Based on the reads that my articles on writing get, I suspect this site has about 200 regular readers who are writers of some kind. As publishing morphs I thought it might be educational, and a bit upbeat, to see how much more open webzine publishing is than the traditional—stay back there, you!—attitude of print publishers. I will leave out whatever e-mail exchange that Manuel Pfister and I have in regards to publishing arrangements. What I will publish is our initial exchange here, partially in hopes of developing interest in his site—which, retarded, non-traveling urban luddite that I am, I have yet to visit as I was being beaten with a stick today.
Hi James,
I'm interested in finding some new contributors for our site. Anne Sterzinger suggested I might ask you. Please let me know if you would be interested.
Thanks.
Manuel
link singledudetravel.com
Of course, I would like to contribute, Manuel.
Please let me know what type of content you are looking for, and feel free to check out my article index at the bottom of this website info page.
link jameslafond.com/?f=site
Thanks for thinking of me.
Best regards,
james
Hi James,
Great! Awesome.
Your writing is excellent. You can write about whatever you want. We have plenty of material and other contributors for destination guides. We want to broaden our horizons a little bit.
A couple questions:
1) What is crystalized ginger? Where do you get it and/or how do you make it?
2) Do you really have 75,000 pages of content on your site or am I reading your stats wrong? Is it all yours? Wow, how the hell did you write 75,000 pages?
3) You have some really loyal readers. If I'm reading your stats right you have 8,400 visitors that produce 220K pageviews, meaning each person reads an average of 26 pages? Wow. How do you do it?
I am happy to help promote your books and your website. Please give me a short bio with the links you want to have in it.
Thanks a lot.
Manuel,
I accomplish this level of writing by being a dick, by cheating. For instance, if I spend more than five minutes answering an e-mail then I make it an article and whore out our conversation to the readers.
For instance, I am right now, sweating from eating wasabi peas, garlic, hot sauce and crystalized ginger. In 16 minutes I have to get dressed to go train, getting there on foot and by bus. I may well get concussed today. I am going to come home this evening and hopefully build an article out of these two e-mails which will fill a content slot, promote your site, and, hopefully, get me published again.
As to guest author content, it is about 0.5% All guest author content can be found through the guest author tag in the scroll down window in the contents box of the site, and some of it is bogus material written by me.
My web master thinks my writing sucks, but has built and advanced this site in return for me being his whipping post. He will beat me up for at least an hour today.
He said our readership has come in major bumps, through no fault of mine:
beginning with a repost of my fifth article:
1. an unsold boxing piece that martial arts mags would not touch, got us about 1200 readers in 2013
2, Jack Donovan reviewed my book, Taboo You, last year, largely in response to my article Getting Hammered in the Hood, which got reposted on WN sites, which brought another 1500 or so readers
3. Ann Sterzinger got us about 2000 readers, and most of our book buying readers, by reviewing Take Me To Your Breeder and Hurt Stoker in her Graphomaniac article on Takimag.
4. Thanks to 300 hoodrats from Frederick Douglass High School defeating the BPD in a pitched battle in late April of this year, we got another 1500 readers, many of whom found us looking for somebody blogging out of Harm City.
You want crystalized ginger, you say, want to ramp up your lousy West Indian rum?
Well then, come back tomorrow and read about the answer in Part Two!
There you go, Bro, the secret to reader loyalty—being a tease.
I will post this tonight—an article that is actually an upgraded e-mail, and then pontificate on prolific writing tomorrow morning.
Thanks for getting in touch with me Manuel, and I hope to get published on your site.
My second e-mail, sent after coming home from the gym.
Manuel,
On the web traffic info page, the column for pages means how many pages were opened. So, if this article gets 100 reads tomorrow, that shows up as 100 pages in that column for August. My webmaster told me to pay no attention to hits as he is unable to keep up with discounting all 'bot' and web crawler hits.
Total content and traffic on the site for exactly 4 years breaks down like so:
Category.............Articles.......of total....Views.....of total
Blog.........................953............36%.....125765......32%
Harm City.................610...........23%.....116940......30%
Fiction......................611...........23%......50000.......13%
Modern Combat.......329...........12%......70397........18%
Ancient Combat.......155.............6%......24933..........6%
Gaming......................14..............1%.......1548..........0%
As you can see I don't write enough for the modern combat readers and write more fiction than my current readership consumes. For instance, I have written over 1 million words in The Sunset Saga, and only have 45 regular online readers and a mere 5 print readers. On the other hands my sloppiest Harm City rants get top reads.
The count on articles is 2,852, plus this one.
Currently I'm publishing about 40 articles or stories per week, with one usually being a guest author post.
I know of two readers who read everything I post, which is kind of scary.
I use the website to build books via the tagging system, usually omitting the last chapter or two and saving those for the print book.
I am publishing 8 books this week. Most of that content is available for free on the site.
I am currently writing the following books, as site serials, Seven Moons Deep, Poet, The Consultant, Your Trojan Whorse, The White Ebb Tide, The Boned Zone, The Poor Tour, On Bitches [a collaboration], Your Trojan Horse, The Pale Usher, The Sardonyx Stone, When Your Job Sucks, A Thousand Years in His Soul: Part 2, The Ghetto Gourmet, A Sickness of the Heart; Part 2, No B.S. Boxing, Basic Stick Fighting, Let the Weak Fall and The Spiral Case.
I am currently editing: Of Lions and Men, Equadistant Drowning Babies, All-Power-Fighting and Retrogenesis.
Forever Autumn Press is currently editing Hemavore [a collaboration] and The Last White Man in Baltimore. Since 95% of this content goes up as a first draft on this site, I appear to be more prolific than I am. I am currently writing about 27,000 words per week, with my median article length being around 800 words.
The fact that I write in seven distinct categories that require different kinds of energy and information, keeps my output higher than normal. I only type with my left index finger and my right middle finger, for about 16 words per minute. I don't scrap anything I don't like, since my judgment sucks and I don't trust me.
Instead of waiting for tomorrow, the key to my writing rate is in the following linked articles.
Also, crytsalized ginger is sliced and candied ginger root, which may be bought in the specialty food section of your local grocery store, or with the canned Chinese food, sometimes in the produce department, and alternately in a candy store. Jamaican grocers will carry it, as will all Asian grocers. Reeds, the makers of the famous ginger beer, sell their ginger candy through urban beverage distributors. Ginger thins you blood and will cause healthy gums to bleed if eaten in excessive quantity. I also use fresh ginger in my rum, an entire trimmed palm-sized root will do a fifth. I'm spiking my Bacardi—a gift from a fine lady that does not play that bottled-in-Baltimore game—tonight.
Articles on prolific writing:
My Bio
Horror and science-fiction author, James LaFond, writes on violence, urban survival, racism, masculinity, boxing, MMA, stick-fighting, fractional autonomy, history and man-whoring, from his ghetto rental in Harm City, U.S.A.
His articles are available here:
link jameslafond.com
His books are available here:
His FaceBook page is:
link facebook.com/tabooyou
Single Dude Travel
As soon as I post this I will be checking out Manuel’s website, at the link below:
link singledudetravel.com
Great read, very amusing. Can't wait to see your next article!
By the way, I didn't want the ginger for cheap rum, it just sounded like an interesting thing to have in the pantry.
I think its used in stir fry.
I just eat it as candy.