#dinohyde

[jaywrites101]

So, we got your feedback

When I Blazed the advertisement post for my book The Wingman, I got a lot of positive feedback: from the black mc, to the fresh idea of following a homeless man who stays homeless in the end... It was pretty gratifying for me to get such good notes! But there was one criticism that kept reoccurring: the cover.

Now, I'm an adult. I've been online for a while now, and I thought I understood where this was coming from. Eighty percent of this hate is people just being put off by the idea of Blaze and hoping that, if they complained enough, Tumblr would remove it. Sure.

But then we found this unnamed expert who opened our eyes to the REAL problem!

Oh, right! It's the kernelling, duh! How did we not see it? Clearly, the font and the colorations were just ALL WRONG!

And you can't have a standard font with automated spacings! You need to hand-do that stuff, or people will think you published a book by yourself!

And they're right! So I talked with my illustrator, and we worked together to come up with a solution. For the kernelling AND the quality of the artwork!

See? Much better, right? The kernelling is now 100% hand-done, and you can see for yourself that having it fixes every problem people had with the cover! And that legibility is just so much better!

But I thought we could surpass our limits!

So we did.

The kernelling comment really impressed to me that the problem was just that a hand-drawn style—no matter how gorgeously done it was in five-year-old-kid authentic CRAYONS this time!—doesn't really look good. It doesn't sell that my book is a nitty-gritty serious book for adults! Why it looks like it might be made for children—Perish the notion!

It's the same reason you can't buy hot-pink cars. Other adults might laugh at you!

We can't have that!

So we went to work on a cover that reflects our mature and serious tastes as consummate professionals:

How about that! Now with 95% less color!! This is a cover you can take to the office with you. It just screams I do tax work for fun! With this book in hand, the guys at the office will feel outright inferior to your vast intellect! Girls will be indubitably impressed by your refined tastes. And ladies, if guys see you reading this book, they'll be so intimidated at your agglomeration of literature that they'll leave you alone! And yes, this is 100% hand-done kernelling too! What a savings!!! ...

but...

Gee... I don't know... something just feels... missing.

It felt like we needed some passion! So we went ahead and borrowed from the Romance Genre of book covers to make a third design.

You're welcome.

HAWT!! Now that's how you do a book cover! It's just so original and steamy!

But, oh nose! Now we can't decide which is the best cover to use!

Now it's up to you to vote on which cover is your favorite! Leave a comment or reblog with your thoughts. If you haven't seen it (or just want a reminder), the original post can be found here or you can buy The Wingman at any of these outlets:

Barnes & Noble, ThriftBooks, Bookshop.org, BookFinder, or Amazon

Below the cut is my serious review of using Blaze to advertise The Wingman. Read it to see if Blaze is a good fit for you! This parody of Clinch Cover's Art was made in part using free Unslpash stock photo's by Justin Essah, Meg Jerrard, and Mathew Schwartz.

Okay, now that that's over—serious business time! As you may know, I bought the largest Blaze package at $150.00 USD for approximately 50,000 impressions. This was in effect from Thursday, April 21, 08:38 to Friday, April 22, 08:38.

Overall, I got 58,193 Impressions. This broke down into: 239 likes, 50 reblogs, 7 comments (a few of them were my own.) 1 Follow (which was probably due to me adding them first) and 11 shares off of Tumblr.

I had two people purchase The Wingman. One print, one e-book. Meaning I had a net loss of about $130.00USD. And the post I Blazed has had precious few notes on it since Blazing.

What does this mean to the book industry? Well, it means advertising sucks. For one thing.

We meticulously combed the meta qualities of my serious post to be widely appealing and upbeat (qualities that get lots of reblogs). I know many people think that means I was cheating, but keep in mind—despite gaming the meta content to be marketable, I lost money. This, unfortunately, tracks with similar experiments done on Facebook and Amazon. If you're trying to advertise your stuff as an indie artist/author—DON'T! Tumblr is selling about the same impressions that other sites are using at about half the cost... actually, less than that, if you take in the fact that people find Tumblr advertisements amusing. It is important to note: This was NOT a high traffic day, so doing a similar experiment on a Friday/Saturday may yield slightly better results. Tags are a roulette. I did my best to tag appropriately, but there is most certainly a better method to utilize tagging. I did not follow up with a second Blaze on the same post to see if the extra advertising would reach different people. I suspect it will, but we deemed it too risky to Blaze the same serious advertisement twice. Ideally, an advertisement builds goodwill so people will like you; ours had mixed results on that front. A second Blaze would've stretched people's patience too much. Especially since there appears to be Blaze purists who want Blaze to only be used to meme on people.

Overall, being a novelist is harder than ever. At least with image art, the artist's work gets to speak for itself. The Art of Writing has to evolve, and the Art of Storytelling is trending toward shorter one-off posts or things in which other users can participate.

TL;DR: It's better to use Blaze to advertise yourself than it is to go anywhere else. But Blazing alone will not help you market your books. Expect to lose money.

[jaywrites101]

How One Black Homeless Man Became His City's Wingman—A Superhero Story

Sam Farsight has a plan to end gang violence forever. Or at least, he did before it all backfired and the biggest gang lord threw him off a building! No one could've known that the wings would appear, saving him from smacking face-first into the pavement. And now? No one CAN know.

Sam Farsight is dead, and the man who’s here now has a long way to go before anyone will call him a hero. Quickly labeled as his city's biggest nuisance, he'll have to work hard if he wants to compete with the other vigilantes in town.

Can The Wingman catch his city before it falls?

Order your copy…

… At Barnes & Noble!! … on The Evil One, I have to include because they own the world Amazon … at ThriftBooks! … at Bookshop.org!!! … or find more options on BookFinder!