Well, I have Easter Eggs of a kind on my sites, as well — yes, plural — but they weren’t really meant to be fun for anyone at all.  Let me eggsplain.

I decided to be an eBook author because I figured I’d take my stuff directly to the people.  No middlemen, no gatekeepers, just straight and direct to the readership — let them decide.

But one still needs to be found, and online that means search engines and Search Engine Optimization, or SEO: it’s what gets a site found — if it’s indexed highly enough.

Online visibility increasingly means social media buzz, especially for an author, but SEO is a bit of a passion for me.  Even if it weren’t so powerful (and it’s arguable that my little dilettantism is a waste of time) I’d be fairly fascinated.  So I got into SEOing my site, and that’s when I started thinking that I might be served by two eponymous sites.

For as I worked on this site more and more, it became increasingly clear to me that I also desired a much leaner, simpler kind of website, one which I didn’t have to fuss over as much, one which could be launched right away, one that only sold books and didn’t get into a lot of new territory hosting forums, updating blogs, offering freebies, and running a whole eCommerce system.  One just like what aminka-ozmun.com (with the hyphen) turned out to be!

It’s a much more sedated, even elegant, site…almost Asian, if I may, in its elegance and modesty.  But its “directness,” its simplicity of purpose, may be its undoing SEO-wise.  And so I decided on a kind of Easter Egg, webpages that aren’t accessible from any onsite menu link.  These pages are meant to as a sop thrown to the search engines, with their appetite for content, especially new content.

So the whole thing’s tied up with SEO and market pricing.

For example, one keyword phrase I targeted is “Asians living in housing projects.”  This is known as a long-tail keyword, one that only a very small number of people are putting into the search engines.

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see whether cart66 allows for “persistent carts”

figure out pre-order selling with cart66

apply fancybox to post thumbs as per https://www.elegantthemes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=95920&hilit=fancybox+blog

fix advanced search box layout

<br /> for homepage featured slider text

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what happened to user-edit in wp ajax comments???

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I say “months” because I don’t think I’ll have anything to offer for a while, given how much time the endeavor takes.  I say “years” because I am committed to maintaining a separate catalog of free stories, interactive and traditional, above and beyond the extensive bibliography I’ll continue to develop.  And I say “free” because this stuff will always cost absolutely nothing whatsoever!

It’s just another way for me to contribute to the BWAM movement I am so passionate about.  What better way than to play Johnny Appleseed with free content, spreading it throughout the internet?  Hopefully something will go viral and have an effect on my sales as well!

The sheer fun of it all is also a factor behind this momentous decision to spend even more time and money on crafting worthy stories that people will enjoy.  Interactive fiction sounds really interesting to me, and I wish to really explore it.  That’s when I thought I might as well just make some good “old-fashioned” eBooks available at no charge as well, just to give my upcoming freebies collection a sort of more well-rounded look!

But I should stress even now that “free” does not mean “rip me off.”  I will still retain the full copyright on all these works, and while I encourage sharing I do draw an exception at other websites hosting my content if they are in any way commercial — after all, why should someone make money off my content without me receiving any compensation for my efforts?

I wonder which will prove most popular with my site’s visitors.  And even more intensely, I’m concerned over how to best utilize the medium of interactive fiction with respect to romances and BWAM romances at that — just about all interactive fiction thus far have been predicated on the “text adventure” model of early computer gaming where the goal is to solve a puzzle, a quest, with every aspect of the experience designed around that purpose.  But how can this work for the romance genre, which is about personal relationships?  Until a true Turing Machine is invented, how will any computer simulation hold up where personal interactions are required?

As can be imagined, it will be a while before these freebies see the proverbial light of day!  But I’m announcing them now anyway partly because publicly proclaiming them is a way of really getting myself to commit to them, further ensuring their creation and, even, success.  As for ETAs, I hope to offer at least one — whether free eBook, otome game, hypertext fiction, or interactive fiction — by Christmastime this year!  And that’s in addition to the free serialized web fiction I hope to be offering just shortly after my site’s debut.

Yes, lots of work — but as long as my visitors find a lot of value in it, I’ll be more pleased than a sista with her ideal Asian honey!  ;-)

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I mean, it’s so lame bugging tech support at Bluehost, Elegant Themes, and Cart66 (love y’all!) about all the customizations I’m doing with their products — and all the inevitable epic fails that result from my n00bness!

But actually, it’s been a great learning experience, and I’m hopeful that I’ll be a much better problem-solver (and not just a problem-creator!) with all this hard-earned experience under my belt.  It wasn’t exactly coding, but it was still a lot of figuring out, mostly on my own, truth to tell, and learning how this interwebs thinggy works!

I sure hope everyone falls in love with this site.  It’s been a real labor of love for me these past six months — and counting!  With 50% of the job completed, I’m now aiming for a September debut, given my rate of progress thus far…then again, by the Pareto Principle, my last 20% might take me yet another six months, for one and a half years in total!!

Hmmm, maybe I should’ve hired that $12,000 web developer after all…?

Not!  Really, it’s been a lot of fun for all the hand-wringing and hair-pulling at times.  I’m really proud of what I have actually been able to do on my own, for all the help I did receive along the way.  And I’m happy that it’s cost me so much less than twelve grand!  In fact, I could have gone relatively no-frills — no shopping cart, no premium theme — and spent money only on the web hosting (four bucks a month on a three-year commit paid upfront) and have gotten a nice site, too…but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near what I’d originally envisioned.

That’s what’s on my mind all the time, my initial goals for AminkaOzmun.com.  They’re been so soldered  into my whole being that I don’t even need to try to refer to them to keep my spirits up.  I want this!

Practically every weekend for the past six months has been busy, busy, busy with me learning all I can about web hosting, website design, WordPress, Photoshop, Illustrator, Inkscape, ChoiceScript, Undum, Ren’Py, TADS 3, Inform 7, Narratavius, and so much, much more.  I’m wwaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy behind on my writing (lucky I’m my own publisher, huh!) and the website’s taken so much longer than anticipated — but guess what?  I’m happy as pie!

Part of that happiness comes from a consideration of how much is available out there online, for free.  Nothing restores one’s faith in humanity like unexpected acts of kindness, and the worldwide web is full of generous souls working cooperatively for the greater good in their spare time.  That’s nothing to sniff at!  And that’s why I want to give as well — details in my next post!

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I get this question fairly regularly when people learn that I am a writer actually making money from it.  It’s as if I could fly and they’re asking me how come their flapping their wings don’t work!

In my case, I simply gave myself permission to fail.  That’s right.  After all the necessary education — by which I don’t simply mean something formal, necessarily, like college — it really comes down to just doing it.  And being able to just do it, to let go and unwind enough that I let the Jungian collective unconscious come through, as filtered by my own unique experiences, comes down to embracing failure.  Not just vaguely accepting some abstract notion of its possibility but outright hugging it, kissing it, making a friend of it.  I’ve never had a moment of writer’s block once I realized that it’s okay to not succeed.

That doesn’t mean I aim to bore my readers and waste their time and money, of course.  But it does mean that I give my honest best — and then leave it at that…and recognize the fact that sometimes, for some people, that will not be enough.  It’s like the Code of the Samurai – “one who is a Samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind, by day and by night…the fact that he has to die,” which I apply to my literary ambitions as “a writer must always remember that she will sooner or later stumble.”  Make mistakes.  But the thing is, these mistakes aren’t likely to be so bad as to end her career as a writer.  Indeed, all anyone needs is another nom de plume and a star is reborn!

After all, what’s the worst that could happen?  That history should record one name of yours as a failure while lauding the other for genius?  Suppose you released a series of atrocious fiction under your real name, learn your lessons and then go on to pen Pulitzer and Nobel winners under a pseudonym.  Would that be so bad?

So this is the only way to write, I’m sure, adopting such a mindset, one that not only allows for the possibility of failure but outright embraces it as part of what it means to be a writer.  Being a writer means being vulnerable.  Being a writer means making enemies.  Being a writer is subversive — of oneself, even.  For the truth is always revolutionary, even the so-called quiet truths.  So by writing, which is to say by being honest, a writer can only reveal things as they are, including herself as she is, and with most things being imperfect, it’s a sure bet that somewhere, somehow, for someone something will be somewhat wanting.

No big deal, especially in this interconnected age of the long-tail and niche markets where a good living can be had from writing for a small number of fans.  This is the worst that could possibly happen, if you think about it, and it isn’t bad at all, actually.

I believe that all good writers ultimately give themselves this kind of psychological leeway.  While sure that what they offer is good, very good, or even great, they most likely long ago made peace with themselves that no matter what the accolades or opprobrium, they are going to craft a tale to the best of their abilities and that’s that.  If there is no point in crying over spilled milk, isn’t it even more ridiculous to fret over that which hasn’t yet been spilt?

And so my advice to all writers is to just write and stop worrying.  It’s how I do it.

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In this modern day and age, since authors increasingly have to be publishers anyway, why not an affiliate program?  Being a publisher means being a business, and being a business means having a sales force.  Instituting an affiliate marketing program is an excellent way of getting some product-moving help, plus it generates buzz on its own!

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