Here’s a great article — “34 Signs You Grew Up Filipino” – which, on closer inspection, should be entitled “34 Signs You Grew Up Filipino in Los Angeles”. (It eventually becomes clear.)
Now, I’m not Filipino. I can’t even claim to be an honorary. But but my wife is a Filipina, gloriously so, and one daughter is (well, she has an American passport now, but you now what I mean – she grew up Filipino), and I’ve had a running joke that I’m “kalahating pilipino ” for at least 25 years.
So, how did I score on this?
Not sure how to score it, but I guarantee you, I get it.
My comments (are in parentheses).
1. This is a perfectly normal breakfast.

Spam, good. Eggs, good. Rice, obviously good.
(Okay, I confess …. I never thought Spam was normal. But I ate far more Spam in the Philippines than I ever did in the United States. I guess I did come to think it is almost normal. Almost.)
2. But this was your actual favorite breakfast.

MMMM TAPSILOG. Nom nom.
(Yes! Now here’s the truth. Of all the breakfasts in all the world in all my life….this is number 1. Ain’t nuthin’ like it. And how come I can’t figure out how to make garlic rice like that?)
3. And when all else failed there was always this.

Sweet bread for breakfast? Yes, please…
(Nope. I guess all else never failed. Can’t claim this one as my own.)
4. You have no idea how to make rice on the stove, only in a flowery rice cooker.

(You can cook rice on a stove?)
5. This was your “ketchup.”

The spicy kind was the best.
(Yes — but why do they call it Ketchup? It’s its own thing. Love it.}
6. You had a hundred pairs of “tsinelas” spread around your house.

Because you immediately took off your shoes when you entered the house.
(Yes …. but I thought tsinellas were rubber flip-flops, not these.)
7. The only name you were ever called by was:

Like, you’re not even sure your parents know your real name.
(Nah. Heard that a lot around the house. But can’t claim it.)
8. Their names are lolo and lola, not grandpa and grandma.

(Well yeah. In-laws.)
9. You know you had to “mano” every adult in the house before you were allowed to go play.

(I have Mano’d more than any other Kano I know. That rhymes.)
10. Which was no easy task because you had approximately 15 “titas” and “titos” growing up.

And half of them weren’t actually related to you.
(By marriage. Yes.)
11. Every year you sent a giant cardboard box to your relatives in the Philippines.

The contents of which were 99% Spam.
(Oh yeah. But we send multiple smaller boxes and Spam is just a part of it. Also Corned beef. Chocolates. Asthma medicine. Blood pressure medicine. A nice mix.)
12. You immediately turn your head when you hear these phrases.

(Yes and yes. And a Filipino “pssst” is the most noise-penetrating sound ever.)
13. This is how your mom points.

Hand me the “ano.”
(Yup. Completely. Well, not my real mom.)
Source: youtu.be
14. Your Thanksgiving includes a few unconventional items.

Note the lumpia, rice, kare kare, pancit, etc…
(Of course. And yes, we no longer have Christmas Dinner — we have Noche Buena.)
15. Nothing makes your mouth water faster than the sight of pan de sal.

(Only before 7am in the morning. Best ever.)
16. Your family does most of its grocery shopping here.

Or the local “Asian food store.”
(Absolutely — Seafood City IS our local Asian food store and we shop there all the time. Panorama City. Or the one in Carson with the statue of Jose Rizal in the parking lot. And Pompano and Yellowtail for $1.99/pound. Yeah! Real Philippine mangoes. Real Calamansi. And OPM playing on the sound system in the store.)
Okay — the rest are here:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/signs-you-grew-up-filipino
UPDATES
11:30 PM Feb 5 (30 minutes before launch): We’ve laid as much groundwork as possible. My son and biz partner Patrick Sellers is helping me. We’ve signed up at all the major sites, set up Tweets with all the relevant hashtags to go out regularly; we have an email blast ready to go out to my list as soon as the promo goes live; and done pretty much all the things we have been able to figure out to do.
12:05 AM: Well, it’s supposed to be live now but it isn’t. Amazon says it can take up to half an hour or even longer.
12:30 AM: It finally kicked in. We’re live now. So we have just sent out the email blast and the tweets have started, etc. We are also patrolling Facebook and putting posts up on all the free Kindle book pages, and other pages that are relevant to the book. We’ve had 15 downloads in the first 10 minutes. It’s a start.
1:45 AM: Okay, I’m gong to turn in. Patrick will keep at it a while longer. Downloads are at 119 now.
7:32 AM: Back up. Downloads are at 448
8:32 AM: Downloads are 552. That’s 102 in the last hour. It’s up on Digital Book Today, one of the big three Free eBook promoters. Will check and see if we are up on all three, but I’ve got a bunch of other things I need to do first.
8:46 AM: We are
- #18 in Kindle Free Bestsellers in the category Nonfiction/Arts and Entertainment.
- #1 in Kindle Free Bestsellers in the category Nonfiction/Arts and Entertainment/Movies
Screenshot showing JCGOH #1 in Arts and Entertainment
Screenshot showing JCGOH at #15 in Amazon Kindle Top 100 Free Bestsellers
DAY 2 SUMMARY
So, I continued to take hourly soundings throughout day two and I am compiling all of it into a spreadsheet that will show the pattern, but here are the main points. As noted above, we ended Day 1 at 10,438 US Downloads. Following are the final tallies after the full 48 hour two -day promotion was complete:
- United States – 16,048
- United Kingdom – 891
- Germany – 141
- France – 106
- Canada – 106
- Spain – 11
- Italy – 8
- Japan – 1
- Total: 17,206
- Don’t do it until you have 20 reviews and a solid rating because the aggregators use that as a filter — not enough reviews, or a so-so rating and you wont’ get listed. So work really hard to build this foundation. Give away books if you have to in order to get legitimate customer reviews. From what I can tell, having an astronomically high rating is less important than having a high number of reviews.
- You’ve got to really lay the groundwork by submitting to ALL of the aggregator “Free eBook today” sites and Facebook pages. There is no excuse for just slogging this out and getting it done. And you need to be doing it, ideally, a couple of weeks before the promotion runs — although we didn’t start until a week before. But I think we lost some important outlets because of that.
- You’ve got to be grinding, grinding, grinding on Facebook, Twitter, etc, especially on Day 1 from midnight on so that you lay a good foundation. It’s not clear to me how much the continued grinding on day two helps …. but it definitely is something that has to be attended to on day one.
And What About the Post Promo-Sales Surge?
- First, when you go off the free status and back into paid, you go all the way to the bottom of the rankings — or at least pretty far down. We were ranked about 20,000 when the promo started, and after the promo was over, the first number that came up was 88,000. So you don’t get a fast start in terms of ranking. But as the day has gone on and sales have been registering, we have jumped up to our current ranking which is around 4,000, which is the highest we have been. And we’re now at #15 in Arts and Entertainment, which is the highest we’ve been there.
- However, the good news is that people do start buying We had been selling 7-10 units a day for a couple of weeks prior to the promo, with the price at $3.99. We raised the price to $5.95 a couple of days prior to the promo and our sales dropped a bit, so figure we were doing 6-7 units per day going into the promo. With that level of sales, we were #20,000 overall and somewhere around #5 in our subcategory of Movies/History and Criticism. So pre-promo–figure 7 units per day.
- Post promo, when I woke up at 7 we had sold 17 units since midnight. It has been picking up steam throughout the day and is now at 70 units for the day. My sense of it is that it should go over 100 units for the day, so …. 7 units per day before, then two days off the market . . . then 100 units on the first day afterwards. The math is pretty favorable and supports the idea of doing this.
Below is the Original Post Written before the Promotion Explaining the Promotion and What We Hope to Accomplish, and How
This post is meant mainly for fellow authors who are waging battle, as I am, in the indie book publishing universe. It concerns what’s happening with my book John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood — a non-fiction book that is the true behind the scenes story of what went wrong with a film that is Hollywood’s biggest financial disaster in history — yet has spawned a global fan movement calling for a sequel. What gives?
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