The Blog of Xangis

I have the magazine back from the printers.  It looks much better than I could have ever expected.  I managed to get a couple sent out before the post office closed today - mainly to a few fiction review sites.  Hopefully a review will show up and give me a boost.   Tomorrow I work on getting the author copies and preorders sent out.  I really need to get a periodicals mailing permit (2nd class mail) as soon as possible - these things are expensive to mail.  Before now I couldn’t really apply for one since it didn’t exist.  Now I can.

I’m in full gear on my promotion efforts and doing everything I can think of.  I’m in the process of emailing all of the authors who submitted work to announce the magazine and related projects.  It’s slow going since my ISP limits outgoing emails to 50 per hour.  I’m going to need to find a way around that - supposedly they can raise the limit, but I doubt tech support is going to be too helpful after midnight.  I think long-term I’m going to need a service like Aweber or Constant Contact.

I’ve got a press release sent to ap.org (Associated Press) and one submitted through PR.com.  Another one is going to the Columbus Dispatch in the mail tomorrow - there’s always a chance they could pick up on the local business angle.  I’ve also got a post up on Digg, but since it’s not too edgy an angle it’ll likely be mostly ignored.  You never know.

I’m not sure what else I can do right now.  One of the next steps for me is to start contacting distributors and seeing if I can get this thing into a catalog, maybe into some comic shops.

Aside from the magazine, I’ve set a record for the highest amount of web traffic in one day, but it’s nothing to do with the magazine - SpaceTheremin was featured on an Italian website today and I have around 750 unique visitors from Italy and nearby.  The app is in English, but I guess it’s not too hard to use no matter what your language.  If only each one of those visitors had handed me a dollar…  how can I get that to happen?  So far I might be on track to get more hits this month than last, which is always the goal - more and better.  It’s tough to beat a month when you win awards, but it’s doable.