Spiffing up Squidoo

I've spent the past few days going over some lenses looking for things to improve. The biggest project I took on was revamping all my lenses about the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels. There's 11 lenses in all. When I first made the lenses back around late December, I'd used a utility that created links to Amazon that would give me most of the commission instead of splitting it. But I found that in the vast majority of cases, that utility wasn't picking up the book covers, so the lenses didn't look that great. So my project was to switch them all over to just use the regular Squidoo modules and split commissions with Squidoo.

I used the Amazon Spotlight module, which shows a bigger book cover than the standard oone, for the winner of each year's award. Then I used the regular Amazon module for the nominees. If there was a Kindle edition available, I stuck in a text link for it using my Amazon Associates ID so I get a bit more money if anyone should happen to click on the link and buy something. It was tedious work for the Hugo lenses, but not too bad.

Things were a bit more challenging for the Nebula lenses. I'd originally only created links for the winning novels and simply listed the nominees. And where I'd written blurbs for the Hugo winners, I hadn't for the Nebula winners. So I had to write a lot more blurbs, although I could copy and paste for those novels that won both awards. Again, I created Kindle links where needed. I never did more than one or two Nebula lenses in a day.

About the time I got that done, I learned of a new site called SquidPedia. It's a new site where people can submit their lenses for listing. I submitted my Monterey Pop Festival and Brian Froud lenses yesterday, and they were accepted pretty quickly. Just a little while ago I submitted my Celtic Music: Lenses and MobyD's Science Fiction Lenses lenses.

I don't know what to expect from these submissions, but more visits would be nice, and some sales through Amazon would be even nicer. This is just one way to promote my lenses, aside from blogging about them, and I think that's something I definitely need to spend more time doing.