This site provides writing advice. If you're writing a superhero novel or comic book, please also read our superhero writing articles.

Would you like to subscribe to our RSS feed?

Continue Reading »

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

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…

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

10 days ago, I changed the title of one of my most popular articles from “Helping Girls Write Guys” to “Writing Male Characters” (I explained my reasoning here). I think that it’ll take 20 or so more days until I have conclusive information, but so far the article has tripled in unique hits over the past ~9.5 days compared to the 10 days before the change. I had anticipated some change, because my target audience is much more likely to use words like male/writing/characters than helping/girls/guys, but the magnitude of the leap surprised me.

Additionally, the article has become more effective. I suspect that the new title retains readers that click the Google link more effectively. “Writing Male Characters” is very straight-forward and serious; “Helping Girls Write Guys” doesn’t sound nearly as helpful.

1. Before, the article bounced an unacceptably high ~60% of readers. That has dropped to 35%. My preliminary conclusion is that strong titles are critical to retaining readers.
2. Including readers that bounce after a very short amount of time, the average time spent on the article has increased from two minutes to three. Excluding relatively unpopular articles that are skewed by a few devoted readers (three people spent an average of 30 minutes on one of mine), only my review of Soon I Will Be Invincible and my article on naming characters retain readers longer. And my SIWBI review is 4000 words long.
3. With the exception of the main site at www.superheronation.com, more readers enter my site through this article than any other.

1. Post something every day. If you’re gungho enough to actually log on to your site every day, great. If not, write a few more posts than you need and set their timestamps so that they come out once a day. Having one post a day is vastly preferable to a few posts every few days.
   1. Daily posts encourages readers to check your site often. It also reminds your readers that you’re still alive and why they love coming back. (Right, guys?)
   2. Coming up with 7 posts each week is not too hard. I think we have 400 posts over the five months. Admittedly, we have a team of contributors, but to be fair I would venture to say that at least 200-250 of those are mine.
   3. If interested readers see that you haven’t updated in the past few days, they may stop coming. I loved Your Webcomic Can Still Be Saved but it hasn’t posted in quite some time. I no longer check it.
   4. Your readers won’t derive as much enjoyment from the second article as the first (diminishing returns). But it’s just as hard to write the second article as it is to write the first. From an economics standpoint, it makes more sense to stash the second article.
2. Strategic post timing. I think the most popular time to browse the web is (for adults) around 5pm-8pm. It’s probably around 3-5 pm for students. Target your posts to just before your audience is likely to check.
3. What should you post? That depends on what your site’s aim is. If you’re trying to market a novel, you can show your writing style with one-liners from your characters, strong scenes or a short conversation between two characters. Character profiles may be useful, particularly if your characters are fresh enough to draw us into the story.

This article describes some remotely technical details of search engine optimization, particularly for authors/novelists.

Continue Reading »