…I was told…. by a good friend… you’re untouchable…

…‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp’, goes the old saw, encapsulated in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Andrea del Sarto’… meaning, basically, ‘to achieve anything worthwhile, a person should attempt even those       things that may turn out to be impossible’… in Tagalog, the mainstream language of the Philippines, there’s another quote I often use, ‘suntok sa buwan’, literarily ‘punch to the moon’, and in the English vernacular, ‘a punch at the moon’… I’m teased into using this idiom for this blog piece today, coz of late, this ol’ Jurassic has noted several blogger/authors who seem to be casting doubts on whether or not they are ever going to be ‘successful’… I could delve further and question the definition of ‘successful’ as far as we quill-scrapers are concerned… but let me go back to the ‘punch at the moon’… just over five years ago, I finished my first ever foray into writing a full novel… from that came the initial book in my Jack Calder crime thriller series… as a still-totally-drenched-behing-the-ears, newbie self-publisher, in my naiveté I felt all that was needed then was to pop the manuscript into the mail to a coupla Agents in London, and voila, a million-dollar publishing contract would be received by return mail… right?…wrong! …and oh, how desperately wrong!… It took a while for it to dawn that rejection slips are the foundation on which many household-name writers built their reputations… but, here’s where the ‘suntok sa buwan’ element appears…

…I’d read that some guy on LinkedIn was told by his boss that he (the boss) felt that LinkedIn was a waste of time, and that he ‘d give his employee a dollar for every ‘like’ he received by posting an item on there… the employee told his LinkedIn connections the story, expecting out of his 200 links to get back at least 100… by the time I read his LinkedIn entry a day later, he already had 1,700 ‘likes’ …bingo! the penny dropped with me… and right there was born my attempt to make my reach exceed the grasp… I ventured down the same road on LinkedIn trying to create a ‘viral’ reaction, referring to a post on Amazon Kindle for my wee literary baby… from that came the recognition for me that the SOSYAL NETWURKS were vital for an author to ‘build the platform’, and I dived in feet first… result? today,  my direct connections across my channels exceed 18,000, with untold multiple reach on the delta algorithm via ReTweets, Facebook shares, and the like… through that base has come downloads/sales over the five years of 80,000 copies and rising for the three novels… and all from one simple ’suntok sa buwan’… go get punching, Lads and Lassies of Blog Land… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!… 

ALL MY BLOG POSTS ARE FREE TO SHARE OR RE-BLOG SHOULD YOU SO WISH—BE MY GUEST!