I just read a Seth Godin blog post, What's It Like (the sad story of the hot pepper), in which he summed up one of my greatest conflicts/challenges in talking about Hell on $5 a Day.

The point that Seth makes is that for most projects, you have to be able to be able to categorize it. People don't want to know what it is, but what it's like. That gives them a quick, experiential point of reference they can build on. "It's like King Kong, but with a giant bunny" lets the audience's memory/perception quickly fill in a whole bunch of blanks so you don't have to.

On a rare occasion, though, your project is so unique, it defies a simple categorization. You can't get that quick hit of familiarity. You either have to describe it in full, without the aid of familiar references, or you have to say "it's like nothing you've ever had. Just trust me and try it."

People would ask me to describe my novel in just a few words, and I couldn't. It wasn't a "vampire novel" per se. It just happened to have a vampire in it. Some of the story was driven by Alain's vampirism, but a lot of it wasn't. There was a lot of borrowing from Dante, some from Milton... Categorizing it was very difficult for me. I was too close to it to be able to boil it down to a few catchphrases and keywords.

I didn't know if it was that unique, or if I just didn't want to categorize it. To categorize it feels like you've not only limited it, but you've taken away a degree of its uniqueness. So, as the creator of an "artistic" work, it's quite possible I was merely resisting categorizing my story rather than the story itself resisting categorization. Every child is unique, right? Even if they aren't.

But when you're trying to sell a work, saying "just trust me and try it" is not a great approach if you haven't built trust with the person. Furthermore, when you say "this is unlike anything else," you have to be 100% sure it is unlike anything else. If someone gives you the benefit of the doubt, reads it, and says "this is just like...", you're screwed. You asked them to trust you about it's uniqueness and lost.

I'm still on the fence over whether my novel is resisting categorization or I'm resisting categorizing it, but Godin has given me some insight that is helping me look at it more honestly. If I want to sell it, I need the best answer for "what's it like" that I can find.

Been working on a new project that will go into previews for selected friends and family later this week and go into general release a few days later, once I've had a chance to fix any issues my preview users find.

One part of the project was to add "Tweet This" links to certain items on the site, where clicking on the link would send the user to Twitter and fill in the suggested text of the tweet for them.

It's actually a lot simpler than you think. The format is: http://twitter.com/?status=[URL encoded tweet text].

Now many of you are asking how you "URL encode" the tweet text. Well, if you're using PHP, you use urlencode('text'); where "text" is the text of your tweet. If you want to do it in JavaScript, the PHP.js library has a javascript equivalent for PHP's urlencode.

But here's a little trick I didn't know about until I made this mistake. Make sure your link goes to twitter.com, not www.twitter.com. If it goes to www.twitter.com, the text doesn't get properly decoded. So, trying to tweet Creating a "Tweet This" Link - http://www.brainhandles.com would look like Creating a %22Tweet This%22 link - http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brainhandles.com, and nobody wants that.

I was recently on Twibes and saw they were using an ad network called FeaturedUsers (featuredusers.com) to monetize their Twitter app. I was curious about whether it presented a good value for promoting my Twitter feed, and through that, my blog and my online novels.

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So, I was checking my FeedBurner stats tonight. According to them between April 1 through April 7, this is a sampling of the kind of clickthrough back to my site I got from the 100 or so people they tell me are subscribed to my site.

Wow, that's awesome. Don't know how it is that an average of 96 subscribers clicked a single link 651 times, but God bless them. And you'd think that number would be reflected in my Google Analytics stats, but Chapter 35 isn't even in the top 5. Google Analytics says it got hit 166 times in that same period, and of that, only 101 came from outside sources (the other 65 coming from other pages on my site).

Now, Google Analytics is JavaScript based and wouldn't count people with JavaScript turned off or a JavaScript defeater turned on, but logfiles don't rely on JavaScript. They also require a good stats program to be able to pick and choose date ranges, but according to AWStats, up until around 9 p.m on the 8th, total traffic to Chapter 35 for the month was 221 pageviews.

So, FeedBurner, either a LOT of those clicks never reached my site, or you're overstating clicks by a factor of at least 6x, maybe more like 10x. I've always thought Feedburner's numbers were a little erratic, but this is ridiculous. WTF Feedburner?