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?

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?

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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 »

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.

Continue Reading »

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 »

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).

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.

This post offers techniques on using header art to market your website, particularly if you’re an author.

Table of Contents

• Starter Guide to Header Art

• Using Header Art

• General Tips and Guidelines

• Superhero Nation’s Header Art: A Case Study

Basic Questions

“What is header art? How do I put it in?”’

In Wordpress, you can use the Paalam theme or any other theme with a custom header. Palaam gives you 900 pixels across and 180 pixels vertically to work with. That’s enough space to introduce your products or books. Our Palaam header can fit 4-5 characters, a brief synopsis and the book’s title fairly comfortably.

“Why should I have header art?”

Header art is your website’s equivalent of a book’s cover. Your header is an enormous opportunity to establish your site’s professionalism and tone/substance. Ultimately, good header art will encourage readers to stick around, browse through your site and (hopefully) make a purchase.

Furthermore, making (or buying) an effective header is fairly easy.  You can buy a quality header for $50-150, which compares favorably to other investments you might make in your writing endeavors. For example, business cards or low-cost advertising will cost at least $50, a book doctor or agent will cost at least hundreds or thousands of dollars, and a year of paid membership in a writing workshop will probably cost at least $75.

Using Header Art

Once you have a space for header art on your site, filling it effectively is your next step. I’ll introduce these methods now and eventually offer more techniques on using them most effectively.

1. Borrow or buy a digital camera and use a photograph as your header.
2. Hire a freelance artist. I highly recommend Rebecca Gunter, the artist that illustrated Superhero Nation’s characters. I am greatly pleased with her quality and style. She charged $25 for each of our four characters. If price is really an issue, you can probably find cheaper freelancers at DeviantArt, but you may be disappointed or defrauded.
3. Create digital art and use it as a header. I don’t recommend this unless you are actually talented; if your header looks unprofessional, it will probably discourage readers.
4. If you’re not artistic, you can probably use Photoshop to make a workable logo by typing your site’s name in a visually striking color on a light background. If you don’t own Photoshop, you can probably find it at a public or school library near you.

Your header absolutely must…

1. Convince most viewers within 1-2 seconds that your site is worth their time.
2. Look attractive.

If you’re using your header to sell a novel, it is virtually required that you…

1. Give us the novel’s title.
2. Give us a 1-2 sentence synopsis of the book. Why should we want to read it? What’s it about? What kind of book is it?
3. Suggest the book’s genre, tone and mood.

That is a very basic set of requirements. Your header might also suggest what your writing style is like, introduce your characters, suggest any relevant themes, or indicate the setting. But these are generally less important.

Text (Book’s Title/Synopsis)

The title and synopsis probably should not be the header’s focal point or on the left side of the header. The header has to make a visual impact immediately. But text usually isn’t visually gripping. Because of that, text should usually occupy the least valuable space in the header, the right side. (Most Westerners read from left to right, so the left and middle of the header are used best by powerful imagery rather than bland-looking text). A final visual consideration is that text should usually not be placed over other elements of the header. That will probably look cluttered and make readers feel claustrophobic.

Don’t use more than 20-25 words. You won’t have enough space (or time) to describe your plot at any length, but you can convince a reader to look at a “Site Explanation” or “Book Synopsis” page to learn more. Be straight-forward, clear and concise. You have a few seconds to make a sales pitch. Ambiguity won’t work.

Genre/Mood/Tone:

Obviously, the header for a science fiction-horror story should look very different than one for a romantic comedy. What sort of mood do you want your header to convey? Is your story cheerful, gritty, dark, tragic, whimsical, scary, comical, etc? How realistic do you want your book to seem? You can suggest any of these traits with lighting and color. Additionally, readers will also pick up on your choice of font. (Consequently, Times Roman is almost always a poor choice for header text).

Characters

You may want to illustrate key characters if your characters look intriguing or suggest a lot about your plot’s genre, mood or plot. I think that a ninja-masked superhero and a reptile in a government uniform strongly suggest that Superhero Nation is an eccentric superhero story.

But most novel headers probably shouldn’t use character illustrations. If showing your protagonists doesn’t foreshadow the story or help the reader visualize something unfamiliar (like a reptile in a trenchcoat), I’d probably leave them out. If you’re writing an epic fantasy, showing another 17-year-old raising a sword will probably disgust your readers. (As a general rule of thumb, swords (and wands, to some extent) are extremely cliché and should be shunned.) Don’t illustrate banal-looking characters. On the other hand, if your character is a middle-aged woman with a peg leg, that would probably intrigue readers.

Relevant Themes?

You may find it useful to allude to different ideas and concepts from your book. However, this isn’t important and readers might miss the allusion, anyway.

If you look at “SUPERHERO NATION” in my header, it gradually shifts from blue on the left to red on the right. That alludes to the theme of political conflict in Superhero Nation. (In US politics, liberals/leftists are “Blue Staters” and conservatives/rightists are “Red Staters”). Additionally, I’ve positioned the characters with the most liberal on the left and the most conservative on the right.

Setting?

You might want to use a real-world landmark or cityscape in your header, but I don’t recommend it. If your header features Chicago’s skyline, it will probably make non-Chicagoans feel like outsiders. Unless a real-world setting is absolutely vital to your story, I’d avoid that.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a fantasy with a juicy setting, that could be really appealing. Illustrating that would probably be pretty complicated for your artist (and more expensive for you), but you could probably work something out.

General Tips and Guidelines

1. Don’t clutter. Leave as much empty space as possible.
2. Make your text easy to read. Adding an outer glow or border to your text in Photoshop really helps. (Our white text has a tiny black border).
3. Using too many colors may be problematic, unless you’re trying to strike a cartoony mood.
4. Aim for consistency in style and brightness. If one character looks photorealistic, your others probably shouldn’t look like cartoons. Try to balance your text. Text rows that are approximately equal in length look much better.
5. If you are working with an artist, give as much detail as possible. If you’re not sure which details to provide, check out Rebecca’s questionnaire. Ask to see a pencil or ink outline before your artist begins coloring. It will be much easier to resolve any issues you have before coloring begins. Also, don’t forget to tip.

   Superhero Nation’s Header Art: A Case Study

   Over the past four months, we’ve had four headers. I’m going to analyze how our audience has responded to each of these headers (using Google Analytics data). However, this is not a controlled experiment. We made many changes to the site over that time. Even so, I think that it’s fair to attribute most of our audience reaction to the header art specifically because it’s so much more visible than any of the other changes we have made.

   These are the four headers we’ve had (shrunken by about 25% to fit in the browser).

   

   Header 1: December 9 to January 14.

   • 77% bounce rate (the proportion of readers that leave after seeing a single page)

   • 1.71 pages per visit

   • 108 seconds per visit

   Header 2: January 15 to February 17

   • 69% bounce rate

   • 1.86 pages per visit

   • 105 seconds per visit

   Header 3: February 18-March 21

   • 64% bounce rate

   • 2.00 pages per visit

   • 110 seconds per visit

   Header 4: March 22-28 (only a week… so take this with a grain of salt)

   • 63% bounce rate

   • 2.35 pages per visit

   • 144 seconds per visit

   I’m not surprised that the bounce-rate has changed the most. It’s definitely intuitive that someone who doesn’t like your header art is more likely to leave immediately than someone who is impressed by it. On this front, header-art has clearly had at least some impact. But I’d like to delve into this data a bit more to try to control for the other changes we have made.

   For example, if I look at only the week prior to the January 15 switch, it had an 82% bounce rate, 1.6 pages/visit and 90 seconds per visit. In the week immediately after the switch, we had a 65% bounce rate, 1.77 pages/visit and 102 seconds per visit. This strongly suggests that the second header was drastically more successful than the first.

   I’m not surprised that the second header performed better; the text is better balanced, it’s slightly brighter and more colorful, the logo looks cleaner, and the synopsis is slightly crisper.

   Looking at the week before the February 18 switch, we had 67% bounce rate, 2.06 pages and 121 seconds per visit. In the week afterwards, we had 64% bounce rate, 2.06 pages and 119 seconds per visit. This slight change doesn’t surprise me too much. The differences between the second and third header are fairly slight– I only changed the synopsis and the placement of the logo.

   Looking at the week before the March 21 switch, we had a 61% bounce rate, 2.15 pages and 111 seconds per visit. In the week after the switch, we’ve had a 63% bounce rate, 2.34 pages and 143 seconds per visit.

   I’m a bit surprised that our fourth header has been bouncing (slightly) more readers. I had expected that its decidedly more cheerful tone would bounce fewer people. Ah well. I think a 2% rise in bounce-rate is an acceptable loss for 30% growth in time/visit and 10% growth in pages/visit.

   END ARTICLE.

   (If you would like a more exhaustive survey of the changes to our headers, without any statistical analysis, you can keep reading).

Continue Reading »

I’m now #5 on Google’s list of hits for superhero novel. Anything in the top ten is useful, but the top five are especially useful because everyone sees the top five without having to scroll down. And people will only scroll down if the first five hits don’t look promising.

These are how the four top hits appear.

1. The All-New All-Different Howling Curmudgeons: Superhero Novels
   1. It seems to be a genuine superhero novel. Compare to, say, Count Geiger’s Blues, which is really straight SF with some superhero trappings, or It’s Superman…
2. Amazon.com: superhero novel
   1. A community about superhero novel. Tag and discover new products. Share your images and discuss your questions with superhero novel experts.
3. Michael Carroll Unleashes New Superhero Novel – LostCarPark
   1. Michael Carroll’s latest novel, The Quantum Prophecy, hits the shops today. It’s part one of an original…
4. Superhero – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
   1. Superheroes have also been featured in radio serials, prose novels, TV series, movies and other media. Most of the superheroes who appear in other media…
5. Superhero Nation
   1. Published by bmaccomic under superhero satire, superhero story, Superhero Nation, quote, Superhero Novel, Superhero parody…

A few observations.

None of these links directly compete with mine. I imagine that the average person that types superhero novel into Google is looking to read (or at least find out more about) a superhero novel.

1. The first result, ANADC, looks like a review site at first glance. I think readers would rather get chapters from the author’s page than just look at a review.
2. I was afraid that Amazon.com would look really competitive, but this hit looks pretty unattractive. “a community about superhero novel” makes it obvious that Amazon’s result isn’t well-tailored to the prospective searcher.
3. Michael Carroll’s book is probably a peer competitor, but this link seems to go to a news article rather than the author’s page. MC’s homepage or an Amazon link to his book would probably be rather competitive, but I think that searchers will pass this over.
4. I think superhero novel searchers will pass over Wikipedia’s superhero entry without hesitation. That’s obviously not what the searchers want.
5. I’m not thrilled with how my entry appears, but my title is short and sweet. Superhero Nation’s Google tagline, but I think that my title is short and sweet. My tagline looks pretty ugly (“published by bmaccomic under superhero satire, superhero novel…”) but at least that says clearly that I’m writing a satirical superhero novel.

The websites that are most competitive with mine are located at #6 and #10. Fortunately, the higher ranked site seems to be selling a very different kind of superhero novel, so audience overlap/competition should be minimal.

1. Andrew Lynch: superheroaction.com. [Tagline]: If you write a novel without pictures about superheroes who are old, fat, gay, neurotic or self-destructive[*] – well, where’s the mass appeal?
   1. His Google entry doesn’t say that he’s writing a novel, what the novel’s title is or what the novel’s style/mood is like.
   2. Judging from his website, his novel’s goal is very distinct from mine. Attracting a broad audience is one of my primary objectives, but he says that “ ‘where’s the mass appeal?’ is a valid question for a big business. I respect it and want nothing to do with it.” Not coincidentally, I think, his novel’s title is The Superhero’s Closet.
   3. Our writing styles are so different that we probably won’t compete much for an overlapping audience. I’m writing an action-comedy that is hopefully pretty easy to read and enjoy—it has a philosophical subtext, but In a novel, I feel that enjoyment is a prerequisite to effective commentary. His work seems a lot more dense, introspective and literary.
   4. Here are some excerpts from his first paragraph. “he’d brought with him even his diary, in which he’d recorded dreams of tempest waves, and of a woman, radiant like overbright fields of flax, and of her awful plunge into a deafening surf… her name came to him in these dreams, but it echoed in his ear, unheard fully, like a staff note struck by musicians in a deep well across town. He’d understood only her pleas, twanging with regret, as she withered in mid-air on her way to the ocean below.”
   5. His introduction suggests that persecution and alienation are major themes. “The novel you’ve downloaded is about extraordinary humans with everyday problems. Retired superheroes, villains with vengeance on their minds, teenage girls as wise as Confucius, young men with mother complexes, and a superhero underground just down the block from you.” I’m not sure what a mother complex is, but it seems to suggest that the young men are tormented in some way. By contrast, my main characters are well-adjusted mentally and socially. Even the mutant reptile is a federal agent. To some extent Superhero Nation is a parody of a persecution or psychodrama** story.
   6. His character’s superpowers seem subtly different. If a teenage girl is “as wise as Confucius,” that suggests her super-wisdom has disconnected from society and normal teenage life***. By contrast, my characters have fairly banal superpowers (strength, agility) that don’t change them fundamentally. I want each reader to feel that Lash, Agents Black and maybe Orange are at heart like them. Even characters with really strange backgrounds, like Agent Orange, have humanizing characteristics (football, patriotism, a government job) designed to help the reader understand the character. I think that if readers think a major character trait for any character is “weird,” then I’ve failed.
2. Axiom-man. His work seems more conceptually similar to mine, but I’m not too worried about link competition. Legal sharks coerced him to tack on –man to Axiom, which would have been a much more compelling name, I think.

Footnotes

*As someone that’s writing a novel about a superhero that’s old, fat, neurotic and an unwitting suicide bomber, I take offense at that!

**Psychodrama is frequently laced with angst and inner turmoil and that kind of stuff. It sometimes overlaps with persecution stories but, like Chuck Paluhniuk, usually thrusts deliberately bizarre characters in the audience’s faces (“neurotica”).

*** I may be misreading the Confucian reference. The story takes place in San Francisco; the author might have referred to Confucius to show the story is culturally broad and/or that the girl is Asian-American. I picked up strong undertones of weirdness/alienation because the difference between Confucius’ best-known teachings (filial piety, traditional respect for elders) is so much at odds with the typical American teenager.

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.

Weird post. I was thinking today about what Superhero Nation’s endgame looks like. Have you ever read 300 pages only to find that the last 25 ruined the first 275? (Jacob wisely calls this phenomenon “Matrix Syndrome”). From the writer’s perspective, Matrix Syndrome is particularly tricky because you’ve already written so much, which limits your choice of ending (”sunk costs“). Generally, it’s easiest to write towards an ending rather than end something midstream. Otherwise, writers might lean towards writing a story that consists of one subplot after another rather than one continuous plot.

A related problem is Muppet Syndrome, which is when an author ramps up his story in terms of weirdness or intensity. So, instead of just destroying a Death Star, you’ll destroy a bigger Death Star… with muppets. In superhero stories, Muppet Syndrome usually manifests as a superhero being drawn into increasingly “epic”/bizarre plots.

Let’s look at Spiderman for a second. He’s one of the most normal, down-to-Earth superheroes ever (that’s a huge part of his appeal). But even he’s not immune to jaw-droppingly strange plotlines.

1. He grows 8 arms.
2. His parents were actually CIA agents that got whacked by Red Skull. They must be the worst CIA agents ever, because Red Skull couldn’t even kill Captain America. And the Captain is one of America’s physically and emotionally weakest superheroes. Hell, a US sniper capped him. (Booyah!)
3. His sister is a supervillainess.
4. Peter Parker was actually a clone of the unanimously despised Ben “Reviley” Reilly… until he wasn’t.
5. Dr. Octopus marries Aunt May– I’m not making this up– so that he can steal her deed to a nuclear power plant.
6. The government owns him… 13th amendment be damned!
7. JJ Thompson’s son, an astronaut and a rival for Mary Jane, turns into a werewolf. (Between Thompson Jr, the Fantastic Four and the Green Lantern, it almost makes you wonder what NASA is really up to).

Then there’s intensity. Most stories will naturally ramp up in intensity, which is problematic when heroes do something that’s far beyond their scope. For example, it’s normal and appropriate for Superman, Green Lantern and the Fantastic Four to have adventures in space. If New York’s neighborhood Spiderman did the same, it’d be weird. Hell, Spiderman is local enough that even saving the world is uncharacteristic.

How does this all apply to Superhero Nation?

I’ve written an ending to a story featuring the first three chapters. This allowed me to test some characteristics of the ending. I also tried a different style of writing. The consensus in the class was that it was both easier to understand and faster-paced.

You can download this mini-ending here.