I've got a couple of mailing lists now...

[julesjones]

So I've decided to join the world of personal announcement and chat mailing lists...

There's an announcements-only yahoogroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JulesJonesAnnouncements which is intended to be a low traffic list I can use to tell people about new releases, cons I'm going to, etc. You can subscribe from the webpage for the list, or by sending an email to JulesJonesAnnouncements-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

I hate Yahell with a fine and mighty passion (even more so since the changes at the weekend), but this is probably the best system for a lot of my readers. I may set up an ad-free mirror list from my own website for the Yahoo-haters, when I have a chance to poke at the stuff available from the server I use.

I've also set up a yahoogroup for general conversation at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JulesJonesChat (or send an email to JulesJonesChat-subscribe@yahoogroups.com ). This is mine, but I might be able to kick Alex into participating occasionally. (I hate the Yahoo interface, but not nearly as much as Alex does.)

Now, I should really have a little contest to celebrate, and indeed I found some very interesting items in a local shop last week that will do nicely as prizes. Unfortunately, I'm on the wrong continent again, so the housewarming party will have to wait until I get home. This has the advantage that I'll then be able to add some nice prints of that gorgeous cover art that Scott did for Mindscan. :-)

Comments

[metaforgirl.livejournal.com]

I hate Yahell with a fine and mighty passion (even more so since the changes at the weekend)

What changes? How can it be worse? I rarely sign up for yahoo groups. I'll sign up for yours if you want the numbers. Otherwise, I'll probably just keep hitting on your site.

Who hosts your site? Isn't there a way to automate a mailing list for updates? I know of a slash writer with a very sophisticated site who has such a thing going.

I loved the cover art for Mindscan. Those big brown vulnerable eyes. Sigh. Can't wait to see it.

[julesjones]

Yahoo decided to make the site more "helpful". Starting with swapping what the "next" and "previous" buttons do... The colour schemes are more... interesting. They updated the summary page for your groups, which now shows you a little thumbnail of the home page graphic for each group, with no obvious way to turn this off. I'm currently using a pay-per-MB access over a dialup, so you can imagine how happy *that* made me. And so on and so forth, including assorted ways to make a Seven Bit ASCII Grumpy Old Fart very unhappy indeed.

Don't much care about the numbers, although you might want to join as a no-mail member in case I take to posting excerpts. I suspect you'd find the blog more interesting anyway.

One Yahoogroup you might find interesting - BBCharacterChats is for authors to interact with their fans - in the guise of characters from their books. Nice idea, and I'll be doing a bit when I've got back to my broadband.

My own website's done through a friend who has a small web-hosting company. It has mailing lists available. I know little more than that, because shortly after mailing lists became a possibly desirable option my life became interesting in the Chinese sense, and I haven't had time to do anything about it. Life should be back to normal in a month or so. In the meantime, Yahoogroups, not least because they offer other options which other Loose Id authors have found useful (not least of which being how many of our readers are already accustomed to Yahoogroups). There's a chat function, space to upload files, etc.

The cover art for Mindscan is astonishing. Check out the art Scott Carpenter did for Emily Veinglory's "Eclipse of the Heart" -- my swooning over that cover on the internal list was one of the reasons they used him for Mindscan.