Awkward Press

And the award for having 100 hits on a review of Purple Rain goes to … me and Mike! I know that is not many hits in the grand scheme of things, but it is a lot of traffic for our little site. And I, for one, think that is just swell.

Congratulations, us! Since Mike is in New York and I am in Los Angeles, I will have to accept the award on behalf of both of us. Here I am:

The other day, I did a piece where I liveblogged a glass of water. (Full disclosure: I really wanted to liveblog a sandwich, but I didn’t have a sandwich.) After I wrote the piece, I wanted to see how quickly Google registered stuff, so I googled “liveblogging a glass of water.” Lo and behold, there was another website with a post entitled “liveblogging a glass of water.” “This aggression will not stand!” I said, thinking that this person had grabbed my work whole cloth and stuck it on his or her own website. But when I clicked over, I learned that no, this person (Lula Lee, according to her profile) had not ripped me off … in fact, I had ripped her off! The original water liveblog had been posted almost one year ago!

Now, to be fair, our approaches to liveblogging water were slightly different. She was taking a look at the particles in her glass of tap water as they settled, while I was more interested in how delicious and refreshing water is. But, in case Lula ever comes across my article in a Google search, let me just say: you win. You were the first. I promise you I didn’t know it at the time, and I in no way meant to piggyback on your wonderful idea. May this post give you traffic behind your wildest dreams, even though you haven’t updated your blog since February.

Hugsies,
Jeffrey

PS: The Awkward Movie Challenge Week 3 is coming this afternoon! Get ready … this one’s a zarDOOZY!

We’re doing it, you guys! I mean, I’m doing it! (Although, if you’re helping me, credit where credit is due … please let me know what you’re doing to help me out in the Great Awkward Boners Battle and I will see that you are given the proper amount of respect. Which is, frankly, very little.) But anyway, how shocked was I when I did an awkward Google search today and discovered this:

We’ve moved up to page 2! Only 5 days after we first moved to page 3! That’s gotta be some kind of record. Please call the Google people and confirm. (The comment was directed at my secretary. Get on it, Rose.)

Um, except then there’s this:

Just when a guy starts to get cocky about his Google position, he sees that hanging out 3 spaces above him. What is that? I don’t even want to click on it.

There is still work to be done, my friends. And by my friends, I mean me.

As everyone on the Internet knows, Awkward Press is currently engaged in a fierce battle with Awkward Boners for Google “awkward” search term supremacy. Of course, they are unaware that they are engaged in this battle. But as Patton said, “one-sided battles are the only ones worth winning,” and he was pretty smart about generaling.

When I launched this campaign against the awkward boners, it was really nothing but a pipe dream. I mean, let’s be honest … independent publisher Awkward Press really doesn’t stand much of a chance against a site as single-mindedly brilliant as Awkward Boners. But then a funny thing happened: the more we wrote, the higher up we moved. Right now, we are the 24th most popular result for the word “awkward” on Google. We’ve blown out the Be Your Own Pet album Get Awkward! on Amazon. (Which is a shame, ’cause I like those kids. Sorry BYOP!) Cracked.com’s list of Letterman’s Most Awkward Moments, the one that caused me migraines last week? Try 14 SPOTS BELOW US!

And the best part is this: not only are we the 24th most popular search result for “awkward” … we are the 19th most popular search results for “awkward boners.” It is a beautiful Democracy, this blogosphere.

And now, dear friends, the rallying cry. Do you want to see us take down Awkward Boners? I ask you, is it fair that a site dedicated to that most odious of experiences, the public erection, be ranked higher than a noble independent publishing agency that is just trying to spread a little common decency among the people and animals of America? In a world of children, do we really want Awkward Boners to thrive? I should say we do not! And thusly, if you have yourself a website, please help us out. Give us a link, wouldja guv’ner?

Related posts:
Page 3, Baby!
Awkward Press Rockets to Page 4
Awkward Boners

To all the haters who said we couldn’t do it, I say: INCORRECT! Why don’t you go hate somewhere else, haters? Because it’s not nice to be hateful. Especially when what you’re hating on is an independent publishing company. I mean, really. That’s just sad. You should hate on something that deserves your hate, like Phil Spector or koala bears.

Now that I’ve dealt with the haters, I’ve got a message for the lovers: WE DID IT! We made it all the way to page 3 of the Google Awkward search! Some people might be like, “what? who cares?” But those people are HATERS. And right now I’m talking to the lovers. So, thanks, lovers. And if you happen to run into any of those haters who have been saying such hateful things about how Awkward Press could NEVER move from page 4 to page 3 of the Google “awkward” search, you just get on Google and show them what’s what. I’m pretty sure they’ll be like, “oh.”

Ack! A few hours ago, I posted the Awkward Movie Challenge, which was attributed to me and new Awkward contributor Mike Segretto. For some reason, this replaced my author profile with Segretto’s. This is what happens when you put together a website with no discernible programming skills. So hopefully this post will blow that out and let us both retain our individual identities. Sorry for the inconvenience, blog readers.

If you google the word “awkward,” the site Awkward Boners is the third thing that comes up. By contrast, you have to click through to page 9 before you see mention of Awkward Press.

You’ve won this round, Awkward Boners. But we’re gunning for you. And we’re taking you down.

Now let us never talk of this site again.

Hi, and welcome to Awkward Press. I have spent the last two weeks staring at web code and I can’t do it anymore, so this baby is going live right this very minute. What this is, is a website for a publishing company that has yet to put out a book. We have a book. We’ll be putting it out soon. But as of this very minute, you cannot buy it anywhere. It looks like this:

I didn’t really need to post that picture, because the same picture is in that little box on the right hand side that tells you to buy stuff. When you click on that box, it takes you to a page telling you that you can’t buy our stuff. It’s a real house of mirrors, all right.

I used to be a partner in a company called Contemporary Press. Technically, I still am. But we haven’t put out a book in years and we probably never will again. Which is too bad, because I think we did some pretty cool stuff. But we got involved in this whole distribution deal thing which led to us having no money to print new books and then my partners all got married and started to have kids and I moved to Los Angeles and it became unsustainable.

But so now there’s Awkward, which is sort of my baby. I have two partners in this venture, Clay McLeod Chapman and Kyle Jarrow. You can read about them by clicking on their names over in that box on the left-hand side. If you don’t feel like clicking on images, you can also find their bios up in that menu above. I know this seems like a stupid thing for me to harp on, since you’ve probably visited websites before and can figure out the navigation just fine, but I’m totally not a programmer and those links represent approximately 5,000 hours of work for me. So I’m kind of proud of them.

Clay and Kyle are both really amazing writers and performers. I know Clay sort of looks like a mass murderer in his bio picture, but he’s actually quite nice. We’ve been working together on this thing for a couple of years, and I’m happy that it’s finally starting to come to fruition. The idea is that we’re going to entertain you, with writings and videos and music and podcasts and whatever happens to pop into our heads. This is where you can come to find it.

If you’d be so kind as to register for our mailing list, we’ll let you know what’s going on. We’ll try to make our emails entertaining, and we promise not to send you too many of them. I wouldn’t know how to spam you if I tried, so that won’t be in the cards, either.

Onward and Awkward!