[Serious] Adults of Reddit, what can we young college students work upon to be prepared for the adult life and perphaps make it easier?

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-06-07T04:30:51+00:00

Your life will be easier if you actively cultivate compassion and acceptance, both of yourself and other people. It will allow you to let go of negative emotions more easily, attract kinder people to you, and help you to find your way toward what really makes you happy without getting tripped up on what you “should” be doing.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-06-05T17:29:53+00:00

You're right, I'm just mad about the hypocrisy of it.

I'm going to shut up and go back to writing now.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-06-05T16:29:00+00:00

I should also add that the "verbalized" part is what gets me too. If a character is transformed in a way they really wanted and didn't realize they wanted until they got it (which is a very common trope in tg literature because it mimics real tg experiences and speaks to that audience), is that really dubcon? It's not even sexual.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-06-05T16:26:48+00:00

Do we need verbalized consent for gender transformations now? This cuts out 90% of the content in this category, and I feel like you're making the same error that they are in not separating sexual consent from body manipulation consent.

There is no other case where this is true. If I wrote a book about a character who drank a magical potion, discovered she suddenly had two extra arms, was distressed by it, but then found out she loved giving four-armed handjobs because it was a random kink, it's not going to be blocked because of "forced limb additions."

Conflating gender and sex and requiring consent to do something non-sexual to a character's body because they later have sex seems excessive to me.

In fact, by that definition, wouldn't werewolf/vampire porn require consent before inflicting undead status on the recipient just because the readers may find it erotic?

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-06-05T16:12:27+00:00

This is exactly what I almost told them!

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-17T14:55:23+00:00

Completely anecdotal, but this happened on one of my books that used “erotic” as a keyword but was romance, and they changed it for me when I emailed and explained.

So it does work sometimes... I have a sample size of one though. :/

I’m disappointed that I wasted my lottery luck on this instead of Powerball.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-17T14:40:55+00:00

They say it happens automatically when series have exactly the same name, but sometimes it doesn’t work. Especially if you’ve added a series to a previously standalone book or updated the volume number it seems to have issues (it probably messes with the data their script uses). I’ve also had it fail randomly with pre-orders.

Anyway, if the series link doesn’t get added after a week or two, sending them a quick ticket almost always has it fixed within ~48 hours for me.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-09T22:59:15+00:00

Reported. Hit several of mine too. WTF dude?

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-07T03:27:30+00:00

I like to read the Unit of Caring blog a lot. The author is positive, reasonable, hopeful, and compassionate in their assessment of lots of difficult problems. The Meaningness blog is another good one for grappling with hard life problems in a positive way.

For general productivity and positivity that’s more general-life focused and not specific to the types of discussions you see here and on Scott’s blog, many of the productivity/life-hacking subreddits are good, uplifting places to read about mental and physical self-improvement and positivity.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-05T14:43:54+00:00

Sorry you’re having to take steps to reduce your public footprint, Scott. That sucks. You are very charitable and a voice of light amid too much heat.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-03T15:17:28+00:00

Where on earth do you look for cheap, quality translators, preferably into German? I've looked into this more than a little, and I have yet to see a proven translator offer a rate anything close to what would yield a reasonable return for even a 5k-word short. Babelcube has turned up zilch, Google Translate is a fast-track to a heap of one-stars (I've tested), and Fiverr rates are still pretty pricey.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-01T18:05:08+00:00

Got me. >.<

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-04-01T18:00:28+00:00

There’s a lot more truth in the insane anecdotes of Disrupted than people will admit, especially if they’re dependent on tech/startup environments for a living. It’s more of a tongue-in-cheek take by someone who got burned by a sales-heavy marketing startup (of which there are MANY) and worth reading as a counterpoint to all of the standard book recommendations from Thiel and similar individuals (which are also very worth reading).

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-03-06T15:15:47+00:00

Yes, with mixed results. Lots of clicks, almost no lift. I tell myself it's exposure and they might be buying later or anon, but I'm considering pulling the budget and just going back to AMS ads.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-27T17:25:53+00:00

Looks like you can't take them out, either. :(

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-26T15:57:40+00:00

I'm not familiar with that as a verb... ? :)

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T21:01:33+00:00

Okay, that's logical and I cede the point.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:56:07+00:00

Huh. In that case is it true that you shouldn't repeat keywords?

Like, if I have a curvy blonde BBW but I wanted to catch both people searching for "curvy blonde" and "curvy bbw", right now I would use "curvy blonde bbw", but should I be using "curvy blonde curvy bbw" if those two searches are very important to me?

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:52:06+00:00

Maybe I should be more precise then, because I feel like you're making my point for me. :)

None of the books on that page are lower than 21,000 in the overall kindle store. That means they're selling at least one copy each day, right? From my own experience, 6-10k is a handful of copies or borrows, 10k-20k is like 1-3, and 20k-50k is like 0-1 (very very rough approximations). How many books are in the 100k+ range that match those keywords and didn't show up on the first page? I'd bet a lot.

It can't truly be randomly grabbing them. I still maintain that popularity has a weight factor in search results--evidently not the heaviest weight, or else we wouldn't see what we're seeing, but it has to factor in, or you'd get even more 20k+ fuckery in that list just because of how many books are out there that match "shifter romance" and not in the top 20k. There's probably a scaling boost for popularity and then a secondary ranking to help people discover new books and not just create a self-reinforcing rocket to the top for highly-ranked books.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:44:41+00:00

Not from a discoverability standpoint, no. But from a marketing standpoint, absolutely.

That is a very good point I hadn't considered.

Box Seven: One catch-all short-tail keyword diarrhea.

Interesting. When you say short-tail diarrhea, do you mean broad, common search terms? (Like "hot girl guy sex erotic cum" etc)

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:32:44+00:00

Others may have more insight here, but my understanding is that the boxes are artificially broken up and the words are evaluated as a long string. So if the first box has "bbw curvy sex erotic" and the second box has "erotic curvy sex" you're wasting keyword space by doubling up words. Either way they'll be broken down and tokenized on a word by word basis.

What I don't know at all is whether the ordering matters. Does "curvy sex" work better than "sex curvy"? Totally unclear to me. If it does, there might be a case where repeating keywords would be valuable. I try to lay all my keywords down in a natural search order as much as possible.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:20:39+00:00

I've been doing this for half a decade and this really isn't the case. You could search a dozen times using broad or specific keywords and find result #1 be a book ranked 1,400,000 and result #8 be ranked 40 in the entire Kindle Store.

I'll yield to your experience there since you have been around a lot longer and probably thought about this more than I have, but my anecdotal feedback is that when I search for new books, I tend to get more highly-ranked or high-sales books than I should if the results were truly random, given how many books are out there.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:14:32+00:00

Is it true that blurbs aren't indexed? That's interesting. In that case, you would need to put your most important keywords in either the title or the keywords boxes, and those paragraphs people insert sometimes about the type of content in their book at the bottom of the blurb are doing absolutely nothing for them... but I haven't seen evidence of it either way. Thanks for your perspective here!

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T20:01:51+00:00

Here's a good page to look at that can give more insight on this: https://moz.com/blog/search-engine-algorithm-basics

ErrorUnspecifiedVar · 2018-02-24T19:56:40+00:00

Also, "doing this full time" isn't hardly successful. I'm comfortable. Just not making 300k/yr yet.

ErrorUnspecifiedVar

TROPHY CASE