News Picks

I'm officially about two months ahead of my writing deadline for the Dimensional Psychologist's Toolkit, scheduled to be released next year from Amazon publishing. I also have long since completed the Tractatus of Dualities, a short work that I'm publishing in a smaller format. It involves some unique category combinations, which are not easy to create in the strict two-part system.

I have reports of one Amazon sale recently, which is disappointing from the outside, but certainly reassures me from the position of needing occasional sales to feel the least bit like an author. Reportedly the book sold was the DPT. So that's good news. Better news if it wasn't a friend or relative. But I may never know. Hopefully more sales in the future. I've been trying to advertise by word of mouth whenever I can. I certainly can't afford the best forms of advertising, and they're very inefficient anyway. It's really like people need to see an ad twice before it makes an impression, no matter at what tier of the puzzle it occurs in.

However, I have been advertising my artwork for only $7 a week, via a very affordable Etsy advertising program. That has yielded some exposure for my artwork (80 favorites), but no sales so far. Discouraging about sales, but encouraging about popularity. I didn't realize it could be that way, but it looks like there's actually a lot more ground to plow up before I make headway. Cheaper prices is not where I'm going, although I have tried, and some of my works are less than a hundred dollars, which is the cheapest they're going to be, since printing costs $60 per canvas. I reason that the more original works are worth well over the printing cost, which is what most people seem to agree about. But I need sales, so the price can't be much over $300.

Another piece of news is that I'm attempting to quit caffeine yet again. I have never been a coffee drinker, unless Chai lattes count (I didn't realize they could be coffee, and the jittery Starbucks staff told me that it wasn't coffee, at least by their standards---they didn't say that, but that's what they meant), but I had been up to about two chai lattes per day, it was definitely an addiction. So now I'm trying to substitute black tea, and avoiding the prospect of drinking bottled cola. So it seems like progress. Goodie.