Psychedelia Gothique

For all the talk about e-books taking over the world, I can’t help but notice what I consider a serious swing in the other direction. When I was lining up beta readers for The Human Template , I gave most of the local readers a choice between electronic or hardcopy versions of the novel.   Only one of the thirteen people asked for an electronic copy. He turned out to be the only one of the beta readers who didn’t actually follow through and read the book. I will say that a number of people since that time have asked to read it and half of the people who received hardcopies still haven’t finished it. But the scales still definitely tip towards the hardcopy side. A good number of the people who read the hardcopy gave it back when they were done, which is quite understandable given the fact that many of them are condo dwellers with very little space to store things like books. Even as a bit of a book collector, I make a point of thinning out my shelves on a regular basis, keeping ...

Having already posted my Zen of Failure, I’ve realized I can now use it to excuse all sorts of unsuccessful experiments on this blog. My last blog post came right out and asked for comments. How many comments did it get me? Zero. As a consequence, I now know something that seemed promising, that absolutely does not work – at least within the scale currently possible on my blog. The experiment was based on some advice I had read that suggested: a)     Asking questions b)     Appealing to your readership Both of these methods can successfully generate comments and elicit response. So why didn’t it work for me? It probably has something to do with Response Ratios I selected some random YouTube videos as examples of normal response ratios: ·        An album with 14,151 views has 510 likes and has generated 58 comments. Ratio of comments to views is .4 per cent. Just over 3 per cent of the viewers ...