Monthly Archives: February 2017

Shadow-Banned

Well, sort of.  Welcome to the edgy dark side of the web, where you know you are doing something right when they start taking shots at you.

It looks like some SJWs at Twatter and FB noticed Michael Neal’s new The Stars Came Back pages and activity. Likes and follows were ramping up steadily. Suddenly the new likes and follows almost completely dried up for a while, before starting to trickle back in. Suddenly “Facebook the stars came back” doesn’t return any Facebook pages on Google search. Suddenly a whole slew of people Michael started following as a test didn’t reply or return a follow. Did a great majority of a thousand people suddenly not see a new follower? Curious. But the pages are still there. The tweets still exist.

If a conservative tweets in a throttle did it really happen? Continue reading Shadow-Banned

India

interesting development. Because one of the main characters in the story, First Sergeant Harbin Reel, is a Sikh, Michael Neal thought he’d run a low-cost advert in FB in India as part of the marketing campaign to raise awareness of the movie project. It’s totally blown out expectations (see the post below this one), even though the book at Amazon India has no reviews. I know it’s not sold a lot of copies overseas, but would not have guessed it would generate nearly two thousand followers on the FB page.

So a question: why the interest? What are visitors to the FB page and this page looking for, or hoping to find, in The Stars Came Back? Has anyone visiting here from India bought and read it?

FB page

While I’m not a huge fan of FB because of its SJW convergence, data-mining, and political activism, it’s got some use. Michael Neal put together a FB page for The Stars Came Back (the movie) that now has more than 1300 followers*. According to Michael, “a great deal of them [the likes] are from India.” Not quite sure what that means, but there is a huge potential market there, so i can’t really see a downside. Maybe it’s because I have two strong non-token Indian (dot, not feather) characters who genuinely contribute to the story as people, not just, well, tokens.

Update: Interesting. The FB page is now over 1500 followers. (1515 likes and followers each, to be exact). Something is happening, here. An ad campaign is one thing, but this? Fascinating.

Update 2: Up over 1715, now. 200 additional followers in about 12 hours.

Update 3: Just went over 1900. Plus nearly 200 in another 13 hours.

Update4: Now nearly 2700. Plus ~800 in slightly less than another day.

Update5: now barely over 2900. After coming to a virtual halt for a while, it’s up only two hundred in a bit more than a day.

Update6: After an unexplained crash in new likes and followers, it’s ticking back up again. Now at 3242 followers after a day and a half in the doldrums.

 

* If I ever create a social media website (snerk!), I’d not call them “followers,” but rather “supporters.” It shows more respect for their individuality and agency.

Option signed

Just had the movie rights to my book optioned. So now we start working with Michael Neal to get the casting and promotions done so a good funding page (likely on GoFundMe) can be put together and production monies raised. If we hit the minimum goal, then he buys the movie rights and moves forward with starting to produce it. Because he’s a relatively small operation, and the book is long, the basic goal is to make just a portion of it, and make it well enough that it can act as a “prof of concept’ to raise enough money for more of it. That’s just a small part of the big picture (no pun intended), of course. When the promo trailer (a simple but scene to shoot) is ready I’ll let people know.