A big deal with World War 2, I guess, was a mismatch between directable energy and sensing and control systems.
So, one man can kill like 50 guys with a machine gun, but he has to do it in person. One man can fly a fighter plane or dive-bomber, but he has to do it in person, with the range that his eyes can see.
Before the 20th century, especially before muskets, a man has to kill someone else with a sword or bow, which limits just how lopsided things can get for one guy. After the 20th century, portable sensing and control systems have been improving, so either a guy can attack at a distance, or an automated system that's much dumber than a guy, essentially an exploding crow, can kill people. It's a lot harder for a guy to fight a swarm of exploding crows - even harder than, like, fighting an artillery crew.
So this reduces agency compared to earlier eras of combat. The absolute reaction time, strength, and speed of a dude aren't faring well against specialized capital systems.
This has problems for the legitimacy of mass democracy.
Also it has problems for writing. Infantry combat ends up having to take place in a narrower range of spaces, where social, political, or psychological factors prevent using more advanced weapons systems. To some degree, this was already true given the existence of bombers, but in practice there are lots of situations where you don't want to use a bomber in which that you might want to use a drone.
This means, for a cool cyborg detective that gets into gunfights, more contrivance has to be pushed into the political system, to the point that it's less believable that there are competing power centers (since why would they disarm?), unless anti-drone weapons become a lot better.
Does a fictional empire have to be evil, something that must be overthrown and opposed, or can it be something that the protagonists can be patriotic and practical about?
(Someone asked this recently.)
From a worldbuilding perspective, this depends on the time and conditions in the setting, the ideologies the empire and their enemies use to legitimize themselves, and the staff of the empire and its enemies.
To make an empire brighter, arrange the political economy of their enemies to produce worse, more oppressive leaders. This may be just due to timing - the shiny new empire may be facing off against an oppressive and decaying establishment, incapable of changing course or capitulating, possibly ideologically committed to expansionism.
However, this would make the work more right-wing. It requires that the emperor himself, his staff of commanding officers, and the rest of his officer corps, are unusually clever and virtuous. This would work best in a "rise of the empire" phase, where the empire is aligned around the morality of the new emperor, and there hasn't been time for it to drift off course yet, because he's still alive.
I think this would feel comfortable, but it wouldn't feel sophisticated, so it depends on the target audience of the work and the desired amount of in-world politics.
My recommendation, sight-unseen, would be different.
An empire is a huge, complicated machine. A lot of the people who work for it will be seeking money, power, or status, and they may be indifferent to working for the empire whether it's currently good or evil, or may just follow along with the current of whatever the ideology from the top is.
There are factions within the empire that are good. There are factions within the empire that are evil. Stack up the evil factions to include both those driven by resentment and envy (left), and those driven by crude self-interest (right). Sprinkle in a few true believers from some previous leadership who were evil.
Have the new emperor, who is both clever and virtuous, come to power some time around age 25-35, probably overcoming an opposed faction with more devious plans, and thus having a personal interest in removing more cruel and self-interested personnel from the empire's ranks, who were aligned with that faction's crueler coordinating ideology. He'll come in with a personal ethos and a crew of individuals who helped him during that time, perhaps revealing their character, including memories of a few that he lost.
Depending on how the setting works, this emperor can then die around age 75-85.
You can then place your perspective characters within this window. If they come of age 20 years in, then the empire have been the good guys for as long as they remember.
The machine of the empire is not guaranteed to be good. Within this window, the characters are, in effect, loyal to this specific guy, regardless of whether they consciously realize it.
To have the empire be more sympathetic without being uncomplicatedly good in the past, have it be ineffective, with a sprinkling of territorial losses, to the limits of living memory, before the start of the new emperor's term. It should not be both effective and evil within the 100 years before the story starts, unless that's going to be a focus of the story, I think, unless it was fighting something even more evil at the time.
Doing this successfully probably requires showing the emperor himself wrestling with some difficult governance problem (or having information about that passed to the perspective characters), as well as showing a few characters from the anti-emperor faction long enough to show, rather than tell, the flaws that make them part of the anti-emperor faction.
But the faux-systems used in LitRPG are usually unplayable. They're worse than heartbreakers. They're poorly designed, incomplete, made in ignorance, untested, based on copy-pasting not from a working system but from other people's unplayable faux-systems, which contain contradictory bits of tabletop and videogames.
These cannot become the laws of nature. At best, a small number of these system mechanics get inconsistently added on top of the laws of nature, when the author is paying attention. When the author gets distracted, it's back to regular laws of nature by habit. Even when the story is based on a video game/CRPG, it has the tabletop joke of "Rules only apply when the DM remembers them" :^D
I see. So writing a proper LitRPG is a hobby for elves, after all. :^)
Doing some worldbuilding. Human beings don't seem to be handling the computer era well. We see improvements in some ways, and problems in others.
One concept that came up - smartphones having both broadband internet and video cameras means that if someone acts cringe in public, it can be blasted on the Internet and spread across their social circle in moments, which makes it more dangerous to take socially risky acts in public - which is many social acts in general when someone is inexperienced!
Using fertility as a crude proxy, things got weird in the 1970s, but were more normal from 1989 to 2009.
Digital video existed in 2001. However, it relied on either dedicated digital cameras, for shorter videos, which required planning to bring with you (making them less likely to show up at random times), or digital camcorders (which are a bit unwieldy and are very obvious).
If technology rules in a zone prohibited smartphones but allowed dedicated digital cameras or digital camcorders, with appropriately large housings, should it use modernized electronic components in a bulky housing, or old-style components that are inherently bulkier?
Well, wouldn't teenagers take the miniaturized modern-style components out of the bulky housing and use them to make a hidden camera?
This one turned out to be easier than I thought.
Thinking about it (and I am not an electrical engineer), it should be possible to make the circuit boards larger, while routing some of the wiring close to the edges, so that it requires some electrical engineering work to successfully cut the boards down to size. This would not alter the weight of the device much, because circuit boards are thin and are often made out of fiberglass.
I've been doing some conceptual sketching over the last several weeks, chewing on the limited technology zones idea that I've been working on. (It's not just an excuse for fictional detectives.)
Rather than proposing a single solution, this post covers some of that thinking, to provide you with concepts to chew on.
The Medieval1900/1960s/1990s/2010s/+ tech zone poll was based on a general sense regarding the speed of movement and the speed of information, and noticing that in the year 2000, "the Internet" was still a place you went to (by sitting down at your computer), and not a cyberspace layer that surrounds the planet.
But what, exactly, would "1990s/Y2K computer limits" cash out to? 800x600 pixel resolutions? 800MHz processors?
Just what was this mysterious "it factor" we would be trying to bring back by making computers slower and less advanced?
From my notes:
One way to view virtual reality is that the VR environment has extremely low weight, and is therefore extremely mutable. Any physical good, such as a sports car, can be simulated, and in almost any number, which raises a question: why buy a real sports car when we can simulate them?
People are at risk of getting lost in virtual reality, with simulations becoming more satisfying to them than real life, leading them to underinvest in their real life. We can think of technology as altering the ratio of effort to environment change. High effort is required to move dirt with a shovel. Low effort is required to move the same volume of dirt with a bulldozer.
The assumption behind the zones-by-tech-level question is that beyond a certain point, except for medical technology, additional high-tech development is superfluous, because virtual reality means that nearly arbitrary sensory experiences can be generated relative to an agent's sense limits.
Demand results when the expected value of a change in the environment loops back through the agent, resulting in a potential change in behavior.
The point of video games is to produce a high stimulus feedback relative to the amount of effort. (I read that in an article on GamaSutra once years ago, and it really stuck.)
In a virtual reality environment, reward signals can become disconnected from agent well-being.
Movies, television, and books appear to be less addictive than video games and social media. What separates them? Interactivity appears to be the primary difference.
With this in mind, I was then able to work backwards and develop an intermediate regulatory concept: interaction frames.
With a book, the content is static the entire time. With a DVD, you press a button and then the DVD may play to completion. You might skip back to a previous scene, but there is no need for further interaction.
A paged website is static until you update the page. With continuous-scroll social media, new content is always being added, and at any moment you may receive a notification to get into an argument or that someone liked your post. Video games in general tend to have continuous interaction.
This model does not adequately address the situation, and, importantly, cannot distinguish between a video game and a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel.
We can adapt a concept from gambling: human beings seek mastery or identification of patterns, and the randomness of gambling prevents mastery of the pattern from being achieved. A spreadsheet is very much not random, while loot drops in many video games are quite random!
We could at least measure commands to produce random numbers, or require registration of pseudorandom number generators.
However, this is still insufficiently general. Simulator games may generate complex behavior from simple rules. Are we stuck regulating "game-like elements" by committee? That doesn't sound right.
Still, people do get bored of single-player games, either by mastering the gameplay, or when they get used to the story elements of the game. A visual novel is more like a spreadsheet or a book than like a slot machine.
Also, not all social media seems to be equally addictive. Why were chatrooms seemingly less dangerous than twitter?
There is an anticipation of information gain (informative tweets). There is an anticipation of exciting experiences (someone shows up to fight!). Also, from the user's perspective, it's somewhat random.
In a chatroom, there are fewer people, and they stay for longer. This means that (1) you have more information about them and their positions, (2) you have more incentive to be cordial, and (3) because there is a limit to how much they can have gotten up to while you weren't looking, there is a limit on the anticipated amount of new social information.
On Twitter, there is an endless stream of new people to argue with, and they can show up at any time. You can post about some chalupas you made yesterday, and some lunatic will show up to fight you. Thus, there is always the background anticipation of an (emotionally stimulating) attack.
In a chatroom, if someone would attack you over chalupas, you already know him as the chalupa guy. In real life, an argument is limited by space and time - the chalupa argument ends by default when the bar closes and the chalupa guy is no longer within earshot, and you cannot reopen it until you see him again.
Tumblr is slower-paced, but things like "likes" are continuous, so there is always the incentive to check in to see how your post is doing.
This allows us to get into a model based on food.
There is a dieting strategy involving not buying junk food at the store, so that it is not at your house when you get a craving for it.
This implies that the craving is a temporary impulse or peak, and that it just has to be outlasted. If the craving were uniform, the strategy wouldn't work, because the dieter would just buy the junk food at the store.
(This suggests that the baseline craving for drugs is higher, because drug addicts are willing to take much more extreme actions to feed their addictions, over a longer time period, and that the symptoms for withdrawal (a more constant negative stimulus) are worse.)
So is control in the hands of the agent, or is it in the environment? Is there choice, or not? The dieting strategy appears to split the difference - removing junk food from the cupboard is a kind of prosthetic self-control and willpower shifting. Willpower exists and can be exercised, but is limited, and reserves vary over time. Altering the environment at a point of high willpower can reduce willpower requirements in later contexts, until they are within the window of reliable feasibility.
This suggests a strategy of altering the digital environment to enable users to act on meta-preferences for prosthetic self-control.
For social media services, this suggests regulations imposing new usage modes. For example, it might be required to provide access to third-party user interfaces, which might do things like hide the number of likes. Alternatively, a user might receive all the tweets from a specific set of accounts as a daily summary. Since social media companies require revenue, this access might be a paid service based on average foregone ad revenue. It's a matter that would require a good deal more consideration.
For other items, as part of a broader social movement, we might imagine users being able to buy dedicated hardware. Attempting to control interactivity via software requires a great deal more regulation and is easier to bypass. By contrast, we might imagine a hardware module that writes to a virtual canvas at some rate. The user could then scroll the canvas without receiving updates until the next refresh.
The user could buy an appliance device with built-in limits, similar to not bringing junk food home from the store.
Regarding welfare...
If social media makes people insane, then refraining from social media is pro-social, but suffers from a coordination problem.
However, that's more speculative. More broadly, this is about the liberal concern of consent under capitalism, and what it means to consent to technology. There are two considerations, in tension.
If you have to either use a technology or be homeless, then can you really have been said to have "consented" to the technology?
On the other hand, why should everyone else be expected to subsidize some guy using a horse and buggy?
Maximization of pattern efficiency is likely to be hostile to the continued existence of the human species, not that differently from how hard drugs distort and kill people. On the other hand, insufficient pattern efficiency means reduced production, which may mean making hard moral choices and having wasteful suffering that could have been avoided.
(Regulated capitalism is actually pretty good about consent relative to production levels, compared to say, feudalism or command economies.)
The conventional liberal response is a universal basic income - this neatly ties up many questions of consent by removing the greatest point of leverage - but this is problematic, as it involves redistributing labor to able people who may not be working at all. I've been working on an alternative based on "universal basic land," but I'm not satisfied with it yet. The essential idea is that land and materials are scarce, while labor (directed effort) and capital (configurations of materials) are variable. If life support (sunshine, air, food, water) is guaranteed, then trade is a net benefit (rather than resulting in potential gradual loss of life support due to lack of leverage).
We must remember that, in the end, Gundam shows are about the power of a pilot in a mobile suit, not the power of political maneuvering. These are stories where a single individual can possess a world-changing amount of power. A standard mobile suit is a weapon on par with a high-powered fighter/bomber plane equipped with nukes; at the upper end of the scale you get Newtype-powered psychoframe bullshit that can rewrite reality with a wave of the hand. A princess screaming "stop!" cannot outsmart bullet; why should we expect her to outsmart whateverthefuck this is?
We see a similar tendency in video games: Commander Shepard is a highly autonomous cyborg detective / space captain / space marine, going from planet to planet shooting hundreds of people in order to save the world.
However, rather than an over-emphasis of agency, in real life all institutional structures and production outcomes depend on the constant exercise of small amounts of agency by large numbers of people, and the nature of limits to information processing and transmission result in the natural emergence of hierarchy which concentrates agency in the leader of an organization. If the leadership of an organization have insufficient will or ability to practice agency, then they may fail to harmonize the behavior of the formation, and the resulting force incoherence will cause the organization to fail to achieve its function.
In a fictional setting, it's difficult to express this nature, especially as a fictional setting has to compress its emotional and information payload into its runtime. In real life, the stakes gain value through their weight and substance (e.g. for a normal person, saving the life of someone who was bleeding out after a convenience store shooting may be the most important thing they do in their life), while in fiction, the stakes are symbolic.
Thus, in terms of messaging over a limited human lifespan, I think that the use of mobile suits, and the way they emphasize agency, is quite valuable, even though they are obviously highly unrealistic. The concept is genius, really.
Most attempts end up with just a pilot chapter or two, around 800-4,000 words.
Two documents, one in multiple iterations of focused thinking over 4-5 years, and another as a more natural single stream over a period of several months, hit about 39,000 words. In both cases, writing stalled out, I integrated the insights I developed from writing the project, hit a new level of understanding, and became unable to finish it.
Over the years, I've also written multiple unfinished 2,500-8,000 word essays. That's specifically stored locally. Generally, for any document over about 1,500 words, I write it in HTML using a text editor. This is extremely light weight, and allows me to easily store it in a version control system. (I have some basic CSS I use to mimic Tumblr posts when writing for Tumblr.)
That concerns solely offline posts. I also have nearly 6,000 unposted drafts on Tumblr (generally much shorter, often just saving a post to respond to later).
I guess you can say that writing is my hobby.
I have a deep intuition and may do something for months or even years before understanding why I'm doing it. This intuition is quite powerful, and is part of why I can manipulate ideas in the way that I can.
The flip-side is that I can't tell you if I'll finish writing a book until after it's already finished. I might just be doing it for exercise without realizing it. 🤷
I've read through the post that was linked, and an earlier related post by the same author that preceded it.
Her position is that the traditional publishing industry is essentially buying books as lottery tickets, paying for most of them using the few big winners they can't predict.
NorthShoreWave - The personal qualities of NSW specifically.
LLMs - Is AI a threat right now? Mostly as spam.
How Many Readers? - One famous book had 3,000 readers on an email list before its Amazon e-book debut, and went on to traditional publishing.
Funding Options - Many authors and artists are currently using subscription services. Some reasoning and numbers are provided.
Illustrations - Should you use illustrations? This lengthy section does a bit of fundamentals analysis of posting to suggest that maybe, you should.
Interaction - Reader replies are one method by which a post will spread.
Search - The people who want to read your story can't read it if they don't know about it. Writing a good book is essential, but only half the battle.
Some thoughts for you:
1 - NorthShoreWave
You implicitly asked if we had discussed your story in detail before, but the answer is that we hadn't. I have a sense of what you're trying to accomplish based on what I've observed of your character. While you think of yourself as seething, I think you're actually wise, compassionate, self-aware, and able to view things from multiple perspectives. A significant number of people are much worse at practicing at least one of these virtues. On its own, that's not enough to write a best-seller, but I think it does provide you with an advantage.
2 - LLMs
Based on my experiments (see @mitigatedai for some logs), I wouldn't worry about competition from AI. For you, the chief issue caused by AI will be spam. AI moves sideways (different text) and downwards (less meaning). I may tell LLMs to "combine Inspector Gadget and Death Note," but...
Do I actually use the information provided? No.
3 - How many readers do you need?
From one of those publishing posts, to get a sense of the number of readers you need...
Andy Weir first published The Martian as a serial for his own blog, then as a self-published novel on Amazon, then as a traditionally published novel with Random House.
“I had an email list with about 3,000 people on it, so, initially, the audience was roughly that much,” he tells me. “When I first posted it to Amazon, I didn’t do anything to market or publicize it. All I did was tell my readers it was available there.”
The book was on Amazon for five months, at a price point of 99 cents, and he sold 35,000 copies before Random House bought the rights in February of 2014.
Note that being a provocative firebrand doesn't necessarily mean you'll sell copies. Some politicians with tremendous name recognition failed to move copies of their books.
4 - Funding Options
I don't recommend using a Kickstarter to publish your book at this time or in the near future. You just don't have the name recognition, but also, Slashdotter Caimlas (who I don't know, so I don't know how trustworthy he is) wrote:
I'm personal friends with a number of authors who publish books in one of several subgenres. Mostly, they rely on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited: some of them are prolific enough that their book sales account for most of their income, simply based on peoples' reading of their works.
Mostly, unless people want a piece of history or something they can reference, folks seem to hate having clutter. Fiction that sells isn't usually, primarily sold as a hardcopy book anymore, I don't believe - short of the kinds of books that end up at the end of the grocery store isle or in an airport novelty store.
A lot of publishing is done online these days, often through subscription services such as Substack (for essays) or Patreon. (Kindle Unlimited is also a subscription service, costing $12/mo.) As an example, the webcomic Spinnerette has a Patreon (bringing down $3.3k/mo), and then runs Kickstarter campaigns for print runs (volume 8 raised $27k).
To give you an estimate, Spinnerette's Patreon has only 536 subscribers, and pulls down $3.3k/mo, but you probably haven't heard of it. El Goonish Shive, which I'm confident you have heard of, brings in $3.6k/mo on 2.4k subscribers. The famous Kill Six Billion Demons has ~5.4k subscribers, bringing down ~$8.4k.
In Patreon terms, a good foothold to try for might be 100 subscribers at $3/mo each, with an initial focus on getting to 50.
5 - Illustrations
You've posted some drawings. They have some character, showing that you have the basic aptitude to develop the skill if you applied yourself to regular practice. However, the proportions are too far off to attract much attention (except as a stylistic choice, which, I can tell, it is not).
This blog tends to break things down into their abstract fundamentals for analysis. I promised myself I wasn't going to do that here, but eh, we'll do just a bit.
To quote one of the publishing articles...
“People tend to buy the books that are already really popular,” Deahl says. “They look at the bestseller list to see what they want to buy and that reinforces this tiny amount of books at the top. It’s a very top-heavy system. The tricky thing in publishing is success begets success. But it’s really hard to create that spark.”
Let's stop to think about this.
a. Banter - Fame
There is one layer to this that you can't do much of anything about, which is that people will watch the same shows their friends watch in order to have something to talk about with their friends.
b. Investment - Background
However, there is another layer over which you have more influence. It's very easy to make a quick judgment of a movie based on its visuals, or a short trailer. It's also relatively easy to judge short songs, since they're only a few minutes long (but I don't find myself doing this often).
In order to judge a book, you have to read the text and process it. You can't make a snap judgment off a single picture, because you have to read the text first to produce the mental picture.
This website does have viral text posts, but they're like...
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood me, Anon. Go read all 5,640 posts again.
Some of these posts can get a bit long, but it's usually a back-and-forth where each individual post is short. Often, they'll mix in images, or memes.
People supposedly read at 200 words per minute. Based on that estimate, this blog's most viral post of all time can be read in 5 seconds. That's about the same amount of time someone would spend looking at a jpeg.
That doesn't mean people don't enjoy effortposts. They will follow a blog upon encountering a good effortpost! They just don't like or reblog them.
I think you already know this part, but for "acceptable" length for reblogging, it's usually best to keep it under one "Tumblr page," meaning around one screen length on desktop, or around 200-300 words. I've talked about this part before, but if the reader can see the end of the post, it feels like less of an investment to read the post, and reblogging it won't fill up a friend's Tumblr dash.
Obviously that's tough for long-form fiction, because it has to load more context about the characters in order to establish the stakes. (Unless it's fan fiction, where the audience already knows the characters.)
c. Investment - Strategy
As you know, this blog will sometimes post political cartoons and other illustrations as part of its general stream of content.
The obvious strategy is just to have some nice-looking character images or images of scenes from the story. It can be "read" faster, so it's more shareable.
I think that strategy suffers from a weakness in that it's easy to just look at the image and disregard the text. This would reduce your fiction blog to an art blog - and it is not an art blog.
Therefore, I would like to gently suggest - and keep in mind, I do not have any published novels - a different potential approach. This proposal is speculative, and this technique is not widely used.
Do you know that famous Rockwell painting, Breaking Home Ties? Rockwell is a master of telling a story with just a single still-frame painting.
Rockwell has to tell the whole story in one picture, because that's the medium he's got to work with. This limits how much story he can tell. As an author, you don't have to limit yourself to what can be told in just one image, because you have the text.
This strategy would involve a two-step maneuver.
First, the image at the top of the post communicates the essentials that the reader needs to know about the characters through the composition of the scene (so that they don't need to read background material), as well as various subtle details, while raising questions, also through the use of details/etc, to increase the viewer's curiosity.
Fortunately for the viewer, second, the questions raised by the image are answered in the text right below it.
The post would form an entry point into a network of related posts; tags for particular characters could be linked at the bottom, or links to other posts in the sequence.
Secondary characters would be ideal for this, because you can manipulate their scenarios/context/character to fit the short format, while your overall project will focus on the main characters and thus have a greater, long-term narrative investment for appropriately larger payoff.
As I wrote in my post on 'text wall memes,' people will read text in an image, and they'll even reblog it, but it's contextual. So again, this is speculative, but it should be feasible. It's a matter of creating the appropriate context.
d. Investment - AI Art
I don't think you should use AI-generated art. Yes, people will be able to tell, but the even bigger problem...
Compare this AI knockoff to Norman Rockwell's original Girl with Black Eye.
The expression is wrong. The pose is different. This is a completely different story from the one Rockwell was telling! The prompteur 'borrows' the right 25% of the image from Norman's original because he can't reproduce it. And what is that random white cloth on the left side of the image?
There is a significant reduction in the amount of intention in the image. Putting it back in involves working over the image, repeatedly, usually with inpainting, and often working against what's in the AI's training data, forcing it to pull from more and more improbable parts of the distribution (until eventually, there's no matching data in the training at all; you have to get out and draw it yourself).
I'm going to borrow a post of my own here from 2019.
This isn't oriented towards the strategy I've described, and it only got 21 notes, but note the teacup with steam and tea bag tag, the obscured flag in the background, and the Youtube-style video tracker on the bottom. The combination of the special effect, text that looks like a subtitle, and video tracker imply that the image is a screenshot from a streaming anime.
The character is casually (as indicated by the cup of tea) sitting at a computer desk (as indicated by the faintly sketched keyboard and hand position for a mouse). What's that flag in the background? It certainly doesn't belong to any extant country. (In fact, as the artist, I'll tell you - it's based on an O'Neill Cylinder.)
Obviously this art is very much just a sketch in quality terms. An AI rendering usually looks much fancier. However, an AI would not put that detail in.
e. Investment - Technical Skills
However, I will suggest the use of software if you go this route. (Or the hiring of an artist, but that could get expensive.)
Your issue is with proportions. Lots of people have trouble with proportions. (You also have trouble with hands. Lots of people have trouble with hands.)
One way to deal with this is to just train. You'd be surprised at how fast you improve if you draw from realistic sources such as photographs an hour a day for a year, even if it's just a quick sketch. You probably aren't willing to do so. You have other things to worry about, including writing.
However, you could use posing software. You could save the proportions of several characters and position them throughout the scene, as well as having a grid for the ground and potentially other props to help with positioning of items like lamp posts or the edges of buildings. (I've experimented with posing software a bit myself.)
Dan Shive (of El Goonish Shive) does not use posing software as far as I know, but he has used 3D software. Although his style is cartoonish, one thing people like about him is that he does put effort in at improvement, and the quality of his work has improved substantially. (That was actually the inspiration for the second part of the "in 2028, Hollywood runs out of ideas and adapts El Goonish Shive" post.)
6 - Interaction
Though shorter posts tend to go more viral, I find that posts which someone can reblog and share their opinion tend to show up a lot in my top posts (as long as they're only about one tumblr page long). The MOON PRISON poll is a good example of something that's approachable and neutral, but fits heavily with the themes of my blog, but other posts may take a political position that invites disagreement, resulting in discourse, and get reblogged that way. (You may also remember the silly Swift Pill poll.)
I don't recommend courting disagreement on purpose. Not only is this bad for the social environment, but it tends to make people go crazy.
7 - Search
I think you've probably noticed some of this already and are working with it (posting short excerpts, initial art). Most of this is, again, speculative. This is all just information for your consideration.
Writing a good book is the first problem. Getting the readers who would enjoy the book to find it in such a noisy environment is the second problem. I think you can do it, but if your trajectory isn't currently looking as good as you want (e.g. # followers on your story's sideblog), I would recommend expanding your strategy so that you're in a good position when the book itself is ready to launch.
