Seriously Humorless Book Review

Philosophical book review misses the humor

The latest libertarian examiner to review my book is Charlotte Libertarian Philosophy Examiner Matthew Reece. He awarded me three out of a possible five stars for my efforts.

I thank him for the review and for the stars.

But note Mr. Reece's title again: "Libertarian Philosophy Examiner," meaning that his review came at the book from a serious philosophical mindset.

One result was that he did an excellent job of capsulizing the subject matter of the various articles while offering his earnestly analytical critiques of each.

For example: "The next article purports to explain libertarianism to the uninitiated, but really only succeeds at explaining what libertarianism is not. A philosophical approach to libertarianism must be found elsewhere, and Mr. Reed even admits as much, begging the question of why it is included in the book.

Actually all of the articles included in the book were written under my rubric of "fun&freedom" in which freedom is the message but fun is the method.

In every case Mr. Reece accurately read, and responsibly criticized, the libertarian message but seems to have had little truck, or yuck, with the humor:

"Mr. Reed explores some hypothetical future news stories which have yet to happen. While the stories are plausible, they lower the credibility level of the book and feel out of place."

"Next up is a humorous piece with a multitude of pork references concerning multiple manners of government interference in the affairs of peaceful people. While a good read, it feels out of step with much of the rest of the book."

"Mr. Reed's self-deprecating sense of humor in some places can become tiresome."

The whole idea of these articles was to escape the solemn, academic, pedantic presentation of libertarian ideas and reach out to people-on-the-street with a libertarianism festively festooned in the wrapping paper of humor, but Mr. Reece never commented on any of that.

Of course, maybe my attempts at humor just weren't very funny to a philosophical examiner like Matthew Reece.

So be aware, Readers-To-Be, that this book is listed on Lulu.com under the HUMOR category. And as I reported recently, we hit No. 2 for a spell on their Top 100 books in that category.

We're Number Two!

My publisher, Lulu.com, ranked Selected Salvos from the Loose Cannon Libertarian as Number Two in their Top 100 this week in Books > Humor (Week of Monday, March 10, 2014)

(As ever, fame is fleeting -- down to No. 5 as of this week, Monday, March 17, 2015)

But not everyone seems to be impressed by this

I recently "un-circled" a person in my Google+ Circle because she angrily CAPS-LOCKED me about one-plussing her with information I shared concerning the progress I was making – or rather not making – in attempting to promote and sell my little book.

I don't know for sure but I hope un-circling in Google+ works the same way as un-friending works in Facebook so she will no longer be bothered by my missives.

Anyone who doesn't like my messaging is likewise free to ask me for an unceremonious un-circling exercise. Of course then you, as she, will also become "nonplussed" as well.

Hello GOOGLE!

As related previously I've been bootstrapping my self-promotionalism by using free online press releases to get the word out about my Selected Salvos book.

While all of these services promise great things for great (to me) amounts of money and not much for zero bucks PR.com became the first one to get my press release posted in Google's news aggregator.

I've been using Google News, both coming and going, for several years now since I began writing for examiner.com

The "coming" part meant subscribing to Google Alerts (free of course) using the keyword "libertarian" for a search query. Once a day after searching the world for articles containing that word Google dumps a list of links into my inbox. This not only lets me know what's going on in the greater libertariansphere but very often, since I'm always looking for ideas to write about, one of these articles acts as a catalyst for an article of my own.

The "going" part takes place when the article I post with Examiner meets Google's definition of "newsworthy." Then the Google aggregator finds it, picks it up and spreads it afar as Google News. This allows my articles to reach out beyond immediate "preaching to the choir" boundaries.

On March 12 this listing popped up in my daily download of Google News Alerts along with other articles:

Now ... if only any of this would eventually result in a few book sales, or a book review, or a request for an interview...

Free Press Releases

Well well, one of the sassy smart-assy press releases I wrote and began posting on all of the free PR websites around the net finally showed up online. You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.prlog.org/12292732-this-libertarian-opinionizer-has-been-getting-it-right-all-century-long.html

All of these freebie sites are questionable. One never knows exactly to whom the releases are released or how many would-be interested eyeballs actually end up rolling around on them (or rolling up into the reader's skulls) but at least the price is right.

This one posted on PRLog's own website not only includes my logo-photo as shown above but also photos of my paperback front cover and eBook promo graphic and also, surprisingly, an actual toe-tapping-along-with working model of my YouTube promotional video.

So nice job PRLog! If this effort ever generates any income I'll use it to buy PRLog's cheapest pay-for-promo package and send it out again to even more victims - er, targets. And if that works I'll go back and buy their next level deal. And so on.

This whole project is a bootstrap operation you see.