid, and technical support was the foreign guy on downers again. He thought my--by now-- short temper was humorous, and he also treated me like I was an idiot. I called again--this time for billing--and waited fourty minutes to ask for my money back. They did give me my money back, but my domain name was registered, and I still had to pay for that which was fine; I still wanted a website. I was discouraged and depressed and my bad day continued: my daughter came home from school in an aggravatingly, rebellious mood, and I broke my favorite drinking glass; the glass shattering all over the kitchen floor where I like to cook meals without having to wear shoes. This story, however, has a happy ending. I sat down and looked in the yellow pages for a local web designer, and I found one. There was no twenty-five minute wait on the phone. He even invited me to come over to his house and see his operation. In less than a week he had my website up and running. Other than my writing the files, he did all of the work which is the way it should be. After all, I'm a writer, not a web designer. The web designer went above and beyond what I expected; he even added little pictures to go along with my commentaries. My site has political essays (How George W. Bush Poisons America and the Top Nine Conservative Blowhards), free short stories, and of course information about my upcoming novels. In the future there will be links to my published work, a picture of me (the web designers suggestion), and a semi-daily blog that I will call the Gelblog. Check it out. www.mark-gelbart.com ------------ About the author Mark Gelbart: My book, Talk Radio, is a black comedy about a radio talk show host who gets kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a loser. It will be published by Publish America within the next year. www.mark-gelbart.com Email: agelbart@aol.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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