Monday Mailbag

What I'm reading: Guardian Angel, by Lise Fuller

I hope everyone is recovered from a surfeit of sugar, and remembered to switch clocks (or, if you're not where you switch your own clocks, that you remember that those who do are now an hour off.) It's November. We're looking forward to having Thanksgiving dinner with one of our daughters and her husband's family. They've got a time share not far from us, and have invited us to join them. Should be interesting to share someone else's traditions—although I've been ordered to bring my special stuffing.

Normally, early mornings are spent with a cup of coffee reading email and blog crawling. From recent email offerings:

According to the headers, the sender was a review site, and the subject dealt with exchanging links. Curious, because exposure is all part of the marketing game, I opened the message and found the following:

Keep Reading...

Hi,

I came across your blog and was wondering if you would consider a link exchange with me. In return for just one link from you I am willing to place a link to your site on my site here: (URL redacted). I can put your link on my home page. I can manually set your link to make sure it always appears on that page and it will never drop off.

I understand that you probably get 100s of spam emails everyday asking the same thing, but I am a real person and not a spam bot.

If this is of interest to you simply reply to this email and I will put your link live first. (Please send me your link details along with a short description of your site)

Seemed interesting, so I decided to check out the site to see what sorts of reviews they did. Some sites feature paranormal, or erotica, or historical, none of which would suit my writing. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the site reviewed CARPORTS. Yep, structures one puts cars in.


So, here's this real person who thinks he's going to target customers from MY blog? Or that anyone who reads his reviews is looking for some romantic suspense? Still scratching my head over that one.



My anti-social networking friend supplied me with another cartoon from Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller. At least this one was relevant. (If you click on the picture, it should open a bigger, more legible, version.





Tomorrow, my guest is Darlyn Finch, who was a member of the first writing group I belonged to – the Pregnant Pigs. Her insistence that I get my work off my hard drive and out to the real world ("Don't make me come get you.") is responsible for making me look at the business side of writing. You won't want to miss what she has to say.