#murder park

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Minor, and probably fruitless, bit of plugging, but I'm experimenting with sale-pricing MURDER PARK since it's mostly been very quiet for months. If you've not heard of it/bothered with it/gotten round to it, it's terribly cool, and currently half off at Amazon (linkage: US & UK) & Kobo, and, more interestingly, variable from free to full price direct from me. I'd have loved to do a proper name-your-own price thing with it, but the particular WP plugin I use can't quite stretch that far. It's the same package whether you get it for nowt or pay full whack, so knock yourselves out.

Trippy lyrics to an electric-folkish waltz. They're pretty much the official Friendcore supergroup, featuring old/current members of Still Stoked, Two Currents, I Do Not Exist +more. 

To start with the announcement and then work backwards, MURDER PARK is out now and you can find it at [Amz US](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009SEXFPG), [Amz UK](http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009SEXFPG), and [Kobo](http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Murder-Park/book-X548_htXRU2sQyPZe1YeXw/page1.html?s=skmhFXdhnkCsXgOTX0WuBw&r=5) for comparative peanuts. See. There it is, look. Now, you may perhaps be aware that I have been [serialising this thing](http://murderpark.seancregan.com) and it wasn't due to finish until early next year. "What gives?" I hear you cry. Don't I? *FINE*. Bastards. Anyway, the thing is, the time taken to upload (and before that, read, edit, convert from Markdown into HTML, etc.) installments twice a week has started to conflict with the time needed to do Other Things - primarily trying to hang on to writing for a living by the narrowest, ragged ends of my fingernails given that Submission Thing seems to be a bust. In addition, my enthusiasm for serialisation as an experiment in finding an audience has seriously waned after three months because I have the staying power of a gadfly (and, more seriously, because without being able to track RSS reading, not knowing what kind of audience it has exactly has been driving me up the wall; knowing if it's worth it or not, etc.). In addition to that addition - so in *double addition* - I wonder if it's really suited to periodic reading anyway. I've heard from several people, not least my wife, that it's too easy to lose track, especially early on, given how many characters there are and how much is happening. If I tried anything like this again in future, I think I'd make each item self-contained for ease of following. Plan better, write tighter. Less frequent, more weighty. But I did promise that the whole thing would be up online for nowt, and this will still happen over the course of the next few days. It'll take a bit of effort to summon up the energy to post the 40-ish chapters still remaining because it's a goddamn drudge, but it *will* happen and it will remain there, free, for posterity. It's probably going to be a bloody sight easier to read as an ebook though, with the benefit of hindsight. (Similarly, the donkey work of putting it up for sale on my own site will happen over the next couple of days too, but the server's been wonky the last couple and I can't be arsed at the moment.) So there we have it. MURDER PARK. New. Sexy. Awesome. Available now. (Rather fetching new cover art, incidentally, cc-by licensed from [Robert Bejil Photography](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robnas/5910624779/in/photostream/) after the image I had been using dropped its CC license at some point between July, when I started using it, and now, and I only found out when I was about to upload this thing to Amazon - which is the *totally not annoying best time* to learn something like this. While existing use is protected, I wasn't 100% on exactly how far that goes - included in an ebook file rather than used online etc. etc. In any case, after three hours on Flickr and another couple exerting my graphical muscles, the replacement is all good. Better, in fact. IMO anyway.)

[Murder Park](http://murderpark.seancregan.com) is six weeks old, roughly a sixth of the way through its total serialisation run (so, y'know, early days and all that). Things known/discovered so far: - It's very hard to estimate readership since following via RSS - in [Reeder](http://reederapp.com/), [Pocket](http://getpocket.com/) or their ilk - is probably the best way for anyone to get it, and the way I'd imagine most reasonably techy types would choose to do so, and yet without using a Feedburner URL there's no way to get stats. - That said, I would estimate that actual "I'm following this, it's great" readership is in the few dozen range. Small, but we've a long way to go, and there's no obvious (RSS factoring allowed) sign of any kind of horrible drop off to judge by reading time, new visitors vs. existing, etc. in Google Analytics. If it gets up to a few hundred by the end I'd be very happy indeed. - Twitter is a *very poor* driver for traffic. While I do - and will continue to - post a note when a new installment is up, overall referrals from t.co addresses are unimpressive. This despite retweets from friends with x,000 followers. Maybe this would change if *everyone* made mention of it at once, but such an event seems unlikely. I'm not complaining; I'm aware from other people that Twitter is at best highly unreliable as a readership source for anything other than news. - Facebook is better, probably because my FB account I keep primarily for people I actually know. - I've added it to the collector at [Tuesday Serial](http://tuesdayserial.com/) for a couple of weeks (I forgot last week, but hey) and I was surprised to see it generated *zero* referrals at all. I think I should find more of this sort of site to throw mention of it on, and make use of the actual hashtag announce system as well. See how that goes. - Editing as I go along takes a surprising amount of time - and there continue to be bits I miss - but worthwhile. - I remain very happy with it as a piece of work. - I remain very happy with the choice to initially distribute it like this.

It's Thursday, so the second installment of Murder Park is live. (I'll stop mentioning it here after a while, but it'll help steer people to the thing early on.)

Uh... and that's it! Go, read, enjoy, you lovely, lovely people, you.