Paper.li ~ useful-ish and fun!

As you may or may not know I "publish" or "host" or whatever it is a couple of Paper.li newsletters;

Click here

Click here

Now that you have clicked on the above two links I trust you will click "share" or "subscribe" or, ideally, both! 

The reason I started these two papers was, of course, in an attempt to promote my writing and my blogs but they do seem rather random and even reading my own issues I have learned a lot!  In fact in one of my earliest editions of Lush Ice Cream News was this headline ...

Cat Snores Into Glass Of Orange Juice For No Apparent Reason 

... and it doesn't get much better than that, does it?

If you are unfamiliar with Paper.li then, briefly, what happens is you set up a newspaper thingy concerning your area of interest and then you designate various websites, twits and facebook pages plus some appropriate keywords and every day or week, your decision, Paper.li collect together relevant items into a new edition of your paper, email it to subscribers and mention it on Twitter.

This method means that unless you are very stringent with sources and keywords some interesting stuff crops up.  I subscribe to a number of Paper.li papers:

~   The @FoodMeditations Daily 

~   The Food Stuff Extra Daily   This recently linked to a version of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic".  Well what a treat! I love Mr. Morrison and, I kid you not, I once had dinner with him, just him and me, at his invitation!  Anyhoo my point is - what has this to do with food? 

~   The British Cheese Daily  Often very interesting but frequently not about cheese.

~   The FoodiesSW Daily - don't tell Olive Magazine, "foodie" is one of their banned words!  They recently linked to a story about this rather attractive older gentleman who at 50 still gets asked if he's old enough to buy booze.  Weak link but pleasant!

~   On #writing 

~   The Click Cornwall Daily  - because I live here.

~   The Caribbean Travel Daily - because I used to live there

You get the picture, I'm often tempted to sign up for more but reading them takes up so much time every day; they can be fascinating.

And why am I telling you this?  Well 3 reasons ...

1.   Another attempt to promote myself, I have no shame.

2.   In case you have not heard of this way of getting your work out there.

3.   So that you too can waste hours reading all sorts useful info, plus irrelevant but interesting stuff.

If you fancy having a go click here. 

I have a favour to ask of you!  

FOOD - the South Wests favourite food magazine have just launched their third Food Reader awards. Please go to my foodie blog Sudden Lunch and click this logo in the sidebar to nominate your favourite chefs, restaurant, retailers and more in the South West. May I suggest Sudden Lunch as the Best Food Blogger?  

After that browse their site, you won't be disappointed.

Thank you,

Suzy 

I never realised how important Twitter etc. are!

I first started using Facebook when a friend of mine got married in Perth, Australia and posted her wedding pics on FB (hello Telly Tubby x) and since then it has been a very useful way to keep in touch with far away friends that we miss in the Caribbean .

When Twitter first started at first it sounded a bit silly to me and you know it, or some of the Tweople who use it, are Very Silly Indeed or worse.  Nevertheless I joined up, started tweeting and have a little over 1,000 followers.  Sometimes it is quite fun and sometimes useful and informative. 

I find Pinterest a great way to store photos, both mine and other people's, in the cloud - a kind of online scrapbook and also a way to publicise my work. My book "The Leftovers Handbook", the publishers felt, is so full of information there is no room for photos so I put them on Pinterest just in case anyone is interested.

Stumble upon can be a great timewaster and I used to get stuck on it for hours, in fact one day a very spooky thing happened to me on Stumble Upon see here LINK

Blogging has become a regular and enjoyable habit for me and I am trying to keep it going during this troublesome time

I did not realise, however, until my recent (and continuing)BT Fiasco quite how useful a marketing tool networking is.

Since publication sales of my book The Leftovers Handbook have generally hovered in Amazon's rank at about 30,000 (the lower the number the better the sales) give or take a few thousand until BT disconnected our phone line.  See how sales immediately dropped soon after I stopped networking and then how they shot up again after I spent a day online at my friend's house.

I thought this might just be a fluke but it happened again the following week rather more spectacularly ...

... and I fully expect the same thing to happen in the next few days (fingers etc. crossed).

Of course when I am fully operational I don't just promote my own books and blogs I comment on other people's thoughts and ideas, make suggestions, joke, retweet things I find interesting, have conversations and generally post things I think funny haha or funny peculiar.  This is all very well but sometimes I've been doing it for hours and have to remind myself to get on with "important" things and stop playing!

Hopefully I shall be back online on or around or just after the weekend, perhaps, and can get back to my tweeting and in the meantime here is a bit of heartfelt networking I saw from the bus recently ...

Summer Special Offer ~ "Lush Ice Cream without a Machine"

I didn't make a big thing of this in my last post so I'd just like to mention it again.  As the weather was so good for a couple of days last week (and rumour has it the sun will be out next Friday - yippee!) I have reduced the price of my ebook "Lush Ice Cream without a Machine" to £1.98 which is about the same price as a carton of ice cream and much, much cheaper than an ice cream machine. You'd better see here and get a copy so you'll be ready next Friday!

This method makes rich creamy dairy ice cream quickly and easily, I promise you, and the reason I wrote the book is that it's so simple and foolproof that I felt it would be a shame not to pass it on. 

Here is easy peasy Clotted Cream Ice Cream, one of the first recipes in the book, as part of a twist on traditional Cornish Cream Tea. 

Incidentally and regardless of the above photo I hope everyone now realises that the Cornish have always been right - it is jam on first, topped with cream.  See here for the maths!  

Showing off a bit - sorry!

Look what I saw in Wadebridge.

I know for most people this is not very exciting but this is the first time I have seen my book in a real, live book shop and, not only that, in the window and, not only that, above Rick Stein!!!

Tomorrow I am giving a talk to a local craft group on getting published.  This is the first time I'll have done this too but presume that if I just chat along giving useful info I've picked up together with some jokes and anecdotes I should be OK and they have promised coffee and biscuits.

One of the things I am going to stress is how much work the publicity is, I feel I could sit here on my computer till the end of time pitching magazines, blogging, tweeting, commenting on Linkedin, posting on Facebook, emailing and so on and so forth. I don't mind at all, in fact I enjoy it but at the same time it is a) frustrating (magazines take ages to reply if at all) and b) there is so much to do I keep forgetting what I am doing.  Serves me right for being so old, I suppose.

And for visitors to Cornwall ... 

Facebook ~ mostly good but a bit irritating!

I first joined Facebook as a friend of mine had married in Perth, Australia and put her photos on FB, since then it has been a very valuable took to me in two important ways.

1.   I now live some 4,000 miles from many close friends and we can keep in easy contact this way.  Even with friends closer to home this is helpful (the girl next door and I often chat with each other rather than having to go to all that faff of standing up, going outside, going to her house, going in etc!)

2.   Through FB I have found and 'met' some interesting people, had a laugh and learnt a lot.  In fact I would go so far as to thoroughly recommend it both generally speaking and as a way to get yourself 'out there' so to speak.  I am in touch with a number of food bloggers and enjoy swapping ideas and stories with them.

I also like the way a missing person's photo can be shared to help find them, petitions signed to stop cruelty and the way warnings about scams, health problems, travel hitches, etc. are posted. I'm all for things that amuse me, info about my old homes (Tortola and Trebarwith), competitions, lovely photos, interesting events, special offers, Rummikub (within reason ie. not paying for it), long rambling conversations with my friend Debs and keeping an eye on my family's doings!  I like knowing when a man I have never met but is a friend of a friend is doing a happy dance, he especially does these on Friday.

Having said that ...

There are several things that really irritate me, not about the application itself but about some of the stuff that floats about being shared etc.  They are, in no particular order  ...

~   The way cats, and to a lesser extent dogs, 'talk' with such strange accents or speech impediments.  I have lived with and been very friendly with many chaps of both species and never have I found any that talked in that ridiculous fashion.

~   The recent plethora of things saying "Bet you can't think of a film without the letter A in it" (ET?) or "..... a word that starts and ends with N" (nun, noon, nation, noun, neuron and I don't think I've even got started).  What is the point of these?

~   Even worse, the things that show a photo and say "Press Like and you will be amazed at what happens", and nothing ever does".  I know what the point of these is but surely people must have caught on by now.

~   Those things about serious illnesses that you are supposed to share and which say something like "I know one person who will but 78% (or some such number - very scientific) won't.  What is the point of them?  I am not heartless but these surely don't to anything for anyone.  If I am wrong and they do somehow help please let me know and I'll go for it.  

~   I can't think of the word for it but all those sayings that tell you how to think and live.  I'm a great one, me, for the old positive thinking, spiritual beliefs and all that and also am very keen on equality, respect for all life etc. and so on but I don't need to be reminded every few minutes (yes - I know that's quite a high frequency rate for checking into FB!)  Just thought - I think maybe proselytising is the word.

Perhaps I am being more irritable than usual due to still being heavily under the weather, hopefully when I don't have so much time for FB, soon,  I'll be a lot calmer about it.  Sorry!

The Leftovers Handbook

The good news is that my book is still on schedule to be published on 29^th March - just two weeks and one day.  I hope I'll have my strength back enough to jump up and down in excitement.

All the best,

Suzy Bowler

Divided by a Common Language

A few days ago I uploaded my little eBooklet to Amazon and was amazed to get a review that read thus ...

"obviously thrown together as today is jan 16, 2013 and this was written in 2013. spelling errors, paragraph errors, grammatical errors. it's sloppy and not worthy of the memory used to store on your kindle. PASS."

... which really got my goat (he's very sensitive).

I was not only hurt but mystified.  Firstly how would they know when I wrote it?  It's just a list of ideas I've assembled over time and when I thought there were enough to make it worthwhile I published it.  Secondly I've always been a good spellist (that, incidentally, was written tongue in cheek) and didn't throw the thing together at all, at all.  It is, however, just a list of ideas I thought might be useful to people not so familiar with cooking as I am.  It is not supposed to be a work of literature.  Luckily I got some good reviews too on Amazon and also supportive messages on Linkedin, Google+, Facebook etc.

In particular a very kind lady, Rae Katherine Eighmey (who writes about American food history) was good enough to comment on my last post with some useful ideas but her main point which I had actually considered but in the other direction, so to speak, was that I wrote it in English English.  Oddly enough I am so very familiar with using American vernacular (e.g. zucchini instead of courgette, eggplant instead of aubergine, arugula instead of rocket and a la mode instead of with ice cream!) that I actually had made a special effort to ensure my English was the homegrown version!

During my many years in the Caribbean I have lived, worked and played with American chaps, read their books, cooked their food and never once failed to understand what they were saying or thought their American spelling to be 'wrong', just not quite right perhaps!! 

Seriously I would never have thought that British English would have caused such a problem to Americans.  As Mark Twain (respect!) said ...

"I don't give a damn for a man who can only spell a word one way."

Not seriously; I also speak Geordie and a little West Indian - I might try using those in my next book!

Howay mehson!