A deal with the Devil, or leveraging social media sites
I'm writing a book, and I want to sell it digitally (and maybe even in some sort of classic dead tree format eventually). I'd like it to be successful, and I'd like to write more. Consequently, even though I swore off social media sites in part due due to their ability to suck your free time like nothing else, I've gone ahead and reopened accounts on Facebook and Twitter with the intention that I would push updates to my website regarding said book (and various other things I feel compelled to write about) to these sites. I'd also like to be able to push to Google+ but that doesn't really seem possible quite yet, at least not via any existing Drupal modules that I've seen, so for now that will just have to be done manually.
This is of course all being done in the name of increasing visibility, networking and various other marketing buzzwords that make me break out in hives.
Okay, I'm also curious to see what my friends and family are up to. I've opted to stay out of touch for a bit too long. So there.
The Twitter module for Drupal pretty much has the functionality I'm looking for in this regard, and since Facebook doesn't seem to believe that I'm a real person I'm currently blocked from creating apps until I prove otherwise, which entails providing a photo ID showing my name and date of birth. Maybe the problem is that I deleted my prior account. Maybe there's another reason. Hopefully I can resolve it before the problem turns into a big pile of fail.
In the meantime Twitter can push my status updates to my Facebook profile, so this is really just a bump in the road - if someone wants to read my post they can click on the provided link, which is pretty much all I'm looking for at the moment. Additional functionality can come later.
What's the book about? The story focuses on a teenage girl who's moved to a new town and starts to discover a number of disturbing things about it. Supernatural events fly, and her new home seems to be at the heart of things. She'll discover some new friends, learn some previous unknown things about herself, and thwart dark forces in the process. I've actually completed the majority of the book, edited roughly 90% of it and I'm currently in the process of rewriting the last chapters. Since this is being done during my lunch break, I don't have a clear ETA yet, but hopefully once the final chapters are rewritten and I go back into editing mode I'll have a better idea.
I've come to the realization that I'd rather earn something for my labor than let it all go for $0, so most likely there will be an initial 24-hour download this book for free period followed by an option to obtain a copy for a ridiculously low price, somewhere in the sub-$2 range.
So there we are, a deal with the Devil is in the making. But it's for a good cause, I assure you.
Addendum: Upon attempting to push this post through to Twitter, my site blew up with the infamous WSOD (White Screen of Death) and I traced the issue to an OAuth error in my Apache log that was being caused by the presence of OAuth functions in the Facebook PHP libraries I had added in the course of my attempts to add the functionality to push automatically to Facebook. So once again I feel like punching Facebook in the mouth, a feeling which is most likely not going to go away anytime soon. Regardless, since I can't use the libraries anyway I went ahead and dumped them, which ought to resolve the problem after I clear caches in Drupal. Yay. If you see this post in your Twitter or Facebook feed that means everything works now.