Being Epic

Day Four of the giveaway and row four of the art! This week has seen some nice press for the book, including a nice Tor.com review by Stephen Raets. If you’re looking for other places to possibly score a piece of the jewelry, try David Steffen’s blog, Far Beyond Reality, or the Goodreads giveaway for Near + Far. As always, comment here to be entered in this particular giveaway!

Image #1 appears on both the title page of Far and the story “Five Ways to Fall in Love On Planet Porcelain.” Christmas tree, one-eyed triffid, and rocket ship all in one.

Image #2 accompanies the flash piece, “Space Elevator Music”. I picked it for its upward line, which made me think of a rising elevator.

Image #3 is a favorite of mine because it always makes me think of the submarine in Yellow Submarine. I picked it to go with a story that’s light and funny and silly accordingly, “Zeppelin Follies.”

Image #4 is a lovely piece that, if I look long enough, becomes a woman wearing an elaborate headdress. As always, your mileage may vary there. It goes with the story, “A Querulous Flute of Bone,” which appeared in the anthology TALES FROM THE FATHOMLESS ABYSS and features the philosopher-king Nackle.

Image #5 actually doesn’t seem to appear in my copy of the book, but it’s a proof, so things may have changed somewhere along the line. Bonus!

I’ll be posting several pieces over the next week with information gathered for the Bellevue College blogging class, whose second session takes place this Saturday. I teach an online class for writers interested in building an online presence; the next one is July 23, 2012. We’ll be talking about social networking and social bookmarking, which are two related but different concepts. Social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, and Reddit along with the largest one of them all: StumbleUpon.

What is StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site. Users submit links to content they want to share, an act that is called “stumbling” the link. Other users can give a link a thumbs up or a thumbs down using the StumbleUpon toolbar, which a user can install when registering a StumbleUpon account. Content is tagged according to interests, and users randomly browsing content (also called “stumbling”) will see more popular content more often.

Three Reasons to Care about StumbleUpon

1. StumbleUpon can drive a significant amount of web traffic – over 50% (50.34 from August to September in 2011) of social media traffic in the US. That’s right — more than Facebook (37.4%) or Twitter (3.23%). Last year it passed the 25 billion click mark. 2.2 pages are added to StumbleUpon each month.
2. StumbleUpon pages keep gaining traffic long after that FB post has dropped off your wall and that tweet has vanished from your Twitter stream.
3. StumbleUpon is an addictive pastime, particularly for bored workers. They’re stumbling for stuff that they’re actively interested in, and I know as a writer that there’s plenty of engaged speculative fiction fans in that pool of users.
4. StumbleUpon’s paid attention to the growing number of people accessing the Internet through mobile devices, a trend that will only continue.

Basic StumbleUpon tips:
As with any social networking or bookmarking site, quality is crucial. An account that has a long-time record of interesting sites will do better than a new account with a handful of suspiciously similar links. Don’t stumble your own stuff more than occasionally (at most).

• Set up a complete profile.
• Stumble other people’s content.
• Connect with other people by following them.
• Join channels pertinent to your content.
• Include images.
• Use the service.
• Use the Stumbleupon shortlink, as Kathryn Hawkins details here.
• If you have the traffic, set up a StumbleUpon channel.

StumbleUpon Resources
Background and Statistics:
StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic
The New Wave of Personalization and Who is Joining the Game
StumbleUpon Sent 700M Pageviews To Other Websites in December, Is Growing 20% Monthly
StumbleUpon Sponsored Stumbles vs. Google Adwords

Practical Guides:
4 Ways To Increase Your Traffic with StumbleUpon
8 Tips for Going Viral with StumbleUpon
An Addict’s Guide to StumbleUpon
How to Drive Website Traffic with StumbleUpon
How to Get StumbleUpon Traffic
How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide
The Secret to Getting Highly Targeted Traffic From StumbleUpon
Use StumbleUpon to Drive More Traffic to Your Website
Using StumbleUpon to Drive Website Traffic

I’m Catrambo on StumbleUpon; feel free to follow me, I’ll happily follow people back.