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Bobby has loved Kenny since they were teenagers. Kenny pushed him away for his own good. Now they have a second chance, but will history repeat itself? More...

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Admin-in-Chief: Mel Keegan
Moderator: Sara Lansing
Art Editor: Jade
Resident Reviewer: Aricia Gavriel
Wiki page services: Alex Draven
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Newsletter October17

Greetings from Mel Keegan and the team at GLBT Bookshelf!

To all participants and supporters in the Christmas campaign, a resounding THANK YOU! Banner places on the page were all gone in 12 hours after the last newsletter, and we have our full complement of 16 … plus several donations to boost the project even further. The page opens to the public on November 1st, so the deadline for your banners and pages is Halloween. Mark your calendar!

Meanwhile, the first round of seasonal banners has been designed, and we’d like to display them right here:

http://bookworld.editme.com/ChristmasBanners

We have squares, banners, skyscrapers and leaderboards, and these will be running on November 1. We’d also like to throw out a challenge: does anyone have a killer-diller slogan for banners? We’ve come up with several – tell us what you think, what worked, and what worked best. And if you have a great slogan, don’t keep it to yourself! More banners will be designed in the weeks to come; the campaign itself is seven weeks long, and we can be tweaking and adjusting every aspect of it right up to Christmas Eve.

To all participants in the Wiki Patrol – the same resounding THANK YOU! We now have all Book Category pages covered, and since the wiki’s “tutorial” and “brass tacks” pages were locked to protect them some time ago, we should now be in great shape. Thanks to everyone who is helping in every way … your assistance is not only much appreciated by me, but this is the very reason this community is still growing rapidly, and strengthening, every day.

One service we’d like to add, as a boost to writers and publishers is this: we have well over 250 followers on Twitter now, and while we know this isn’t a massive following, it’s significant – and as you know, the more you tweet, the more followers you may get. We’d like to Tweet when new books are released – and we’re inviting you to drop us an email with your announcement, the day your book comes out. Several things will happen this way: you’ll reach some new people with the news; we’ll have something to tweet about, so we can tweet more often; so our community of followers will slowly grow; so the next time you have a book to release, we’ll be able to Tweet it to a heck of a lot *more* people …! The cycle should feed itself, and in the true spirit of “community,” what’s good for you is good for us, and vice versa.

So please do remember to let us know when your book comes out. GLBT Bookshelf should be Tweeting enthusiastically – there’s so much creativity and energy in this community.

Meanwhile, in the background, the new Bookstore (drum roll) has been designed! It hasn’t been built yet … Las Vegas wasn’t built in a day! But it *has* been designed, and we’re investigating an engine which will come close to powering the whole thing. It’ll certainly take at least 50% of the manual labor out of the process, which makes the store doable, and attractive to us all. If you’re interested, check out this website to see the engine we’re investigating: www.openx.org ...

And I’m actually thinking long and hard about registering the new Bookstore as a domain of its own. This would give the Bookshelf a second “bite” at Google, and if we were to score a dot-com along the lines of “gay-book-store.com” or similar, tell me how any search engine could possibly fail to understand that!

Right now, I’m trying to make time to do the raft of SEO pages for the wiki. It’s “hard yakka,” as we say downunder, and time is short. I’ll get there – bear with me. But a new domain which stands up and yells at the engines, “g-a-y -- b-o-o-k-s, damnit, Ma Goog!” Now, this has to give us a good shot at goal.

Meanwhile, the Bookshelf community is growing at the rate of about 7-10 new members per week, every week. We’re not too far away from the 500th member line now, and I’m thinking of having a “door prize” for that member. Something along the lines of a swag of ebooks. So encourage your friends to join us here; as they say, “You gotta be in it to win it!”

The idea of shopping Amazon to support the wiki has been well received, and to facilitate this, I’ve built a special page:

http://bookworld.editme.com/ShopAmazon-andSupportTheWiki

I’ll be parking discreet banners here and there throughout our pages, to get this message across. It’s important to make sure that you start your shopping on a link where the Amazon code originates with the wiki’s own affiliate account, if you want the referrer’s fee to benefit the community. You can click any Amazon link to go shopping, of course; but only those links which carry our tracking ID will be recognized by the Big A. Starting your shopping on someone else’s link benefits them, which is no bad thing, but it doesn’t benefit the wiki. So take a look at the special page … perhaps even bookmark it. And if you’re going to shop at Amazon, do think of starting there. Every little helps!

Otherwise, it’s business as usual behind the scenes. The wiki homepage has been slightly redesigned – nothing major, just a little rebalancing. And I know, I know, I’m about six weeks behind in archiving these newsletters. That’s on my Job List, but it’s one of those low priority chores that always get deferred in favour of the important stuff. Like writing a new newsletter.

On that note, let me once again thank all those who have participated in the Christmas campaign, the Wiki Patrol, and numerous other small project, and close!

Giving a couple of plugs here:

Our art-director, Jade, has just launched a fantastic new art blog … “guy candy” …! Adventures on 3D lives here: http://3d-adventures.blogspot.com -- with 17 posts up in the last three weeks, and some glorious artwork. (Jade is also available for covers,

If you need an assist with your wiki pages, contact our new tech representative, Alex – help is at hand, and you can find it right here: http://bookworld.editme.com/AlexDraven-webservices

…wiki pages without the learning curve!

Cheers,

Mel Keegan

Admin-in-Chief