Daily Archives: November 6, 2013

Nov 6 2013

Read Tuesday would Love Your Help

It’s going to be huge.

What is Read Tuesday? It’s a Black Friday type of event just for books. In 2013, it will be Tuesday, December 10, 2013.

We’re off to a good start:

  • We have an official website up and running, with content.
  • We have a healthy start in terms of followers, especially the Facebook page and Twitter.
  • We have several authors who’ve shown interest and agreed to participate.
  • We have a press release and we’re now at the stage where we will distribute it.
  • We have been advertising on various websites to let both authors and readers know about the event.

Read Tuesday could use your help. If you can help with one or more of the following, your help will be greatly appreciated:

  • We’re looking for any name recognition that may help to promote the event. We have a little to begin with; the more we can get, the better. Any authors (or even indie publishers or booksellers), for example, who have achieved some small measure of success who may be willing to participate in Read Tuesday could help to promote the event as a whole. It’s a win-win situation, as we would include your name with our press release, press release distribution, and other efforts to promote the event (including paid advertisements and social media). This would help to advertise the authors (or entities) who have a little name recognition in addition to advertising the event. This will help to promote these authors along with the event. If you know anyone with mild success, please let them know about this offer. They can contact Chris McMullen at the email in the next bullet.
  • We can always use more participation, especially books and authors added to the catalog. We’ve had many more authors say they will participate than have taken the time to add their books or names to the catalogs. I expect they will be promoting their books on December 10 and participating. It would help the event be better if we could get more books and names in the catalogs. Simply email your ASIN (for a Kindle book that will participate) or a link to your book at a website where it will be on sale to Chris McMullen at greekphysics@yahoo.com. It’s that easy.
  • Tell a friend, or several friends; tell anyone. If you like the idea of Read Tuesday, you can help make it better just by helping to spread the word. Word of mouth, email, blog, Facebook, Twitter, any way you might spread the word will be valued. 🙂

Give the gift of reading this holiday season.

Chris McMullen, founder of Read Tuesday

Follow the Read Tuesday blog: http://readtuesday.com

Like the Read Tuesday Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ReadTuesday

Follow Read Tuesday at Twitter (@ReadTuesday): https://twitter.com/ReadTuesday

Nov 6 2013

Update on the new WordPress Reader

Reader Update

Perhaps the changes to the WordPress Reader are oriented towards the trend of more people accessing websites and reading blogs on mobile devices, as suggested in the following post:

http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2013/11/05/wordpress-com-reader-update/

That may explain, for example, why the post opens in a new window—but not the actual website—when you first click on it, and allows you to like or comment without visiting the actual website. Unless, of course, the website restricts the Reader from showing the entire post, in which case you must click a second time to access the post. Then you have to close two separate windows when you’re done, so we’re clicking twice as often. That’s in addition to scrolling several times more because of the larger images and text.

It’s a shame that you can read some posts entirely in the new Reader window that pops up, completely missing the blogger’s header, background images, social media links, products for sale, and all the other content that blogger prepared on his or her website, hoping to draw a little traffic with the blog post.

On a positive note, the images seem to be displaying on all of the posts now.

I’m getting used to the font size and picture display now, but my wrist is sore from all the extra clicking and scrolling.

There are some threads about this in the WordPress forum. The following thread is now up to three pages. You can find a comment from one of the Happiness Engineers on page 3 of the thread (I strongly urge you to read this if you’re curious about why WordPress did this and what they think about the reactions that have been posted). It also provides informative clarification on whether or not the new Reader window will affect your stats.

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/reader-changed/page/3?replies=4

If you would like to share your feedback, please click on the above thread. Perhaps you can help them “engineer more happiness.”

Here are links to my two previous posts on the status of the new WordPress Reader, in case you missed them:

Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing)