I was sort of expecting Abe to win the fight by staking the vampire with a flagpole, but maybe that would have been too over-the-top.

When you send out queries asking agents or editors to look at your work, it may help to have an e-mail address devoted to your writing career.

1.  It reduces the odds that you’ll lose crucial e-mails. Don’t let an agent’s request to see your manuscript get lost in a torrent of spam!

2. It’ll be easier for you to find old e-mails.  For example, you might need to check which agents you’ve already submitted to.  That will be much harder if you have to sift through hundreds of unrelated e-mails.

3.  Your default e-mail address might not be professional enough for business use. No offense, “SuperheroBoi24,” but “JohnBryant” will raise fewer eyebrows in the editor’s office.  Also, it makes it much easier for me to tell at a glance whose email is whose.  As a rule of thumb, your work e-mail address should be based on your first and last name (or possibly your pen-name).

4.  You can give out your writing e-mail address to strangers without compromising your privacy. If you have a website, that will help keep you accessible to your readers without making your default e-mail address public.  For example, you can contact me at superheronation-at-gmail-dot-com.

Today I came across Mike Angley’s website– Mike Angley is an OSI veteran (hu-ah!) that writes paranormal military fiction.  This review will help you design and write an effective website to market your writing.    

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In the sidebar on the left side of SN, I’ve separated it into two lists, one for my favorite sites about writing and another for my favorite sites about superheroes and/or comic books.  I’ve also added a few links.  Check it out! 

I’m also starting a new free blog-review/linking service.  If you would like me to consider linking a website, please send me a link and I’ll get right on it. If you submit your own website, I will also throw in a free review (what works, suggestions for improvement, etc). If you’re interested in submitting a site(s), please leave a comment here or e-mail me at superheronation[at]gmail[dot]com. Thanks!

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The front-page for Chicago Comic-Con’s webpage strikes me as disastrously useless.

The website really drops the ball on two critical questions.

1. Why should someone want to buy a ticket to Chicago Comic-Con?
2. What are some of the things that I could do at CCC?

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Asaya’s Blog: How to Write and Draw the Supernatural is a blog similar to this one.  It offers writing advice focused on supernatural fiction.  Quick question.  What kind of stories would you consider to be supernatural fiction?  It strikes me as a slightly more open-ended category than, say, “superhero stories.”

Here are a few trends about the “summer slump” in internet use.  (Well, when it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway).

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Both Chicago and comic books are pretty awesome.  Hence Sequential Chicago, for all of your Chicago comic book needs.  Hmm.  Is this a half-baked idea or a well-targeted niche?  What do you think?

1.  Make it clear what you offer and why readers should stick around. For example, if you wandered across Superhero Nation, you might stick around because you wanted superhero writing advice or because you want my observations about writing.  The trick is to make this as blatant as possible:  for example, I repeat myself in the title, in the header art, in the page headings, in the side-bar, etc.  Everyone focuses on different elements of the page, so it pays to be redundant.

2.  Stay away from adspeak and flowery language. For example, our title includes the phrase “how to write superhero novels and comic books.”  That’s much more user-friendly than something like “superhero writing insights.”  What’s an insight?  Don’t make readers struggle to translate what you’ve written.

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Last Friday, we switched headers.  This is what it used to look like.

And here’s the new version. The only noticeable difference is that the bubbles have been redrawn.

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Here are some tips for webmasters that want to add moderators.

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Over two years, several hundred thousand page-views and 750 posts, I’ve accumulated some thoughts on what makes a blog successful.

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Site titles play an important role in search engine optimization.  A site named “Superhero Nation: a writing advice site” has a much better chance to place for a search like superhero writing advice than a site named just “Superhero Nation.”  Site titles also helps draw people into your website by explaining what viewers will get out of your website.

For example, check out how a typical search for Superhero Nation appears on Google.  The site name plays more prominently than the name of the article does.

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Just wondering.

(We’ve also considered the appeal of Twilight and The Hulk).

We’re mostly satisfied with our header, so now on a monthly basis we experiment with major site-design changes.  I’ll let you know what happens in a month.

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In the four weeks since we’ve added the Recent Comments widget, our comment-traffic is up about 800%.

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We’ve slapped together a mock page to help show about how much text a comic book can fit in a frame full of important scenery.

We could have squeezed maybe another three lines into the opening paragraph.  In all, I think 50-60 words for a large frame is pushing it.

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This trailer sells an unusual premise effectively.  It also makes a skillful pitch to its target audience with reviews that specifically say that geeks will enjoy the book.  I found its comparisons to other works of geek-culture helpful.  However, I thought that its emotional cues were a bit mixed.  The book-cover makes this look like a light-hearted comedy, but but the only clear emotional image in the trailer is her sobbing as mushroom clouds loom in the background.  There isn’t very much in the trailer that suggests the book is actually funny, or what kind of humor it uses.  For example, if this is a dark comedy about the protagonist and her failure friend trying to survive, it might have helped to show us a glimpse of the comedic relationship between the two characters.

The cover-art was very eye-catching, even though it rips off a famous scene from Dr. Strangelove. My main question is that she appears to have wings on the cover, but the trailer doesn’t mention that strange detail at all.  (My guess is that it’s a nuclear mutation).

Microsoft Word automatically corrects common spelling mistakes. It also allows users to tell it which words should be autocorrected. Here are a few ways you can use autocorrect to make your life easier.

1. If you use the same long phrases repeatedly, you can use autocorrect to create a macro. For example, our book repeats phrases like Agent Orange and the Office of Special Investigations, so we told autocorrect to turn the “word” [OJ] into Agent Orange and the “word” [OSI] into Office of Special investigations. When you set up macros, I recommend either using a combination of letters that will never come up naturally (like OJ) or a bracketed phrase. That way, you will reduce the odds of accidentally setting off your macro.
2. If you change a character’s or location’s name, you can use autocorrect to help remind you not to use the original. If you change your hero’s name from Hiro to John, suddenly referring to him as Hiro will confuse readers. Autocorrect will help you from adding more mistaken references to Hiro. (However, it won’t fix instances of “Hiro” that are already in the work– use “Find and Replace” to hunt those down).
3. This can help you maintain stylistic consistency. For example, sometimes authors forget how they spelled the names of minor characters. Mr. Merriman might become Mr. Merryman. Mrs. Busch might be married to Mr. Bush. If you notice that this is a problem, you can use autocorrect to prevent future occurrences by telling it to turn Merryman into Merriman.

This is a useful resource for anyone that might want to destroy the world.

“It’s the most heart-warming phone ad of the year!”  I’m not sure that heart-warming is the best fit for NFL Live.  I think that the average American man likes his humor a bit more robust and, umm, funny.

UPDATE: We’re in the second quarter now and the ad has played three five times.

SECOND UPDATE: The ad ended up playing nine times, by my count.

The site is http://www.annecordwainer.com/ .  Anne is a friend of mine and I would really appreciate if you would check out her site, particularly if you’re a fan of real-world magic stories.  Does the site work?  It feels like there’s something not quite clicking, but I’m not sure what.

Tobias Buckell gathered some data describing how much authors make on their first advance. The median author in SF or fantasy makes $5000. The average in both categories is slightly higher (about $6500), but that’s probably distorted by a few superstars that skewed the distribution curve.

He also broke the data down by agented vs. unagented submissions. The median advance for an unagented manuscript is $4000, compared to $5500 for an agented manuscript. You might think to yourself “aha! I will make more if I have a superior negotiator on my side!” That’s probably true, but please also consider that a novelist that is good enough to convince an agent to work with him is probably better-than-average to begin with. In addition to that selection bias, you’d also have to factor in the agent’s share of the advance.

That said, I think an agent can be a powerful ally and (all things considered) one that will probably pay for himself.

Some authors are now marketing their books with videos (book trailers). Frequently they emphasize Hollywood-lite visuals over elements that would speak well of the book. For example, this one for Christine Feehan’s Dark Curse uses a live-action dragon and bats at a decent production level. But the trailer’s writing is atrocious. There’s no dialogue and the text that shows up on the screen is almost too bad to believe.

FROM New York Times BEST-SELLING AUTHOR CHRISTINE FEEHAN.

THE TIME HAS COME

TO FIGHT THE EVIL

TO RECLAIM A BIRTHRIGHT

TO CLAIM A HEART

TO SAVE US ALL

AT ANY COST

FROM THE…
DARK CURSE.
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B. Mac, a regular customer of freelance art, offers this article for freelance artists that want to maximize their sales.

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If you have a list of links in your sidebar or site-map, test the links once a month.  It amazes me how often we change the permalinks without updating the sidebar.  The monthly link-test is easily the most productive minute I spend on website design. 

Archives are not a particularly effective way to organize your website’s content. A list of years and months doesn’t help readers figure out what sort of content your site offers. In contrast, listing a few of the categories you post in most frequently will help readers understand what your website offers. Archives are also inadequate because they’re daunting and impenetrable for new viewers. I wouldn’t recommend placing archives high in your sidebar, although you may that they are useful at the bottom because returning viewers like using them.

I recommend placing index pages ahead of archives. For example, readers that click on the entries in our Top Categories sidebar get sent to an index page where we tried to lay out our content intelligently. For example, our index of writing guides organizes 30 writing articles into seven sections, such as Characterization and Common Writing Mistakes. Readers can navigate through an index more easily than through a flood of articles thrown at them in no particular order. If readers can easily find the content that interests them, they are far more likely to actually read it.

What do you think? Which sites do you find particularly easy to navigate?

Fans of trippy science-fiction novels everywhere can rejoice that Neuromancer is getting a movie. In other good news, the movie poster shown by i09.com looks pretty stylish and suggests that it won’t be a remake of Swordfish.

The bad news is that Hayden Christensen, the same “actor” that ruined Star Wars and Jumper, is starring as Case. Dare I say that John Travolta could do this better? Egads. How could we have come to the point where John Travolta is the lesser of two acting evils? Hayden [censored]ing Christensen.

I’m particularly fond of Gosmick Sans and Agency FB. Stay the hell away from Comic Sans, Times, Impact, and Helvetica. None of the default Microsoft Word fonts are particularly attractive. I recommend browsing through a free-font website like 1001 Free Fonts. I’ll have more thoughts on this later.

It’s time for our monthly header update. I’m embarrassed to admit that I drew some inspiration from the writers of the computer game Mass Effect… Continue Reading »

The Hellboy Quote Generator is out, although it has been technically unreliable. On a comedy scale of 1 to 10, I’d give this a 5: amusing but uneven. It’s a well-done piece of viral advertising, though. (“Let me put this to you as delicately as I can.” *BANG*)

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Thanks for coming.

The New York Times has an interesting run-down of cartoon updates, from apparently successful endeavors like Strawberry Shortcake and the ugly-but-popular TMNT series to horrible flops like Magic Earring Ken and Warner Brother’s Loonatics…

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On May 29, we replaced our old header. We recount the changes and explain some of the editing changes we’ve made along the way below.

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This article will teach you how to change the space between paragraphs, create internal links, add footnotes, and a few other tricks applicable to WordPress.
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This brief article will help you design a premise for a novel or blog that sells better.

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Some starting authors expect that their work is over when their manuscript gets picked up by a publisher. No, not even close. Once the book is published, it falls largely to the author to market his work by running promotional events like book-signings.

Learning to host an effective book-signing is as crucial for authors as a good hand-shake is for a politician. Here is some advice on how to hold an effective promo event. Continue Reading »

Authors, particularly new and unproven ones, have to use promotional events to drive sales. Google Analytics can provide useful information about which cities are worth promoting in. The conventional wisdom is probably that the most readers for the typical book can be found in large cities (NYC, Chicago, LA…) But you can probably do a lot better than just hitting up large cities.

For example, we’ve tabulated our numbers for January 2008 and found that Atlanta and Toronto currently have almost as many Superhero Nation readers as NYC.

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This art is used by Red Alert 2, a video game that portrays an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.  There’s a major artistic flaw in the drawing (and it’s not that there are enormous blimps attacking New York, of course)… can you spot it? I’ve got the answer at the bottom.

In this picture, the blimps are facing the same way as the Statue of Liberty. However, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t face towards the United States, it faces towards the ocean! These blimps are not attacking– they’re fleeing.

Usually, we wait a month before doing major header changes. However, we got slightly new art, so I wanted to rotate that in as quickly as possible.

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Seth Godin had an interesting, brief post on organization. He finds that alphabetical order is not the best way to organize most things– he argues that relevance is a better measure of organization than arbitrary letter rankings.

I think that applies to sites as well. Most blogging platforms organize posts chronologically by default, but that’s a terrible way to organize information. If someone leaves and later returns, it will be virtually impossible for them to pick up where they left off. If you wanted to send an article you read yesterday to a friend, your only hope is to search through all the posts again. The only strength of chronological organization is that it’s relatively easy to tell when there’s an update.

Avinash at Occam’s Razor has a better approach: a site-map. He splits his articles into a few rational categories and then orders articles within those categories chronologically. That’s effective because it ties articles together in a logical way. If you liked his first article on web analytics, you can run down the list and find ten more in a row. Avinash’s site-map wisely includes dates. That, too, is effective because it helps readers quickly identify if there have been updates and where they can be found.

I like Superhero Nation’s organization– a combination of widgets and chronological ordering– but that clearly pales before a real map. If you look at the widget on the left labelled “Writing About Superheroes,” you can see that we’ve only included links to six articles there and then added a link to a map for our superhero writing articles. Widgets are a great start, but they will probably grow inadequate as you accumulate content. How many widget-links can you use before people’s eyes glaze over? Probably 20, at most. But we have 500 posts (including 120 quotes of the day and 60 articles on writing).

On April 14, we did our monthly header change. (Note: this post is actually dated April 13– we always date our non-comedy posts a day off so that our top post is always comedy).

Here, glance at the two headers and see if you can spot what’s changed.

Original

Revision

The main change is a slight edit to our caption, from “…guide to superhero politics” to “superhero comedy.” I think “politics” scares potential readers and most of our posts aren’t political. Also, I think that people naturally associate “politics” with “propaganda” rather than comedy, entertainment or anything that would encourage them to stick around. So politics had to go.

This looks like a minor change. If I showed the original to 100 people and then showed them the new version 10 minutes later, maybe 5 would realize what was changed. But I suspect that this will significantly reduce our bounce-rate (5-10%). People are quite good at appreciating differences, even if they don’t consciously realize what they’re doing. I’ll release preliminary Google Analytics results in a week to show whether it’s had an impact. Over the past week, our BR was in the mid-to-high 60s.

By comparison, Google Analytics says that Comics and Animation sites have an average BR in the mid-40s. I suspect that we’ll remain worse than average for some time. Our site is very eclectic. Our audience is highly fragmented between sports buffs, politicos, online entrepreneurs and writing aficionados. When I write articles on, say, designing effective header art, someone who’s casually interested in comedic content is going to bounce. Even the the ISS limits its offerings to comedy, although it also makes tangents into sports and politics.

Other Header Modifications

Kudos if you picked out these aesthetic changes. The heroes have gotten a bit bigger and more spaced-out. Catastrophe’s face is a bit more evenly purple. The blue portions of the US flag are a bit brighter.

It looks like Catastrophe’s face is wider and rounder. It’s not, but we see a wider cut of it because I moved Agent Black (the white guy).

Other Modifications

At the same time I changed the header, I also changed our WWSGD plug-in.  Before, new visitors to our site were greeted by this message at the top of the screen.  “Superhero Nation is a wacky comedy site devoted to a superhero novel, sports and politics.”

I changed that to “Superhero Nation is a wacky comedy site and novel about New York’s second-most inept superhero and a Homeland Security agent that might not be a mutated alligator.
In addition, we are the world’s #1 provider of Lol Gators and occasionally offer noncomedic articles on creative writing, business planning and market analysis, visual design and marketing.  In fact, we may be the only site anywhere to offer these things in addition to Lol Gators.”

In a header, text usually looks best when balanced. For example, in our header “a fairly unbalanced” is balanced nicely because it’s exactly as wide as the row below it, “guide to superpower politics.” If you’re interested in learning how to make text look pleasant, this will help.

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Google Analytics reports that only 40% of our visitors on Tuesday were new. Previously, that number had never been less than 90%.

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Wow. Nice job, guys. The TWPL site started two months ago and has attracted 15 million hits (itself an astonishing achievement: I estimate they get 1800 times as many hits per day as we do).

If we assume that a publisher offers the same amount of money per hit ($.0233), then I’ve calculated that our site has so far created $600 worth of publishability. By my estimates, we work (collectively) between 20 and 40 hours a week for this website. I calculate that we earn $.83 per hour.  [Update: for the month of September 2008, we earned between $1.20 and $1.75]

Final verdict: I shouldn’t quit my day-job.

By comparison, if we assumed that the author(s) of SWPL worked 20 hours a day for the last two months, Jess has earned $292 per hour. (Minus his/her costs, but I don’t know what those would look like. Traffic control, I guess).

*The publisher says the Observer’s $350,000 number is off but won’t say if it’s over or under the actual number. If I had to guess either way, I’d say the real number is likely lower…

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Hey! Superhero Nation offers comedy, superhero writing advice, generic writing advice, and a few assorted articles on how to manage a small online project, particularly an online novel (these include Using Header Art and Using Google Analytics to Self-Review).

Note:  if you’d like to read the article Pat mentioned, click here.

If you are interested in the mechanics of making an online novel work, you may find this interesting.

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The gremlins that run the internet have smiled on Superhero Nation… for now.

Superhero Nation has seized the #1 spot for the Google search query superhero nation from Time Magazine, which has an unrelated article of the same name. By my count, we had to use the phrase “Superhero Nation” 229 times over the past 415 posts to win the day.

Four days ago, I changed the text’s appearance on my header a little bit.

You can see the original portion below.

The original

I think the revision looks a lot cleaner and more uniform than that. But the percentage of people that “bounce,” leaving without seeing a second page, has risen considerably. Hmm.