Facebook Ads

So, I had $25.00 free Facebook advertising that I've put towards my digital scrapbooking business on Etsy. I've set a limit of $5.00 a day and will run the ad for 5 days, and so far it's generated 16 hits. Very, very small time, I know, and only spending $5.00 a day isn't aggressive at all, but I'm just testing the system and using my free credit. If the timing were better, I'd wait until I had a full store before running the ad, but the free offer was about to expire.

But this means I am now in the sidebar as you surf Facebook, provided you've got something in your profile about being a new mother.

This is my first foray into paid advertising. Anyone else got any experience with Google or the other advertising services on the web?

7:51 AM

This is the time someone decided to call us this morning. Perhaps they thought that because Trevor works on Saturdays, this would be appropriate. This person clearly does not know how to use a telephone, and yes, it is the same person who called us at 7 and then four more times before 8 on a Monday. This time they didn't even leave a message, so whatever their excuse was, apparently it wasn't pressing enough for that.

Trevor is going to make this person take our home telephone number out of the cell phone contacts. This is also a 3 day weekend, so Trevor wasn't at work. It was also the one day I actually was sleeping in, because I went back on my medication. And we have a SMALL CHILD!

Not the best way to start the day... Last time, when they called at 7, they explained they'd already been up for an hour and a half. It's too bad I went back on my medication, because I'm tempted to, on one of my insomniac nights, call at 5am and explain that I was up for an hour and a half already.

In a few days, I'll be more rested up and not quite so angry - well maybe not. I think I'll still think this person needs their head examined.

Meanwhile, my Etsy store is featured in the Paper Goods showcase today. That's located here: http://www.etsy.com/category/paper_goods?ref=fp_ln_paper_goods  I'm getting my scrapbooking store all stocked up. There is a giveaway item in the album pages section. Go check it out: http://www.artisanscrapbooks.etsy.com/.

Rewrites...

I don't normally wait a week between posts, but all this last week I've been rewriting my novel. I think the finished product is better, but we'll see what Trevor and Char think. In the end I got 5 critiques from all 5 readers who volunteered, which is amazing and really, truly wonderful of them. Once I finish with all the proofreading and final edits, then I begin the slog of agent submissions, and I'm in the very strange position of having two novels in two genres out. Like I've said before, we'll see which on lands representation first. If neither, then I may have to have a personal crisis, having been writing for ten years and slooowly building up sales.

But I take the fact that five people who know me were able to read the book and get back to me to be a good sign. Contrary to popular belief, people who know you are less likely to read your books than strangers. They fear it'll be too awful and they won't want to tell you about it. Parents and spouses may be an exception to this rule, but I was lucky enough to have a cousin, three friends, and my longsuffering spouse who really isn't in the target audience for romance at all.

Meanwhile, in other matters, now that I'm past the 20 week mark in my pregnancy, we've decided I should go back on my sleep medication. This wasn't an easy decision because I don't want to take any substances I don't have to, but the doctor assures me that the medication I use, which is very old and has been used extensively for over forty years, has never been connected to any birth defects, and that my dosage is far lower than normal anyhow. I rely on Trevor's judgment here too, since one of the symptoms of sleep deprivation is to be clueless about how out of it you are. In fact, one of my pet peeves in life is seeing how many sleep deprived people there are in the world who don't have the common sense to go get some sleep, rather like watching an alcoholic drink all the time to relieve stress. Trevor's been very nice, but he'd like me to go back on my medication :-)

And since he's as invested in the well being of our children as I am, I trust him. This means I will be incoherent for most of the day tomorrow. My medication doesn't just allow me to sleep for the night, it allows me to put a dent in my sleep deficit, which means I usually sleep for a day or two afterwards. Not straight through, but I'm not much good for anything else other than lying around. Our son will get a lot of time with daddy this weekend.

It's the stupidity that gets old...

I didn't sleep last night, which means my brain is fairly useless today. I just screwed up a new scrapbooking project I was doing by saving over a file. It's the second time I've done that. An hour's work, gone. Oh well. I console myself by pointing out that it wasn't great work. I'm too tired.

On days like this, I can't write. Over the years I've tried a million different approaches to this kind of day. One thing I've learned, don't get up and go-go-go. That sends me into a hyper phase that'll last days if not weeks and will make my sleep cycle deteriorate even faster. If I can stay mellow, there's a much better chance that I'll sleep tonight. Some, at least.

And then maybe I'll get my brain back! Many thanks to Char Peery, Samantha Ling, Trevor Tippetts, and Sandra Mah Benzie for reading my book and getting me notes. Such an act of charity, if you ask me. I'm well into rewrites, and I look forward to being able to do more. Once I can do things like keep track of a narrative flow... So far, this blog post is about as long as I can go before rambling off on some other topic, like this morning when the mail came and I got an offer for something that I promptly hid from myself and now I wonder what it is and where I'll find it and if my son will find it first and did it have any stickers or anything like that in it....

I really want to go to sleep :-(