Several of you have mailed me regarding the cover of The Strangeling that’s up on Amazon and various other sites. Yes, my name is wrong on the cover, and the publisher is onto the error. Things over at the publishing house have been hectic, what with the launch of the Juno line this month and the fact the publisher has been busy winning awards at World Fantasy Con :) The whole Strangeling cover is going to be very different and should be going up soon. I’ll post it here too, as soon as I can.
Now, onto something else. I don't tend to rant much here (or indeed in real life) but I am feeling a bit ranty or maybe... “WTF?” would be a better way to describe what I’m feeling. ;) I want to say something about Amazon blog/plogs. I know a few people who call by here use the system so I’m hoping someone will tell me I'm not alone in being wary of the thing, or that it really does help and is worth doing. You see, I just don’t feel.... well, all warm and cuddly about it, or something…
I’m coming up to my one-year anniversary running this blog, and I’ll post some thoughts about the whole blogging thing then. Amazon blogging feels very different to me though. I started it because I was encouraged to use it as a promo source by Penguin. The info they sent was an Amazon mailshot stating that author blogging on book pages increases sales. How do they know, I ask myself? Proving what increases book sales is a notoriously difficult thing to do. Anyway, that’s by-the-by to my concerns here. I decided to give it a shot. First up, it feels odd to me because I’m posting on a big public site. (I sometimes feel like that commenting on other people's blogs, a me-quirk perhaps. It's just the whole thing about posting something that instantly appears on someone else's website.) I’m also not entirely sure about where the posts appear, should it be before reviews, after? But anyway, I ignored the doubts. So far, I’ve only got a couple of posts up there, what with not getting warm and fuzzy and all that. Then I noticed the commenting and scoring thing. Did you like this post? Hilarious! It’s never going to be useful to everyone, especially if we just blog/plog about what we’re up to in life. But then I noticed that someone had not only said they didn't like my post, they had added a reason why. Didn't like it because “don’t know the author.”
The irony really hit me, since they were on a page with a helluva of a lot of info about me, reviews, links to bio, excerpt, favourites, you name it, but they took the time out to say it wasn’t useful because they don’t know me. I’m not saying they should know me, or that my post was useful and they are wrong, but it seemed to highlight the fact that the whole system is somehow kind of odd to me; it just doesn’t make too much sense. I never seek out Amazon blog/plogs the way I do with regular blogs or journals, I just happen on them, and maybe that’s why they often seem out of place. Does anyone else feel this way? Or do you think I’ll eventually get used to the whole thing? :) Maybe even feel warm and fuzzy…one day…?
