I had a Web Designer build this web site. The gurus for selling books hound me that I need a freebie to get people to give me their email addresses. I don’t fight the advice of authors that are more successful than I am.

The web designer built a pop up that springs up in the middle of the home page.

I don’t like popups. I got a popup on my web page, like I asked for, but it just stays there until the visitor either clicks on it or clicks on the x in the upper right corner to make it go away.

I don’t like this so I got on fiverr and contacted several popup specialists to build me a popup that would popdown after two seconds (two seconds is a long time to stare at something you don’t like) and I wanted the popup to popdown to a smaller verision of the popup window and to dock in the lower left hand corner of the screen.

I got a bunch of ‘can’t do it’ responses. So I figured I needed to hire an expensive wed designer/programmer. I got on the site where the web designers that specialize in the Enfold theme (the theme this site is built from) and who also do email harvesting hang out. I contacted a bunch of them and they all said they couldn’t do it.

I recently contacted a friend that does his own web site work. He said it can be done with a Java script. From what I can find out web site builder use a program to make popups. The popup program has a series of check boxes have you check to make the popup do what you want. There are several places you fill in the time delay for when the popup appears and to position where it appears. There is no check box for making the popup go away after a period of time.

So I was asking the web designers to do work to figure out how to get the popup to popdown. Web designers are programmers and programmers do not work, they program. I have seen programmers go to great lengths not to work. They will spend double shifts or even 24 hours shifts debugging, but will they update the documentation, no. Documentation is work, stuff for the peons to do. They won’t do it even if you pay them. They’re the best ones to do the documentation because they’re the only ones that understand how the program works. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe they don’t understand how the program works.

So now it looks like I have to learn enough of the Java programming language to write the Java script to do what I want. I don’t have time for this, I got books to write.

What has this to do with writing steampunk? Your reader wants to read something different, but the same. He wants something new. He wants you to work and work hard to give him a good story. He doesn’t want a story where you just checked some boxes in template and the program spit out the same old, same old.

You want to sell books, give the reader what he wants. He wants you to work. He wants something different and yet familiar. He wants a good story and he wants it told well. That’s a lot of work. It’s work; good authors, selling authors do.

Stay strong, write on, and work to write a good story.
Professor Hyram Voltage