"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Monday, June 14, 2010

OK, Here's the Story
Posted by jurassicpork | 8:45 AM

Well, all of them, actually.

I've posted not only the entirety of American Zen on Scribd but also sample chapters of every worthwhile novel I've started in the last 12 years. With the aid of Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious and other affiliated feeds, I've been able to flog these various manuscripts, as well as my most recent blog posts, so that my number of reads has gone up.

The problem is, I've been getting more new followers on Twitter as a result while not getting any new subscribers on Scribd. I've been stuck at 7 for the last several days.

Since I discovered how to use Twitter and the #Readcast, #writers, #authors and #nowreading hashtags, my traffic has gone up exponentially in the past few days. Yesterday, for instance, I got about 1200 reads.

The problem with Scribd is that there are precious few forums for fiction writers and it's impossible to contact those who haven't subscribed to you. I'm obviously trying to get the attention of the few legitimate publishers on Scribd, since I've long since given up on brain-dead literary agents giving me the respect and consideration my talent deserves and their sense of community and rating system leave something to be desired.

For instance, if you go to the Books-Fiction-Thrillers category, you'll note the top six titles with reads in 4 digits and that's all good and well. Then if you refine your search and go to Most Recent, you'll see the prologue for Reaction, my new thriller about Chernobyl and that it has far more reads than any other document on that page (nearly 500 since early last night). Yet, while three of my other documents have made the Rising category, Reaction isn't on any of the ten "rising" pages in spite of having more than ten times more reads than documents that have been up for the same time.

Obviously, without many subscribers, your only chance of getting more than cursory attention is to make it to the short "Featured" list.

So, for those of you who've been curious about what else I write besides politics and want to know where my heart really lies, what follows is a list of links to the fiction documents and brief synopses that I've posted on Scribd since last month, including a revised 52 page upload of the Bone Bridge. The more reads I get, the more exposure I could get in the future and the better my chances of getting approached by publishers.

The Bone Bridge.
Romanov 12:19.
The Toy Cop.
American Zen (in its entirety).
American Zen II.
Reaction (the Creative Writing:Novels version that's gotten 400 fewer reads).

Most of my uploads are 8-52 pages and, if you don't have time to read them, you can download them or print them out for a time when you do have time. I wouldn't be wasting your time if I didn't think I could hold your attention and entertain you. Neither would I be writing at all.
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