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“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.

As an advertisement, this probably didn’t sell Serta mattresses very well, but the laugh-line at :25 was remarkably well-delivered.

UPDATE:  See our new book cover here!

What do you think?  I haven’t put in the text yet, but it’ll eventually say SUPERHERO NATION, obviously.  Any thoughts on what we should use for a background?

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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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When you try to sell your work to a publisher or readers, please do not use the word “parody” interchangeably with “comedy.” A parody imitates the style or plays on the conventions of an author/genre /work to make fun of it.  Most comedies are not parodies. There are two common reasons that authors may misuse the word parody…

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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.

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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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 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 is, however, one 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 sea! These blimps are not attacking– they’re fleeing.

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.”

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.