Random skills you find in pubs down my way

Picture the scene. A quiet country pub in the Cotswolds. Two men are having an offsite business meeting over lunch. The table is covered with charts and graphs. One man, the CEO of a small start-up, is wearing smart business attire. He peers perplexedly at the papers. The other, his CTO in jeans and T-Shirt, tries patiently time and again to explain his vision for the company infrastructure. He occasionally points to various diagrams to make his point.

The landlord wanders up.

"I don't want to be funny gents, but I couldn't help overhearing, and that's probably the worst place to site your slave database."

The CTO looks up. "I'm sorry?" he says defensively, astounded that a mere landlord could dare challenge his authority.

"You will be, putting your database in Australia. Probably the worst place in the world." The landlord muses for a few seconds. "Well, with the possible exception of Hong Kong, of course."

"With the greatest respect, what do you know about it?"

"Well, I expect you're getting all kind of replication problems for a start..."

The CTO bristles with indignation. "Look, thanks for your advice but it's nothing we can't sort out, and we are rather busy..."

The CEO butts in. "Wait a minute. Geoff, we're having problems?"

"Nothing we can't fix Steve, My guys are on it today in fact."

"Really?" The CEO turns to the landlord. "Excuse me sir, what do you think we should do about it?"

"Well, it's your basic TCP/IP packet size, innit. Now, back when I was charge of the biggest database infrastructure in the world, before I retired and became a landlord, we had exactly the same problems with Australia. It's all down to packet loss. The replication protocol isn't too resiliant with the level of faults you get, so you just get into an endless retry loop."

The CTO looks on, open mouthed. The landlord picks up a pen and starts sketching.

"Now, you want to try cutting down the packet size. Don't use one big fat pipe. Use lots and lots of small pipes. That way, you'll still get errors, but they will have less sigificance and you will push the replication through. Try adjusting these parameters and see how it goes."

CTO: "Um..."

CEO: "I don't suppose I can persuade you to take on a short term consultancy for us?"

A true story from my local pub.

Cheerleader Training

A new short story. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A5V6KJO

Sandi has a body to die for, with curves in all the right places. She has no time for boys though; studying at college takes up all her time. That all starts to change when she decides to try out for the cheerleader team. Coach Jackson downloads the dance routines onto Sandi's iPod so she can get familiar with them, but soon afterwards Sandi starts feeling horny. She finds herself skipping classes, frantically fingering herself in the girl's changing room while thinking of cock. What is that strange hissing on the dance routines? Is she hearing words or is it just her lurid imagination?

Will Sandi be able to resist Coach Jackson's subliminal instructions, or will she become his latest sexual plaything?

A rhetorical question, obviously!

I'm trying this one out via the Kindle Lending Library. Not having much success with my current sales strategy - the ratio of downloads of my free books to paid books is around 100/1 - so it's time to try something different.

New short stories



Alien abduction. (Erotic humour). Two incompetent aliens attempt to abduct Cletus.

The Bet. Kate thinks she is there to mow the lawn. Eric thinks she is there to suck his cock. Who will be correct? (Hint. Kate is the one wearing the NanoPanties)

Three free short stories

For all those of you who would like to check out my writing style before actually parting with your hard earned cash I have made three of my short stories available for free on smashwords.

If you like them, please consider leaving a review.

Some more firsts

I got my first book review! I was so excited to get the notification; then I got worried. Would it be a nice review, or a nasty review? I was on a train at the time so I had to wait over an hour before I could get a fast enough connection to actually read it. I needn't have worried.

"It's hot and definitely worth a read" 5 stars
 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mikey Lee Ray, whoever you are (you're not even a relative!)

Then I got some reviews for some of my other stories. Some didn't set ratings, but they were all nice.

"I really liked this story. Well written with skill and humour. The Persuader knows how to use words."

"Quite an amusing story. Where can I get some of these panties."

That was for NanoPanties, of course.

It turned out to be quite a day. I had my first book hit over 100 downloads, then my second book as well. When I woke up next morning, the third was over 100 too. Those were all my free books. I also hit my target of selling enough books to buy a coronation chicken baguette. That's all my targets hit now!

Woohoo! I will have to set some more. The next targets are for a story to hit 1000 downloads and also to get a comment on this blog. I have two stories due for publishing on 12 October so I will have to see what happens then.

Smashwords formatting tip

It's quite difficult to get the formatting right for Smashwords; chances are there will be at least one mistake the first time you publish a new work. But that's not good news. The problem is, as soon as your book is published, it becomes available on the Smashwords front page. This is your moment of glory; your fifteen minutes of fame.  And you don't want it to be spoiled by a sloppily formatted book. You want your readers to get the slickest, fanciest version of your book - after all, you want them coming back for more.

I asked Smashwords tech support about this. I got a very nice reply from Aaron, but essentially there is no way round this. It is something they are considering implementing, but not right now.

This is where my tip comes in. I have a book in my dashboard called 'Do Not Buy This Book'. To encourage people not to buy, it is conveniently priced at $100. (So, er, if you do buy it, thanks very much).

The book does not have a book cover, so it never appears on the Smashwords front page. It also spends most of its time unpublished, and in my archive, so it doesn't generally appear on my author page. But whenever I'm finalising a new book, I dig 'Do Not Buy' out of storage, and update it with my new work. I always get the Autovetter error 'does not have a cover', of course, but I'm not bothered about that. What I then do is download the new version and check out the formatting. Once I discover the inevitable errors, I fix them, rinse and repeat. Only once everything is perfect do I publish my new book for real, this time with a cover. 'Do Not Buy' gets retired back to my archive and hopefully my new readers are suitably unimpressed with the flashy way my chapters work properly, the fact that the fonts are all correct and that the book starts in the right place. Because after all, it's the content that really counts. And you don't want your readers distracted from your brilliant prose because the formatting is messed up.

Now available on Smashwords - coupon codes

I'm publishing on Smashwords.com as well as Amazon now. It's a bit trickier to format for Smashwords, but hopefully this will increase my potential audience.

As a thank you for visiting my blog, here is a coupon code for my short story, Double Talk: BF52W

And here's one for How to use hypnosis to seduce any woman you want: SB88P

These will give 50% off until November 2012. If you use a coupon code and like the story, please consider writing a review for me, and of course I would love to hear your feedback personally at me@the-persuader.com

For some extracts from my other stories, don't forget to visit my website and let me know which you would like to see published next.

Thanks,

The Persuader