Guy Gonzalez

Site Seeing: Guy Gonzalez | Loud Poet

October 6, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

If I have a weakness for anything it’s simplicity. Where a lot of people like to dress things up or add detail, I like to strip things down and emphasize what’s essential. Neither approach is right, really, unless of course you’re trying to figure out how something works. In that case, ignoring the noise and focusing on the mechanics is not simply a subjective choice, it’s objectively necessary.

Guy Gonzalez at LoudPoet.com seems to have that same approach, and it’s one of the reasons I keep learning something every time I visit his site. In the hive-mind world of social networks Gonzalez often sounds like an old hand, and that’s not easy to do in a medium still in its infancy. [ Read more ]

Publishing Parasites

October 4, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve been working on a post lately about what I call publishing parasites. Rather than bringing focus to the post, however, my initial attempts only led me off on wonderful rants about various injustices.

Last night, however, I came across this hilarious tweet from Guy Gonzalez —

Red Room sends me an email saying I’m “one of [their] self-published authors” and thinks their site is worth $30/mo? Seriously? #fail

— and a follow-up tweet pointing me to this post of his from July:

These are the three fundamental steps to building yourself an author platform, no matter what kind of writing you’re doing, and precede any discussions of SEO, Freemiums, URLs, etc.

As to his post, I think he’s right and you should read the whole thing. As to my fixation on publishing parasites, I now have my focus. Money. [ Read more ]

Feedback and Distortion

September 29, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

In what has turned out to be a nice bit of convergence, I started this post last night (title included), then woke to find a very nice interview of Richard Nash by Guy Gonzalez that helped focus my thoughts.

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed myself hesitating to write a few comments on sites for fear of A) appearing like a self-marketing weasel, and B) appearing like a know-it-all weasel. It’s not so much that I’m trying to pass along anything even remotely controversial, but that, as a writer, I’m intensely conscious of how my comments or feedback may affect other readers’ or visitors’ perceptions. To the extent that all information in a conversation affects the next part of that conversation, these things are inevitable. Distortion in this sense is neither positive or negative: it’s simply the effect of the weight of one’s words on the subject at hand. [ Read more ]