Liphar Magazine Issue 2

By Liphar

What an overwhelming response to our first issue! Such positive and uplifting comments to articles, interviews and stories we received. We at Liphar would like to thank you for your support and feedback. This makes it all worthwhile.
We will not rest on our laurels though, but continue to improve our high standard with more in- depth articles, more probing interviews, whilst keeping you abreast with books reviews and new trends.
As the reader, we value your comments on articles, interviews, articles, stories, art and photo gallery and book reviews. This is an opportunity for you to give us your opinion. You can do this autonomously with feedback on anything you read in Liphar.
To reiterate for submissions of articles: nominate yourself or someone else for an interview, advertise, or submit photographs with good composition that reflect your work and images of your art that reflect your particular style. Artists and non-professional photographers are welcome to submit their work to the Art Gallery. Please contact the relevant department at http://litartmag.com/index.php
In this issue: An inspiring erotic memoir interview with Emma Styles of a married woman's sexual journey from housewife to fully liberated muse and plaything. Oxford mother, Jane Yates with the reading age of a 12-year-old and the spelling age of an eight-year-old, has swept her dyslexia aside to write her first novel; shares her struggles in an interview. Wilbur Hollinger examines editing software and its usefulness as a tool to a writer. Staff reporter, John Loval, focuses on Smashwords as a viable choice for self-publishing authors.

Contents
Articles
Why the Quality Reviewer can be a Writer's Great Asset
Power of the Word
Facebook- Social Media Gone Wrong
The Road to London --Review
Smashwords to the Rescue
Editing Software Lacks Perfection
Thought Food

Interviews

Emma Styles
Jane Yates
Patrick Brigham

Stories
The Billy Goat Caper
How Charlie Saved my Life
The Survivalists

Art Gallery
Joshua Townley
Laurie Shanholtzer

Books Worth Reading

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liphar
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310338007

Liphar

LIPHAR (pronounced Lifer)We cover Literature Photography and ArtWe are a small company with a Free online Magazine as well as the magazine will be presented in Ebook formatWe are always looking for Submissions of articles and stories

Book preview

Liphar Magazine Issue 2

LitArtMagazine

Copyright 2014 Liphar

Spangaloo –Smashwords Edition

Visit is to see the Online edition as well as to make comments.

http://litartmag.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright © 2014 by Liphar Magazine. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher.

As well Stories and other articles are copyrighted by the authors.

All images are also copyrighted and used by permission

Contents

Editorial:

Credits

Articles

Why the Quality Reviewer can be a Writer's Great Asset

Power of the Word

Facebook- Social Media Gone Wrong

The Road to London --Review

Smashwords to the Rescue

Editing Software Lacks Perfection

Thought Food

Interviews

Emma Styles

Jane Yates

Patrick Brigham

Stories

The Billy Goat Caper

How Charlie Saved my Life

The Survivalists

Art Gallery

Joshua Townley

Laurie Shanholtzer

Books Worth Reading

Credits

Editor: Deuce Wylde

Staff Writers

John Laval

James Blanchette

Theo Jansen

Alvin Johnston

Wilbur Hollinger

Guest Columnists

Martin Fox

Madi Preda

Contributors:

Queen of Spades

James Bryron Love

Robert Saltzman

Ndaba Sibanda

Rochelle Campbell

Felicity Harley

Cover Image:

From an Original Oil Painting by

James Bryron Love

http://jamesbryronlove.com

At my Desk…

What an overwhelming response to our first issue! Such positive and uplifting comments to articles, interviews and stories we received. We at Liphar would like to thank you for your support and feedback. This makes it all worthwhile.

We will not rest on our laurels though, but continue to improve our high standard with more in- depth articles, more probing interviews, whilst keeping you abreast with books reviews and new trends.

As the reader, we value your comments on articles, interviews, articles, stories, art and photo gallery and book reviews. This is an opportunity for you to give us your opinion. You can do this autonomously with feedback on anything you read in Liphar.

To reiterate for submissions of articles: nominate yourself or someone else for an interview, advertise, or submit photographs with good composition that reflect your work and images of your art that reflect your particular style. Artists and non-professional photographers are welcome to submit their work to the Art Gallery. Please contact the relevant department at http://litartmag.com/index.php

In this issue: An inspiring erotic memoir interview with Emma Styles of a married woman's sexual journey from housewife to fully liberated muse and plaything. Oxford mother, Jane Yates with the reading age of a 12-year-old and the spelling age of an eight-year-old, has swept her dyslexia aside to write her first novel; shares her struggles in an interview. Wilbur Hollinger examines editing software and its usefulness as a tool to a writer. Staff reporter, John Loval, focuses on Smashwords as a viable choice for self-publishing authors.

Deuce Wylde

Facebook- Social Media Gone Wrong

By Alvin Johnston

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, wait, that’s a different story and doesn’t really apply here. Facebook and social media is the topic and not how a group of rebels beat back an evil empire. There still may be some similarities.

Since its IPO offering, Facebook has continued to grow and not necessarily in a good way. There are still many harbingers of doom related to how Facebook operates. They’ve lost touch with their clientele and now scramble to remedy that situation.

Teenagers have left Facebook in droves, seeking easier ways to express themselves. With many more choices that seem to be obvious, there was a mass migration to Instagram and snap chat.

Facebook has acquired Instagram for the godly price of $1 billion, or thereabouts, but SnapChat turned down $3 billion dollars. SnapChat chose to keep themselves separate from everything and forge ahead on their own.

Let’s get back to the beginning years of 2003 and 2004. Facebook started as a project and some of the legalities are questionable. Originally, many people just added to it from the University, a definite invasion of privacy. It has spiraled out of control since then, most notably from its inception. It was bad press that led to its stardom. People wanted to know more about Facebook, more people joined and the word spread. Word-of-mouth propelled it to its heights of enormity. This all seem to happen overnight.

The bad press was a privacy issue, a couple of students wrote some disparaging comments about one of their teachers. The press waded in with a vengeance and soon a fair part of the world was aware of Facebook.

One of the original social media sites was called MySpace. It steadily lost ground to Facebook and since then, had to reinvent itself as something different.

The value of a brief history lesson on Facebook should not be wasted on you. The reason it makes it relevant is because of how Facebook handles their advertising structure. They took the basics of Google and tried to migrate it into their own.

The main problem with Facebook advertising is that it doesn’t work; it doesn’t seem to have any real value on promoting whatever it is you’re selling. Now, as it is modeled after Google, it's the price per click that determines how often your ad is seen. They also have some basic geographical tools available, but still haven’t hit the market with anything that works.

Google has been successful in their advertising models on a global scale. Their advertising works. Google makes money. Facebook does not.

Since its inception, Facebook has lost money every single year no matter what. Since their IPO, they been looking at ways to strengthen not only their offerings to the public, but also their bottom line often disregarding the very clientele that is propelled them to the top spot in social media.

Customer service is lacking on all levels and it seems the only focus is to try and retain membership and sell advertising.

Facebook's sole purpose for authors and artists, as well as businesses is simply brand recognition. You need a Facebook presence to help establish yourself in any market. It is not suggested to use their advertising services, because it seems just to be a waste of money.

If Facebook truly does not make any money, what sense is there to expanding their offerings to include such programs as Instagram? Simply put, they are attempting to maintain their market. Facebook has struggled long and hard to try to retain the membership of teenagers, but to no avail. They moved onto other services and don’t want to return. Instagram is filled with teenagers because it lacks the restrictions that Facebook has directly placed upon them.

Unfortunately, for social media presence similar to Facebook, there are no real contenders. It doesn’t mean there isn't and never will be, just that there are currently none available.

Facebook spent billions on maintaining public awareness of themselves. They try to buy things that they can incorporate as part of their services to further their stranglehold on the population. Facebook has over 1 billion members, if estimates are correct. You are truly just a number to them and that’s all. They suspend accounts with little or no provocation is evidence of something being done wrong. Ironically, Facebook is all about friends, but if you add somebody and they object, you may not be able to add any more friends for a few weeks. You can’t fight them on this either, because no one ever gets back to you with a real answer. Horrible customer service should be their motto!

What makes this relevant to authors, artists and photographers is that they are often tricked into using Facebook advertising. It is suggested that you grow your audience and become successful as a direct result; is it worth wasting the hundreds of dollars in advertising? If you want to waste money on advertising, Google will offer better results. Private advertising will offer better results. If someone likes on your Facebook page, rarely it results in a sale. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. It’s harder to sell advertising if you have to be honest and tell them it won’t work.

It is a sad thing that the major social media presences out there, Twitter and Facebook have poor relations with their customers.

Their customers are what is responsible for their immense growth and should not be ignored and treated badly.

Customer service issues reflect Facebooks ever growing problems when it comes to dealing with you, but you would think that they least be working on a better solution then swallowing up other companies for a quick fix.

As for SnapChat, refusing a $3 billion buyout bid, here are some of the reasons. Instagram was purchased for $1 billion dollars. They didn’t get 1 billion in cash. Most of the 1 billion is in Facebook shares. It is estimated they received 300 million as part of the cash settlement. 300 million is still a nice number, but hardly $1 billion in cash. Now if Facebook’s stock price plummets, so does the rest of the investment where they didn’t receive cash.

SnapChat’s exact offer from Facebook is not currently known, but you can bet it is heavily filled with Facebook shares and probably not nearly enough cash.

They are working on backend methods to retain their membership base. Perhaps Facebook should actually listen to their membership and find out how to do the things that their members wants done. Facebook lost the teenage audience, directly because of the restrictions that they placed, restrictions that are still in place. Instead of fixing the problems that exist, they bought one of the services that many of their members have joined. This is a bad fix