He was dead.

I was so shocked to receive a birthday notification for a friend who had died seven months earlier that I expressed my frustration in a Facebook status update. I suggested that Facebook should have a way of notifying friends when someone dies, some kind of “tribute” function. (Of course, then there would be that chance that someone would post a tribute for someone who wasn’t dead, whom they wish were dead. That could be problematic.) It just seemed WRONG that I was receiving notifications to “Wish Chris Happy Birthday!”

I was surprised by the responses to my status update. One friend said, “I’m sorry abt ur friend…but I think finding out if our friends are alive is kind of up to us more than FB.” and another: “I think the bigger problem here is: how come you don’t know he is dead if he is a real friend …”

These comments left me feeling like, “If you really cared about your friend, you would know if he was alive or dead.” But Chris wasn’t a close friend. He was someone I went on a few dates with more than a decade ago, someone who convinced me that if I wanted to learn the craft of writing, I should become a reporter (I wanted to write for women’s magazines at the time). He was a journalist himself, and I took his advice and got a job as a newspaper reporter and stuck with that for the following three years. So he had a big impact on my life and my writing career. After I left LA and moved to the Bay Area, we talked or e-mailed a couple of times a year, then not at all for a while, until he joined Facebook. A few months after he friended me, I messaged him, mentioning how sad it was that the wife of someone we once knew in common had died of cancer. I had no idea that Chris himself had died—soon after he had joined Facebook. We knew just one person in common, and I was no longer in touch with her. (I am now; I found her on Facebook.)

A friend of mine said to me last week that she thought it was nice that some people use the Facebook profiles of friends who have died to write tributes to them. Maybe for people close to that person it is nice—like when my siblings and I thought it was nice to keep the recording of my mother’s voice on my dad’s voicemail for thirteen years after she died. Other people thought it was creepy. And I find it a little creepy (and so heartbreaking!) to visit Chris’s page and see that his relationship status is “engaged,” to see who is “current” employer is, to be reminded where he “lives” and when his birthday is. It’s as if he weren’t dead but frozen in time.

So what can you do about this? You can create an online will. You can either do it through a paid service like Legacy Locker, who, for $30/year will manage your online afterlife, or you can do it yourself—by entrusting someone close to you with the logins and passwords to your various accounts. If you choose the latter, make sure you store this will with your other will and living trust (You people with kids have a living trust, right?) and include in it information about all your online accounts: your website, your blog, your photo archive, your online backup service, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Also include instructions on how you want each account dealt with. Deleted? Made inactive? Or would you prefer that your friend/spouse/child/parent use your page to notify friends about your death and funeral arrangements? Or maintain a tribute page? Whatever you do, tell him/her to STOP THE BIRTHDAY NOTIFICATIONS.

You probably don’t think you’re going to die anytime soon, but neither did Chris. He died suddenly of a heart attack. So don’t delay. Draw up a plan for managing your online afterlife NOW. This article on Time.com explains what companies like Facebook and Google require to access a deceased loved one’s accounts, and here is
a list of online services to help you manage your online life after death.

What about you? Do you have a plan for your online afterlife? Do you plan to make one? Do you know people who have died who still have websites and blogs and Facebook pages intact?

Red Room began as the Red Room Writers Society in 2002, where Madison personally helped hundreds of aspiring and professional writers complete their books. A frequent keynote speaker and panelist on writing, entrepreneurship, and social media, she has been a guest lecturer to the faculty and writing coaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Stanford Publishing Course. Trained as an attorney, Madison was Editor in Chief of her Law Review, interned at the California Supreme Court, and served as a Law Fellow at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Her adventures have also included episodes as a New Orleans restaurateur, radical feminist politico, and torch singer at the Plush Room. Her feminist-mafia-noir graphic novel, Huntress: Year One, was published by DC Comics in February 2009 and is now in its second printing. It tells the origin story of a strong female superhero. Madison is twenty-nine.

MW: What gave you the idea to create a Red Room online bookstore?

IM: Well, it didn’t make any sense to me that authors were doing all the work marketing their books—on Red Room, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites—and then handing the profits and the customer relationships over to Amazon. We wanted to change that and dramatically improve the future for authors.

I’m also concerned about the stranglehold Amazon has on our culture and our
industry. Jeff Bezos was a hedge fund manager who evaluated numerous retail
categories looking for the one with the biggest upside at the time, which
was books. I think I read it was almost women’s shoes. To Amazon, books are
a retail category, period. But to you and me, books are *not* just another
retail category. They are the world of ideas. They are our culture. They are art, politics, parenting, history—books are everything. Books change the
world.

The reality is that at least half of all book sales have moved online. Of
course we want you to shop at your local independent bookstore, and people
reading this blog probably do more than the average American, but most
people buy most of their books from Amazon. We want back that half of
American book sales that take place on Amazon. They make more money from all
of their other products, so we can take back books and they won’t even feel
it because we’ll be buying everything else on earth from them. And
regarding independent bookstores, we’re trying to figure out right now how
we can support them through Red Room. One idea on the table is to allow
shoppers to pick an independent bookstore, and we’ll give that bookstore
part of the profits. We want to preserve book culture, and there may be a
way to do that *without* ignoring that most consumers buy from large online
retailers and are not going to stop. So we’ll build an online retailer that
supports book culture.

As a side note, I’ve *always* wanted to run a bookstore; I love bookstores
and libraries. I worked at Book Passage [a local independent bookstore]
when I was fifteen years old. In my twenties I looked into opening my own
bookstore, but economically, I could see it was an almost impossible
business model. I used to go to the library all the time, before the
Internet. One of my [unpublished] novels stars a librarian working at the
San Francisco main branch.

MW: Does the Red Room bookstore carry all Red Room authors’ books? If not, why not?

IM: We carry about 95% of our authors’ titles. Since we don’t want our authors to miss a single sale, if we don’t carry it, we offer a link to other retailers. We’d like to carry 100% of our authors’ titles. Right now, we’re working with the largest distributor in the world, and they have almost everything, but we will work with other distributors, too, so we can fill in the gaps.

MW: What does an author have to do to get stocked in the Red Room bookstore (and how much does it cost)?

IM: Soon we’ll be selling *all* books, not just the books by our authors. So you’ll be able to find any book on Red Room that you can on Amazon. It’s completely free for you to join as a “Community Member” and for us to stock your book. Free to shop. And consumers don’t need to set up a public profile in order to shop.

However, just because your book is stocked, doesn’t mean readers will find
you. If you’re an author, you’ll want an annual “Premium Membership” so you
can take advantage of how we help you market your book. When you’re a
Premium Member, your profile looks and feels different with numerous
additional features. We’ll showcase all of your titles on your homepage, and when
people view your book, they’ll see a personal note from you about it, what
other authors are recommending it, and lots of other premium benefits
designed especially for authors.

Premium Membership costs $250 a year. For authors doing the math, part of
that is you get unlimited “Red Room Royalties” of *15% of your book sales*, so unless you sell fewer than about 85 books a year, you’ll make back your membership fee and be enjoying Red Room for free, and we’ll be sending you checks. Also, we know that authors who are really broke need this program the most, so we offer scholarship rates for authors in financial need—if you’re an author who can barely pay, send me a note, we want to help you be a part of this.

And I want to reiterate that people who aren’t marketing their book—readers,
journalists, librarians, publishing industry folks—can all create a profile and blog and shop and participate for free.

MW: To clarify, although all authors will eventually see their books stocked in the Red Room bookstore, only premium members will benefit from the 15% commission?

IM: Yes, in the near future, we’ll be selling “all” books and ebooks, at which time only authors who are Premium Members will get “Red Room Royalties” (15% of their sales).
 
So, at that point, if you’re an author there are three possibilities: Your book could be for sale and you aren’t a member (no benefits or special marketing), your book could be for sale and you are a free “community” member (same—you get nothing), or your book could be for sale and you are a Premium Member (so you get all the benefits).

MW: Besides the 15% Red Room royalties, what other advantages are there for authors selling their books through Red Room?

IM: IM: Ah! I forgot to mention the biggest thing. We call it “Red Room Relationships,” and it means that for the first time in history, you meet your book buyers. Imagine if you had the names and contact info for everyone who bought your last few books, so you can market directly to them on your next project. For a bestselling author, this could change your life.

On the author side, the author writes a customized thank-you note for each of
her book titles in which the author can say something that pertains to that book,
and then the note is automatically sent to her book buyers. The customer’s info then gets sent to the author’s “customers” file. Red Room is a social network, so this is similar to when people like you on Facebook, but it’s much more useful, because it shows their real name, ZIP code, what book they bought, and when. Readers are *excited* about being connected to their favorite authors—that’s why they don’t generally opt out.

When I talk to bestselling authors, like Po Bronson or Maxine Hong-Kingston, the thing they are most interested in is not the money, it’s the customer relationships. Think about if you’ve sold millions of books and if you had all the names of all of those customers, so you don’t have to start from scratch when your next book comes out. “Red Room Relationships” can deliver that if an author plants the seeds wherever they link to buying their books.

MW: The Red Room website states, “We’re not offering a new publishing model, we’re offering a new retail model.” Can you explain what that means?

IM: Sure. Right now, everyone is talking about disintermediating the publishing supply chain, meaning cutting out publishers and printers and agents and distributors, leaving only the author and the reader with whomever is attempting the disintermediation (Amazon, for example) in between. Red Room’s model doesn’t cut any of these traditional players out.

Despite the big hype around a few successful self-published books, most
books being purchased are traditionally published books, and despite the
excitement about ebooks, at the moment, the majority of books being sold
are still print books. So how can authors make more money on the majority
of books selling today? We’ve come up with a way. You can double your income if you successfully route your sales to Red Room.

Why should you give Amazon your customers, anyway? Red Room’s new retail
model breaks down what I call “the retail wall” between the author and the
customer. It’s going to change everything. Authors do all the work marketing themselves all over the web—we make it possible to close the sale with exponentially more benefits.

We give you some of the most important benefits of an author’s collective,
except that you don’t have to take turns dusting the shelves or cleaning
the kitchen. Just update your blog, please. I know some readers are going
to say, I’d rather clean the kitchen!

MW: Amazon heavily discounts books. For example, the list price for Haruki Murakami’s new hardcover, 1Q84, is $30.50; the Amazon price is 50% of that—$15.25. What motivation is there for readers to buy books at list
price through Red Room when they can get them for half that on Amazon?

IM: This is the million—wait,* **eight-b**illion*-dollar question. Our first task is to eliminate every other advantage Amazon has, and then we will be in a position to address this. First of all, studies have shown that price is not the primary reason people shop on Amazon. The number one reason you buy on Amazon is because you’ve bought previously from them and they have your credit card info and shipping address on file. That’s referred to as “convenience.” And shows how important initial customer acquisition is.

Also, Amazon often only discounts books 20%, and the majority of
books only 2-5%. Once we’re selling a higher volume of books, we may be able to compete on price—so buy on Red Room, please! The biggest challenge for
us is that they discount the bestsellers 40-50%. We may someday be able to
do that, but books cost retailers between 45%-65% of their list price
through most distributors or publishers, depending on your volume, so we
may get close but not all the way.

There was an op-ed in The New York Times recently that was essentially saying, “What Price Amazon?” A Pulitzer-Prize winning author, whose name I forget, argued that while their prices may be lower, it hurts local communities, destroys our local tax base and infrastructure, and our culture as a nation.

I don’t know how many consumers, out of the $8 billion in Amazon book
sales, will be willing to switch, even if they’re encouraged to do so by
the authors. If Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs had been on Red Room
in the first two weeks it was out, and Isaacson had, when promoting his
book, directed readers to Red Room, Isaacson could have made up to an
additional $3 million more than he did. Not to mention that he would have
gathered the names of 500,000 of his customers to sell his next and his
backlist books to. Anyway, let’s say he only got a measly 10% of his book
sales to move to Red Room from Amazon. That’s still $300,000 and 50,000
names.

The authors are already their own sales force, Red Room is a mechanism that
allows them to get more out of closing the sale, wherever and whenever
they’re marketing themselves.

MW: How many authors use Red Room? How many authors sell their books through the Red Room Bookstore?

IM: Three thousand authors use Red Room. About 500 of them haven’t filled out their profile enough for us to sell their books yet, but the other 2,500 sell their books through the Red Room Bookstore. And when we launch selling “all” books, not just our official Red Room author titles, the other 500 authors’ books will show up, plus we’ll have about eight million additional
titles. I’ll let you know when that launches.

MW: How can Red Room authors reach more potential readers through Red Room?

IM: We have numerous testimonials from authors saying they get far more readers of the same blog posts on Red Room than they do on their other platforms. Some authors have reported between 15,000 and 500,000 readers. We provide analytics, so you can see your traffic on Red Room. Blogging regularly (something I don’t like doing, and I understand why others don’t like to do) is, as everyone knows, a good way to get new readers. You’ll be showcased
on our blogs page, and we can feature you—if you wrote something fantastic—on our homepage or in our newsletter. Another great way to promote yourself is to comment on the blogs of other authors you authentically like. Don’t sell, just add to the conversation. Readers will see you there and look you up.

I gave an hour keynote talk on how to market your book through social media
at the Stanford Writers Conference a while back, so I have a whole
methodology I suggest to help people spend a limited amount of time online
but make the most marketing impact. If you’re on Red Room, call me and I’ll
give you a short coaching session tailored to your situation. Seriously,
I’m happy to do it. I don’t like authors out there feeling overwhelmed or
intimidated or guilty about what they “should” be doing on the Internet. I
like to see authors getting their next book written, blogging and
participating strategically in a limited way that doesn’t waste their time, and gathering over time a lengthy email list of real book buyers. We get notes all the time from authors saying what a support we were and how much we helped them succeed. That’s what we’re here for.

MW: For authors who already have a website and a blog, what advantage is there to blogging on Red Room? Do I have to have a Premium Membership to blog on Red Room?

IM: You can have a beautiful Red Room home, and you can blog on Red Room for free. It’s called a “Community Membership.” (As I mentioned earlier, you only have to get a Premium Membership if you want us to showcase and carry your books.) Blogging on Red Room is the most pleasant blogging experience you’ll find on the Internet because of the quality of the people on Red Room—no weird comments, no spam comments. And you’ll be in really good company, as you know, from seeing who’s already on Red Room. Plus, it’s an elegant site. We just rebuilt and redesigned the site from the ground up, and it looks great. And we always provide email and phone support from our editors in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Red Room isn’t exclusive. You can still post elsewhere and sell books
elsewhere. But we’ll become your favorite. Most of our authors are on
Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Red Room. A significant number also have
a personal website and a blog elsewhere. We know it’s time-consuming to
maintain all of these sites, so we keep up with technology and improve the
design, so Red Room can be your only home if you want it to be, but we also
don’t mind you linking to and showcasing your activity on other
sites. Because you’ll start linking where to buy your book from all of
those other sites back to Red Room, so you can find out who’s really buying and so you can earn your Red Room Royalties of 15% of those sales. We amplify the
success you have on all the other sites. We play nice with everybody.

Except Amazon. Which is kind of ironic, because I think I would get along
really well with actual amazons.

* * *
Thank you, Ivory, for a great interview! Readers, what do you think about Red Room’s new online retail model? Do you use Red Room? Will you buys books through Red Room? If you are a published author, will you link to Red Room on your website?

Throughout the four years I’ve been a parent (to two children now), I’ve asked myself many times: When I look back later, what will I wish I had done differently? What will I regret? Until last week, I couldn’t think of anything. Because I ask myself this question frequently, I tend to feel that I am on the right parenting track—spending a lot of time with my kids while at same time maintaining a healthy balance of time to work on my career, getting their pictures taken at regular intervals, reading to them every night, taking lots of photos and videos of them, writing down cute things they say, etc.

Then, last week, it struck me that my two-year-old daughter’s two years of life are a blur. I can hardly remember her at 6 mos, at 12 mos, at 18 mos. I can picture her bald head, but I have trouble picturing her in the stroller as a baby, or my carrying her around in the Bjorn, or her first words. We’ve been so busy—rushing from play dates to swim class to preschool—that the details have already faded. During my son’s first year of preschool last year, I taped every art project he did on his bedroom wall. This year, my daughter’s first year, her artwork comes home and sits in a pile on the dining room table until I move it to a pile on my desk in the basement. I haven’t kept up her baby book (yet, but I plan to update it next month), and I’ve missed all three preschool parent events for her class.

Looking back at this blur that is my daughter’s life, I ask myself what my favorite memories are. The answer: The mornings and afternoons I sat on the floor with the kids and played: built train tracks, played musical instruments, did puzzles, played Bingo, put shapes into the shape sorter, etc. And the mornings and afternoons we’ve spent at the park—playing in the sand, playing soccer on the grass, and riding scooters/bikes. I’m proud that my kids understand French and Spanish. I love that they are good swimmers. I’m happy that they are social and well adjusted. But my favorite memories aren’t the ones of us driving in the car from this class to that event. They aren’t the ones of me cleaning the house while the kids play alone. They are the ones of me sitting on the floor doing a dinosaur floor puzzle, building Lego castles, and trying to make a train track around the living room that uses every tunnel, bridge, and piece of track we own. And I plan to do more of that starting now.

What about you? Looking back at your children’s younger years, is there anything you would do differently? What?

Now, here’s an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience:

Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you’ve got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list.

And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

By the way, there is some value in attracting other bloggers to your blog for the simple reason that they are more likely to blog about you and your work than non-bloggers. But you need both. You need to reach as many potential readers as possible, and there are many ways to do that.

Now, you tell me. Are you blogging to the RIGHT audience? Are you blogging to your potential readers, or are you only blogging to other writers? What’s stopping you from making that leap?

As someone who just finished the last revision of my manuscript Monday night (Hurray! I’m taking the day off to go to the hot springs tomorrow, my favorite reward), this rang true for me. I sent an earlier draft of my memoir, Paris On Less Than $10,000 A Day, out two years ago to five agents. All five requested fulls, and all five had positive feedback but ultimately turned the book down (No wait, there was a sixth, the fabulous Nathan Bransford, from whom I received a form rejection, but who hasn’t received a form rejection from Nathan?) Rather than send it to more agents, I spent the next two years rewriting the book. I don’t regret that decision because I think the book has greatly improved, but now, as I prepare to send it out again, I have one goal: No matter how many rejections I get (assuming I get some) I’m not allowed to revise my book again, unless an agent specifically requests that I do so.

I’m confident that my book is well-written and marketable. I’ve read enough publishing blogs to know not to take rejection personally. It’s an impossibly tough market, the business is incredibly subjective (It’s all about finding the right agent, the who will fall in love with my story), etc. etc. I know all that. And yet …

I also know myself. A month from now, after having received three or four rejections, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll doubt my book and my writing in general. I’ll analyze rejection e-mails for clues as to what could be improved. I’ll kick myself for not having gotten my book out there sooner. I’ll wonder if having a bigger author platform would make a difference. I’ll tell myself that memoirs are a thing of the past (unless you’re a celebrity from the 80s), that modeling books are out, that the only chance I have of getting published is to sleep with Oprah’s hairdresser. I’ll wonder if my book is too serious. I’ll tell myself that if only chapters 1, 6, 9, and 18 were as funny as 2, 7, and 41, it would have sold by now. In other words, I’ll be plagued by self-doubt.

Back when I was rock climbing, I wanted to get my lead card at my local rock climbing gym. I’d heard from several people that no one passes the first time they take the lead test. Climbers often have to take it two or three times to get their cards because their lead has to be PERFECT—perfect clips, smooth, strong climbing on an overhanging 5.10B or 5.10C, and no stepping on or behind the rope. I passed on my first try. Not because I’m a great climber, but because I was so afraid to fail that I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced long after any sane person would have taken the test. I would not take the test until I was confident that I could do it flawlessly. Why? Because I’m plagued by perfectionism, the cousin of self-doubt.

Perfectionism can be a good thing. It can lead to great accomplishments. But it can be damaging, too. It can slow us down, it can prevent us from putting ourselves out there, from taking risks. And in order to get published, we need to be willing to put ourselves out there. We need to take risks—in our writing and in our lives.

What about you? Are you plagued by perfectionism and/or self-doubt? Do you find that men are more confident than women when submitting their writing for publication? How do you remain positive in the face of rejection?

I worked it back up to 55, and it held steady for a while. I had come up with a “system” to maximize my ROI without working too hard, and I was happy. Then the sky fell when Klout changed its algorithm on October 26. My score plummeted to 46 overnight. And then, through some bug, it bottomed out at 10 (then popped back up to 46 the following day.) I wasn’t alone. Thousands of Klout users were incensed that their scores had dropped 10 to 20 points in one day (most of those with high scores saw a drop while those with low scores benefited from an increase.) To soothe my bruised ego, @missuku sent me this great xtranormal video about the inanity of Klout. And in response to one commenter’s lament that he had spent months getting his Klout score into the 70s only to see it drop back into the 50s, TechCrunch published an article titled Nobody Gives a Damn About Your Klout Score.

Back in April, when I wrote this blog post about Klout, that was true. When I interviewed agents and editors in the publishing industry, none of them had ever heard of Klout. They definitely weren’t checking writers’ Klout scores before deciding whether to take them on.

But all that has changed. Since April, Klout has expanded to include not only Twitter, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare, WordPress.com, Blogger, and more (I can’t check their site for the complete list because I refuse to look at my Klout score), and now literary agents and social media gurus are telling us that the size of one’s Klout score DOES matter. In fact, in this blog post, literary agent Rachelle Gardner says you should include your Klout score IN YOUR BOOK PROPOSAL along with your number of Twitter followers and page views on your blog. Kristen Lamb, author of We Are Not Alone, a social media guide for writers, responded in a post titled The Dark Side of Metrics—Writer Friend or Ticket to Crazy Town?. For me, Klout was a ticket to crazy town.

When I first started using it, I watched other Tweeters to see what raised their Klout scores. I noticed that getting any kind of mention helped, so I @replied and retweeted people each night hoping they would @reply and retweet me back. It worked. But it felt like a waste of my extremely valuable time to spend half an hour (sometimes up to an hour) on the Internet each night writing tweets like, “Hey, how are you?” or “I loved that movie, too!” in order to raise my Klout score. There were some aspects I liked about it. I was connecting more with people and we all know social networking is about being social. I worked harder at writing tweets that would get retweeted. I tweeted more frequently and more regularly, instead of 10 times one day and none the next. I was happy with my progress. 55 was a good score, and 60 was on the horizon.

What frustrated me most about Klout’s new algorithm is that I couldn’t figure it out. I no longer knew what to do (get my Twitter followers, get more FB likes, get more retweets) to increase my score. Whereas before, my “True Reach” was a transparent number—my number of Twitter followers plus my Facebook likes, suddenly my True Reach was a mysterious 700 while a friend, who has a fourth my Twitter followers and no Facebook page, had a True Reach of 3000. And another friend, who doesn’t have a Twitter account or a blog or a Facebook page (only a personal Facebook profile), suddenly had a Klout score of 43—just three points behind mine. And she HATES social media. How was this possible? My husband found the answer in this article. According to Annie, and I think she’s right, what matters is the percentage of your followers who are actively engaged with you. In other words, you’re better off with 50 friends who retweet everything you say than 10,000 followers of which only 500 retweet everything you say. The algorithm is clearly flawed. And it’s not the only one.

I’ve been to Grader.com to score my website and my blog. My blog gets penalized for having infrequent posts that are long (the highest scores go to blogs with frequent, short posts) and for not having links to Twitter and Facebook. Uh, sorry Grader.com, but I have not one but TWO links each to both Twitter and Facebook on my blog. In other words, these scoring websites make mistakes. Big mistakes. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

So I’m taking a break. That’s not to say I’ll never check my Klout score again, but for the month of November, while all your Nanowrimo writers are cranking out 1666.66 words a day, I will be assessing my social media influence the old-fashioned way—by instinct. And until Klout reveals what exactly goes into its cockamamy (I always thought it was “cockamany” but Dictionary.com disagrees with me) algorithm, I won’t take my score too seriously. I’d rather spend my late-night hours playing games the old-fashioned way—sitting around my dining room table with friends, producing coffee and tobacco, and laying track between Palermo and Moskva.

What about you? Do you care about your Klout score? How was it affected by the algorithm change? Do you care? And have you found the secret to increasing your “new Klout” score?