OHHHHHH I did not know the slang on heroin! Of course anyone who knows that will instantly get it, I just did not have that knowledge.
Again, your suggestions and sharing little pieces of your life are so very much appreciated. You are truly honored and blessed that the little girl holds such a perfect and loving memory of you. How rewarding is it that your selfless gesture was returned to you with such special benefits!!
Quote:
Your mentioning this issue reminds me of the time I was remembered that mattered most to me. I worked for several years at a domestic violence shelter, and one evening I danced in the living room to amuse and entertain a little girl who was staying at the shelter with her mom. A couple years later, the mother and I happened to meet by accident in public. She told me that her little girl still remembered the shelter because of that "nice, pretty woman who danced for her so beautifully."
I thought to myself, what a lovely way to be remembered: a child goes to a domestic violence shelter and of all the horrible things she might have remembered about that time, instead she has a happy memory of someone dancing for her...and that someone was me.
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I love everything about this story.
And about self-publishing. I totally agree. Advertisment and having the right professional fight for your exposure is undeniably on those possible keys of success. The example of Joshua Bell is a little flawed. I'm sure this was a one-off and for a very limited time? And I agree if you don't tell anyone Joshua Bell is going to be in the subway at this time to perform then who would ever know? So it IS a perfect example of how useful advertisement is. But I've been in sales forever and we have this concept that drives the entire career of any salesman...building clientele...its the poor man's advertisement. What you do over time is promoted by word of mouth or by your excellent service you obtain repeat customers that will show loyalty to you and from that point will also go out and spread secondary yet positive publicity about you. We all have that in our day to day lives, if I told you right now I am about to put new cabinets in my kitchen there would probably be an instant reaction in your mind, 'Oh I know a guy! He's super cheap and he did our cabinets to perfection and it cost us HALF what anyone else quoted.'
Well with self-publishing it is almost the EXACT process. You can blog about your upcoming work as a form of free advertisement, but I've seen endless comments on the lack of blogs as an advertisement medium in self-published e-books. But the main concept is building your clientele over time.
Also since reading your post I have been trying in vain to find this one link that has an example of being proactive about self-publishing. I can't even remember the author's name now, but he told his story about having an agent that was carrying three of his books. He said he had given over thousands of dollars to this agent for his service, and the agent basically sat on those 3 books for 2 years and had not sold a single copy. The author gets rid of the agent and formats the books as e-books. He blogged and self-promoted, put the books up for sale at .99 cents a copy as e-books, but the books were slow going for the first few months and then all of a sudden they exploded. He claims to have made a million dollars so far off those 3 books alone. I think by now he has several works being published. I don't know why I can't remember his name but I'll look for the link and post it later.
Self-publishing is most attractive to me right now because I can post my own work at very low cost and don't have to go through an agent or publishing house which is a very expensive process. And in the case with the previous author I mentioned, he knew his agent was not enthusiastic about promoting the 3 books. The agent had other authors and was clearly putting priority on them. I don't want to deal with any of that. I don't have thousands of dollars to take on a gamble. If I keep this in my hands then I know what level of participation and urgency that I am going to put into it.
And if it doesn't work I can always get with an agent later. Certaintly not discrediting your advice at all, because your suggestion is spot on as always. But I do want to take the self-publishing route to begin with. I'll look over the link to Literary Agents, thanks so much for that! Can I ask if you are published? Or have lyrics floating around out there? If its in this thread somewhere, forgive me I'll have to keep reading through the thread.
Yeah it was sad about my friend. And her mother calls me from time to time and I feel that guilt all over again. I've even told her mother that I thought I did all I could and yet I still feel like I let her down and now she's gone. Her mother has says almost exactly what you did, 'There's nothing you could have done. She wasn't herself anymore and she could not control her addiction.'
And I know anyone reading this will think well why didn't the mother do something like force her into rehab or even have her committed to protect her from herself. Her mother DID try that...she went to the sheriff's office and to a doctor and asked for help...this was the response she got in all cases...'You cannot commit a person or force them into rehab or into any kind of program if they have not hurt themselves or hurt someone else.' So even if the person is clearly destroying themselves, if they haven't done anything to harm themselves or anyone else, then they can just sit there drunk all day and out of their minds, a ticking time bomb, until they fall down the stairs and die.
We should communicate in PM or make our own thread or communicate in my thread. I do NOT want to take away from your thread in any way. You have shared a lot of high quality material here and it deserves to be critiqued.
But thank you so much for sharing and giving.
Hey maybe we could start our own publishing company???
If you have some tens of thousands of dollars I have this big piggy bank full of coins. If I cash those out I'm sure I would have nearly a hundred dollars. And we could be partners. Right down the middle, 50/50....hehehehe....
I hope your day was wonderful!