The Blog of Xangis

When I sent out the “invitation to check out the first issue” email for APW I must have worded part of it strangely because a couple writers thought it was some sort of rejection letter — it must have been the opener thanking them for submitting work.  It did get me a lot more traffic and a sale or three, so it served its intended purpose — keeping APW fresh in the minds of writers and potential customers.  With the 15th here now the deluge of submissions has begun.  I wonder how well I’ll be able to keep up.  It’s only a one-month submission window, so it shouldn’t be too tough.

I did a bunch of shipping today - 25 copies of All Possible Worlds mailed.  I have a few more to send out tomorrow, but I have all of the preorders and sold copies sent out (save the ones that sold after I came back from the P.O.)  Tomorrow I’m going to send a copy to my high school English teacher.  I’ll probably receive it back with a grade on it.

I also did a bit of promoting and some research into distribution.  It seems that one of the main distributors for pulp mags decided to close this past month because the owner is having a third child.  If you’re completely insane like me you’ll see that there’s an opportunity presenting itself in the form of a shitload of work, and possibly some financial gain.

I’ve also signed up for the Adbrite advertising service.  Everything I’ve heard about it says that it’s not as good as Adense or YPN, but I’ll see.  I only have it up on fictionclassics.com, which is pretty low-traffic.

Tonight I’m playing with installing the Drupal ecommerce module.  The e-zeitgeist is that it’s pretty good, but lacks some advanced features.  I’ll soon see.