No news yet. Still waiting. There are worse fates.
Keeping positive in a potentially negative situation is not impossible ... just challenging. :-)
We must acknowledge our anxiety and realize it is merely being human.
Deep breathing exercises are helpful ... no hyperventilation allowed though!
Focus on helping others while we wait.
Focus on endeavors that we once found enjoyable and might take our minds off the wait.
Then there is my writing and sometimes Samuel McCord's words come back to help me:
WHAT GOD LEFT UNTOLD
We live in an ocean and
hours are the islands, linked in ways we cannot imagine while we are hopping one
from the other.
It is only in looking
back that we can see the path we took … and whether it was a wise one or not.
The Lakota call God the
Great Mystery.I do, too. I am a man or
I once was.What I am now is a mystery
to me.And maybe to the Great Mystery as
well.
But men are creatures who
tell stories. This is a gift from the Great Mystery, who spoke our species into
being, but left the end of our story untold.
Perhaps that is why the Lakota
call Him The Great Mystery.Anyway, that
mystery troubles us.
How could it not? Without the final part, how are we
supposed to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?
So we make stories of our
own, in stumbling imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance,
what God left untold.
And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were
born.Maybe it will work.Maybe not.Only the Great Mystery knows, and He comes by His name naturally.
Just when I thought it was safe to go to the oncologist after so many clear check-up's,
she found something. Biopsy time yet again.
My company has switched to Catastrophic Insurance where I pay the first $2600!
Ouch! But the company puts $25 per paycheck into an individual fund for each of us. Nice of them. If the dentist hadn't sucked every cent out of it, I might even have something in it! So I will just ask you to pray and cross those fingers for me. :-)
Wow! It's nice to be liked. But it is just a number I know. But 750,000 page views is nothing compared to what the Weather Channel (2 Billion a day!)
or Google (3.5 Billion a day!)
or Alex Cavanaugh gets. I mean Alex gets a Zillion Page Views per day. I am just a cyber minnow. :-) I see some of you scratching your heads, asking, "What is a Page View as compared to Unique Visitors?"
PAGE VIEWS
A page view is triggered when any page is loaded by any visitor to your
site. For example, if you click this link and the page loads, you have
triggered a page view. If you click the link 20 more times today, it
will count as 20 page views. But why anyone would want to do that is beyond me!
UNIQUE VISITORS
A unique visitor is an individual user who has accessed your site. It is
determined by the IP address of the computer or device that the user is
browsing from,
combined with a cookie on the browser they are using. No matter of how many visits a visitor makes, if he is on the same
device and same browser, only one unique visitor is counted. For
example, if you visit this link once today, you will be counted as a
unique visitor. If you come back to this site 20 more times today, you
are still counted as one unique visitor.
WATCH THE BOUNCING BALL
At the end of the day, the most important factor for growing your page
views and unique visitors is content. If your content is not engaging
and relevant to your users, they are going to "bounce" and never come
back. The "bounce rate" is the percentage of visitors who come to
your site and leave within a few seconds. A high bounce rate indicates
that visitors didn't like what they saw or didn't find what they were
looking for.
OUCH!
HAVE YOU GOT THE TIME?
The amount of time spent on the page indicates whether users are
actually reading or watching what you're serving up. The higher the
average time on a page, the more engaged your audience is in that
particular page.
THE LEGEND LIVES
Oh! I just received the shirt I ordered for my Author's Table for next April. How do you like it?
It is two-pronged ... 1) Unless you price your Indie Book Cheap few, if any, will buy it. 2) Cheap Books are seldom read, for they are thought to be inferior, hence their price.
The CATCH-22 CURSE
Price your book cheap enough to be bought, and it will not be read.
So what is the answer?
Heck if I know.
John Locke ruined The 99 cent pricefor Indie Authors.
Amazon now counts each sale of a 99 cent book as a half a sale in their rankings equations.
$2.99 used to be the "Just Right" Price.
Yet, there are thousands of ebooks coming out each month.
Most readers will not gamble on your book at that price.
There are just too many books by their friends to shell out that kind of money.
FREE cannot be maintained as a price on Kindle.
Besides, even if it could, people take you at the value you place upon yourself.
To most, FREE just means even you consider your work inferior. PAY PER PAGE READ ...
the new Amazon method makes it even worse when your book is bought but not read.
Previously, authors were paid a flat fee for every reader who downloaded
their book:
typically around $1.30 per book.
But after the
change was introduced, they were instead paid six tenths of a cent for
each page read,
meaning that an author would have to write a 220-page
book, and have every page read by every person downloading it
to earn
the same amount they had previously gotten.