1. Photograph yourself in a natural pose.  The most common sort of authorial photograph is a disembodied headshot foloating on a monocolor background, but I’d recommend against that because it is rarely interesting and feels too staged.  In real life, people don’t stare straight ahead and smile very often.  (Unless, perhaps, they’re taking an arrest unusually well).  His head’s on a slight angle, which makes it easier to imagine that he’s having a conversation with you.

2. Please work in some body language and/or setting details to help make the desired impression.  For example, if you were a businessman and publishing guru and were marketing yourself as a keynote speaker, you’d probably want to come across as personable, professional and literary.  Leaning towards the viewer, tilting your head slightly and grinning effectively establishes him as personable.  His clothes and slightly disorganized bookcase (disorganized enough to suggest that he actually uses it and that it isn’t just a stage prop) help establish him as a literary professional.

3.  Please remove anything that might distract viewers from you and what you are doing.  For example, if this picture had been in color, the books (and perhaps the wall and shirt) probably would have distracted viewers from the subject.  Shifting to black-and-white made it easier for viewers to focus on what the photographer wants them to see.

4. It doesn’t have to be symmetrical.  For example, even though the head is in the center of this shot, we see all of one shoulder but only part of the other.  The bookcase and his chair are one side and empty wall is on the other.

5.  Please look excited!  Enthusiasm–believable enthusiasm–is contagious.

A professionally-published novelist usually makes only $1 in royalties per paperback sale.  Typically, I’d guess that a well-tailored cost-per-click Adwords campaign could get the costs per incoming reader to somewhere between $.05-.20.

If you’re selling a single book, you almost certainly can’t break even with ads*. If you spend $20 on cost-per-click advertising, you have something somewhere between 100-400 prospective customers and need to get 20 sales to break even.  That almost certainly will not happen.  If your material is good, I think you’d probably convert 1-3% of your readers into buyers.  So attracting 400 readers would probably generate between 1-12 customers.  You probably couldn’t break even with that.

However, there are several situations that might shift the numbers in your favor.

1. You’re aiming at customers that will buy tens of copies or convince many other people to buy copies.  For example, if a teacher assigns your book for class, you’re probably looking at 25 or 50 sales rather than just one.  If a bookstore employee or librarian falls in love with your book, he might end up recommending it to many people that will go on to buy it on their own.
2. You have written many similar books with a lot of audience overlap.  For example, if you’ve written a fantasy series of seven novels or ten different horror novels, a dedicated reader would probably buy more than a single book from you.
3. You’re self-publishing a book that is good enough to have sold hundreds of copies. (Unless you are absolutely drowning in money, I would not recommend paying for ads until you’ve demonstrated that level of quality and salesmanship). One of the few advantages of self-publishing is that you receive a larger proportion of the proceeds from each sale.  If a person buys a $10 professionally published book in a bookstore, about $1 goes to the author.  If an author prints 250 copies through Lulu, the printing run will cost $6 per copy.  If you sell your copies for $10 + shipping, then you’d be making closer to $4 per sale.

Generally, my favorite type of promotion is giving out copies to bloggers and/or journalists that have demonstrated an interest in works like yours.  Each promotional copy costs you ~$10-15 to print and mail.  If a smallish blog has something like 2500 or 5000 readers a day, I suspect that a positive review would sell at least 20 copies.  (Plus, there is some hope those 20 customers might end up talking up the book with their friends or blogging about it themselves). Even a negative review can result in sales–some readers will buy the book to see if it’s as bad as the reviewer says.

*There are other types of ads besides online ads, but ads in newspapers, radios, magazines, TV and other media are even less promising for novelists than online ads are. They cost more and have trouble reaching the fairly small proportion of the population that is actually interested in buying books.

If you have a spare hour from 1-2 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) on Tuesday, June 29, register for Dan Zarrella’s free webinar about marketing on Facebook. Here are some of the topics he will discuss.

• The behavior of demographic groups on Facebook
• The sociology of the Facebook community
• The difference between men’s and women’s interactions on Facebook
• How to get your content shared on Facebook

One thing that I find both interesting and scary about Facebook is that its audience isn’t gathered around a single interest (like a political site) or even a group of interests (like DeviantArt).  If you’re interested in marketing a book online but aren’t web-savvy enough to make your own site, I’d highly recommend giving this a look.

Also, one brief note on titles…  When you pick a title for your project, I’d recommend taking something that isn’t already being used as a URL. It’ll make it easier to place high on Google searches for variations on your name.

]]> http://www.superheronation.com/2010/04/22/superhero-nation-the-documentary/feed/ 0 http://www.superheronation.com/2009/03/13/site-tweak-of-the-week/ http://www.superheronation.com/2009/03/13/site-tweak-of-the-week/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:29:31 +0000 J. Mallow http://www.superheronation.com/2009/03/13/site-tweak-of-the-week/ 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.

Since Friday the 13th is such an auspicious time to make big business decisions, I decided to test a new site title today.  Instead of “Superhero Nation: a superhero writing advice site,” it’s now “Superhero Nation: how to write superhero novels and comic books.”  Hopefully that will make us more competitive for Google searches related to comic books and superhero novels.  In a few weeks, I’ll release statistics about whether the tweak was successful or not.

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.

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.

Are you kidding me? This trailer probably cost thousands of dollars and has accomplished virtually nothing. It tells us that the book has vampires, dragons, sex and fighting. A remotely competent cover could have done all that and more. This trailer should have accomplished what a cover can’t: showcase the author’s style and develop the characters through dialogue and action. Instead, we get action sequences with cheesy captions and absurd sword-poses.

I would rewrite this trailer by replacing the awful rock music in the background with snippets of dialogue featuring the male and female leads. I can’t imagine why anyone would use low-grade rock music to sell a romantic fantasy novel with vampires, swords and dragons.

On Youtube, I also saw a video made by a video producer trying to sell her services, which start at $200. The first sample of her work begins at 1:12.

Christ, if I had paid $200 (or more!) for this, I would be angry. It sounds like the person reading the script has been directed to speak as though her audience doesn’t understand English. The lifeless narrator really betrayed this book. From what I can tell, this book is fiction with a visceral, political undertone: the politicians sold us out in Vietnam. Narrating this trailer with Bryant Gumbel on Valium was a colossal mistake. I would have rewritten this trailer by…

• Replacing the announcer with clips of the author speaking and reviews from servicemen. You only need to find one soldier out there who’s willing to say “hot damn, this shit is real!”
• Using patriotic backdrops would be cheesy but would probably underscore the political message.
• Rewrite the lines to make them more personal and stylish. It boggles my mind that anyone would use the phrase “the hunter becomes the prey” for a paying customer. That’s a slap in the face.

I liked the musical accompaniment, even though it wasn’t nearly as kickass as the Halo theme.

Do you have any thoughts about how to turn book trailers into an effective marketing tool?

UPDATE: You do not have to use the characters’ upper bodies. I’ve only included these two pictures for a style reference and so you see what they’re wearing.

For the pose, I’d like to focus on what the two characters are holding. Agent Black would, on the left, be holding a clipboard and Agent Orange would be holding a briefcase on the right. I’d like it to be orientated like these two pictures. I’d like the emphasis to be on the hands and props, so please do not incorporate the upper bodies or heads of the characters.

I’d like the clipboard to look neat and professional, like this.

On the reptile’s briefcase, please place this logo facing the audience.

Character Notes

I feel like a reference for the reptile’s hand and claws would probably be useful. This one comes courtesy of LizaIsMyName. If you compare the picture below to the original on her website, please note that I’ve modified the picture slightly by making the claws straighter. I’d like the claws to look mostly neat and straight because I think that will help readers suspend their disbelief that a US government agency might hire an alien. On a final note, I’d like the reptile to only have four claws.

Also, as you can see in the character shots at the top of the page, I’d like the human wearing a business shirt and suit and the reptile wearing a trenchcoat.

I’ll handle the text and background. Thanks! If you think this would interest you, please send me an e-mail at bmckenzie05-at-gmail-dot-com. As for payment, I’ve never actually subcontracted out this sort of work, so I’d feel a lot more comfortable if you could offer a price estimate to me.

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.

Hellboy interests me, mainly because its writing is decent but widely thought to be worth ripping off.  For example, one recurring critique of Brian Clevinger’s Atomic Robo is that “Atomic Robo is a robotic Hellboy!” I don’t regularly read either series, but the comparison seems counterintuitive to me mainly because Hellboy’s hook is that the genre isn’t light sci-fi and involves a lot of planar travel.  I would, however, criticize both series for using the ultimate cliche setting: WWII.

I’ll leave you with this parting thought.

C’mon. You’d have to be crazy to give up horns like those.

“There have been some noteworthy misfires. Warner Brothers has struggled to make the Looney Tunes crowd relevant to modern children, introducing futuristic-looking versions of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a new television series in 2005. But many parents hated the ‘Loonatics,’ which had mohawks and menacing eyes.” I think that Warner Brothers really missed the point. Kids aren’t moving away from L.T. because they aren’t “modern” enough, but because of the advent of children’s shows that are far better. For example, shows like Jackie Chan Adventures, Kim Possible, Justice League, Pokemon and TMNT actually have plots and make cursory (and sometimes successful) attempts at characterization and humor. In contrast, the characters on L.T. are not actually characters but just a single zany antic played to the hilt. How many times do kids want to see Wily Coyote fail to catch the Roadrunner, or Sylvester fail to catch Tweety, or Fudd fail to catch Bugs?

I think that the L.T. as currently written have about as much of a future as Tom and Jerry.

This story is not doom and gloom for all franchises, however. The NY Times shows the graphic redesign of the Strawberry Shortcake character.

I’ve never watched any variation of Strawberry Shortcake, but I feel absolutely confident that that its stylistic update has made it more watchable and pleasant to look at. Nor does it seem to have compromised the wholesome quality of the original, unlike Loonatics and Magic Earring Ken… According to the NYT, Strawberry Shortcake has actually sold 2.5 billion dollars worth of merchandise since 2003. Hot damn.

This is true for novelists as well as blogs: ultimately, the ones that are successful are well-crafted for friend-to-friend marketing. “You should read Author X or Blog Y for reason Z.”

The key is not only producing something that someone will want to read, but producing material that someone can easily persuade someone else to read. Nothing drives that more than coherence. If a fan can describe your premise in a single sentence, preferably in 4-8 words, he will be able to sell your work much more easily.

Another factor which matters (slightly) is the familiarity of your premise. For example, writing something like a political blog is somewhat easier because there’s already an established readership in the genre and fans can pretty easily compare your work to existing and popular examples. “If you like Daily Kos, Powerlineblog, LGF or Wonkette, you’ll like this blog,” or something like that.

But I think that this is overstated because, if your writing is tightly focused on a simple concept, your fans can sell the work whether or not their friends are familiar with the concept. Things White People Like exemplifies the potential success of an unusual-but-simple premise. In the world of superhero fiction, I think that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is another highly unusual premise that went gangbusters. “Turtles get mutated and fight evil.”

Is your premise simple enough? How would you sell it to a friend?

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.

Unfortunately, running a successful event is a lot harder than just signing books for excited fans. For one, consider this. Who actually comes to a book-signing?

1. Excited fans.

2. Casual fans– they usually come because an excited friend brings them along.

3. New prospects– they’ve never heard of your work before, but they were in the store when you were talking and are interested enough by your book concept to stick around.

4. Unacquainted donors–they’ve never heard of your work and don’t normally read books like yours. However, they hear you talking and stay around because your book concept appeals to someone they’re buying for. These are usually mothers looking for books for their kids.

With that in mind, the best promotional events build a personal connection between you and an audience of people that range from heavily devoted fans to complete strangers. (Towards the start of your career, expect more strangers than fans and not all that many of either).

How might you create such a bond?

Things You Might Do At a “Book-Signing”

1. YES: Offer brief stories about your writing experiences and life-story. Ideally, these stories will interest even audience-members that are strangers to your work. For example, the theme of your talk might be “why [and how] did I become a writer?” That’s personal enough that your hard-core fans will feel like they are bonding with you, but general enough to interest random strangers, too. If you were standing in the checkout line at Barnes and Noble and you hear a 5’’6’ guy say he became an author because his (accidental) football scholarship got rescinded, wouldn’t you want to keep listening?

2. MAYBE: Sit at a desk and sign books. This is fine, but not particularly likely to excite fans and interest unacquainted readers in your writing. Ultimately, your fans should walk away from a promotional event feeling like they know you. But do you sign books any differently than I do? Probably not. I wouldn’t allot too much time for this.

3. YES: Field questions from the audience. Memorize brief answers (2-3 sentences) for the following common questions. (Since you will give these answers often, it’s important not to feel annoyed if you have to repeat yourself!)

1. What’s your book about?
2. What’s your style like?
3. What’s being an author like? (Like being a hobo, but less respectable).
4. I’m very interested in becoming an author. What should I do?
5. What genre is your book?

Note: try to keep your answers short. A 3-5 sentence answer is usually long enough to satisfy the questioner without boring everyone else. The main exception to the 3-5 sentences rule is when a question reminds you of a funny story that you think everyone would enjoy.

4. YES: Smile! Being constantly cheerful and engaging is hard for a lot of people. But audiences don’t fall out of the sky and no one will be more enthusiastic about your book than you are. (If you love writing but couldn’t see yourself doing promotional events, something like teaching creative writing might make you happier).

5. MAYBE: Sell associated apparel, like Superhero Nation t-shirts. The site provider may not be OK with that and sometimes it looks tacky. The trick is using the merchandise as a springboard into your world. Why did you choose the images you did? What sort of fights did you have with your artist? What do these t-shirts say about you and your work?

6. YES: Use a conversational form of address. Sounding like a movie narrator is probably not a good idea—it doesn’t sound personal enough. It’s generally better to emulate a stand-up comic or storyteller.

Things You Should Not Do

Unfortunately, the typical promotional event is bland and ineffective. For example, authors sometimes make the mistake of reading from their works. Mistake! We can read your work anywhere, at any time, especially if you have a website that features samples of the book you’re selling. Reading someone’s work online is easy and comfortable. In contrast, listening to someone else read is usually tedious.   This will sound counterintuitive, but speaking about something else besides your writing, like why you became an author or what being an author is like, is more likely to convince people that your book is worth reading than actually reading from the book.

A related mistake is reading from a prepared text. The more extemporaneously you speak, the better. It is far more effective to speak to us than to read to us.

I would also recommend avoiding activities that segregate dedicated fans from casual onlookers. If someone asks you a question about your book, try to answer it in a way that will interest everyone rather than merely people that have already read your work.   (For example, why did you become a writer?  What sort of challenges do you face as a writer?  What advice would you offer to a kid that wants to be a writer?  What would you have done differently?  Etc.)

Potential Venues to Consider

Like most other aspects of marketing a book, this really depends on your audience. If your book is about high-level literary theory, a random Barnes and Noble probably won’t draw as many readers as an event at Iowa, Columbia or Dartmouth.  Go where your readers are.

With that in mind, here are a few site locations that you might try looking at.

1. Mainstream bookstores, like Barnes & Noble or a campus bookstore. These may be hard to schedule.
2. Specialty bookstores. For example, Dreamland Comics and Comics HQ are unusually valuable to anyone selling a book on superheroes. These are generally easier to schedule because there are fewer novelists competing for the store’s time and space.
3. College campuses.
4. Military bases—I bet you weren’t expecting that! Well, the core audience for most superhero novels is 18-25 year old males. Military bases have quite a lot of these and the bases are generally such hotbeds of comic-book readers that Marvel Comics specifically prints comics for the military community.
5. High schools.
6. Libraries.
7. Book festivals and art shows.
8. Conventions related to your subject-material.

Miscellaneous Considerations

Authors sometimes put off audiences with sloppy dress. It depends who’s in your audience, but generally I’d recommend business casual (like a polo and nice shorts or pants).

If at all possible, be the first person to get there and the last to leave.

Always be polite.

Be completely sober. (I only include that because I’ve been to a few promo events where I suspect the author wasn’t).

Smile!

Graciously accept any criticism that comes your way. Don’t get defensive. Smile and move on.

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.

I think this provides several insights that go beyond the “NYC-LA-Chicago” strategy.

1. Our top six cities (in North America) are Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Toronto, New York, Seattle and Atlanta. I think Vancouver, Dallas, St. Paul/Minneapolis and Madison also stand out because they cram significant numbers of fans into a tight geographic region.

2. Watch out! Analytics makes California look deceptively insignificant by splitting Californian cities (and Toronto) into deceptively small geographic areas. For example, Los Angeles looks like it has far fewer hits than New York City, which is only split up into three zones (New York, Brooklyn and Astoria). By contrast, Los Angeles is split up into at least twenty zones.

3. We’re seeing some evidence to support B. Mac’s expectation that military readers would be statistically significant. (Did you know that Marvel Comics prints comics specifically for the military? Comic books are apparently kind of a big deal on military bases). I’m still somewhat skeptical, but we’ve seen heavy return traffic from several Air Force bases, particularly in Nebraska and California. B. Mac speculates this is because the USAF is relatively techy. I’m just hoping it’s not because the USAF’s Office of Special Investigations is researching an unfair portrayal case against us because Superhero Nation makes the OSI look so wacky.

4. Georgia’s on my mind! Atlanta generated 80% as many site views as the New York metropolitan area. However, unless we want to have angry Bulldog fans riot and kill us, we should probably get BM to tone down his Florida Gator loving… if you look at Northern Florida, you can see that he made a slight adjustment to the color scheme around Gainesville (the home of the University of Florida’s Gators).

5. Canada has been exceedingly kind to us and, demographically speaking, Canada seems favorable because its cities are pretty clustered together. It’s got a few cities in its southeast, a few in its southwest, and Winnipeg* in the middle. The southeastern cluster is especially logistically helpful because it fits most of Canada’s population into an area about the size of Montana.

*Winnipeg is a small Canadian city that is notable for having consistently devoted Superhero Nation fans. It leads the world in the number of viewers that have spent more than 30 minutes on our site.

6. Not too surprisingly, we do well in most college towns. Madison and Gainesville made our map and we got so many hundreds of hits out of South Bend/Notre Dame– mainly tied to B. Mac’s writing classes, I think– that we had to filter them out. I think our main underperformance among college towns is Boston.

7. Demographically speaking, we perform worse than expected in the Northeast, particularly New York, and and drastically better than most American authors in Canada. I’m not too surprised about underperforming in New York. You don’t make too many friends by mocking them. And, besides, so much comic book stuff– pretty much all comic book stuff– comes out of New York already.

8. We overperform in Washington, DC and the northern Virginia area. That’s a bit surprising, given that we mock Washington specifically and US politics generally (suddenly I’m seeing the attraction for Canadians).

9. We only average about one Hawaiian viewer a day. As much as we’d love to take a trip out to the Aloha State, somehow I don’t think the publisher will spring for that. [Cadet Davis adds: what if we started blogging on Hawaiian politics to spike traffic?] In response to Davis, I would say… You dog! I like your thinking. … Likewise, we receive virtually no traffic from Alaska. Thank God. Having no Alaskan traffic guarantees that our publisher will not ask us to go there. (Not that I have anything against Alaskans. After a millennium or two of global warming, they might have a state that’s worthy of them).

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).