Tag: steampunk

Adventures with Advertising

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

With Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine coming out June 30th, I’ve decided to try to get the word out. That’s harder than it sounds. My social network footprint is tiny. (You finding your way here is a blessing. Glad to have you!) My skill for talking myself up is…questionable at best. So How do I let the world know the greatest steampunk fairytale retelling ever is about to drop from yours truly? (See…that felt weird to say.)

The answer: TikTok

Allegedly.

Not just TikTok, but that has been my primary medium. I’ve poked at a YouTube short and will likely do at least one more before release date. But mostly I’ve been following the advice of Katie Wismer (a.k.a. Katesbookdate) as presented in this video. I’ll give the rundown of my interpretation, but let me start by explaining why I took Katie’s advice over others. (I’ve never spoken to Katie directly, so if she is alerted to my existence via Google Alerts or something: Hi Katie!)

Why This Advice

First off, I have scoured the internet (mostly YouTube) for advice on advertising a new book. And yes, there are a lot of voices out there, many saying similar things: establish a presence on social media, interact with the communities that overlap with potential readers, let people know you have a book coming out, and let people know a bit more about you. That’s four items that sound like A LOT of work. Where do I start? This is going to take how long? You mean I have to talk about myself?

Katie’s advice was titled “The one book marketing strategy you NEED to be doing”. Yeah, a very clickable title for me. She goes on to lay out a strategy that felt manageable. I can do that! She also wasn’t pushing a course to take or anything like that, just an advertising tool that has been successful for her. I’m not putting all my eggs into this basket, but it’s the basket I’m filling the fullest.

What am I doing?

If you didn’t watch Katie’s video already (heck, I linked it twice), I’ll give you my version of her advice. I’m sure I’ve misinterpreted parts and overlooked important nuances, but you can get the full breakdown from her.

  • Make carousels (slide shows) on TikTok. These are images with text.
    • The first slide is a hook/attention grabber
    • The last slide is a direct quote (passage) from the book
      • She seemed to suggest you hint at the excitement without giving too much away
    • Use a trending sound that fits the theme of the book/passage/hook
    • Make sure your profile page does a good job of promoting you and the book. (This is my weak spot; I’ll get to why.)
    • Oh, and make sure you use good hashtags!

This felt like a process I could handle. No fancy equipment to buy or awkward performances required, just post some images with text. So I made some.

Okay, I didn’t follow the recipe perfectly. My carousels have a one-slide hook, the next slide starts a quoited passage, the last slide has the book’s cover.

The first carousel I made had the whole passage on one slide. Depending on the size of your phone and the mightiness of your eyes, that could have been tough to absorb. My next few had the quote spread out over 2-4 slides, their text posted either over faded images or carefully curated around the images.

About half the hooks are the same or very similar with very similar images: a cloaked figure with a metal skull for a head with something along the lines of “When a man who was more metal than flesh entered her father’s shop, her life changed forever.” Others get more thematic to the excerpt/images. One scene takes place at a wedding, so the hook is “What better place for an ambush than a wedding?” You get the idea…

Music choices have been a battle between my preferences and TikTok’s preferences (mostly represented by my 18-year-old offspring). My first choice was George Michael’s “Father Figure” which has been hot on TikTok, though that song seems to accompany a fairly specific trend that has nothing to do with books. (My kid also thinks it might suggest the book is spicier than it is.) I made a couple with songs that had been used in a few thousand posts each. I made sure to swing big with a couple of the songs (uses in the millions and the tag “popular”). I have a mind to make a video or two with sounds that aren’t songs, but I haven’t made that leap yet. Are they helpful? It may still be too early to tell.

Alas, the profile page is the weakest link. Speaking of links…TikTok won’t let you have links to external sites (a.k.a. a link tree) until you have one thousand followers. So I’m only 998 followers away from that goal! Yeah, I’ve had a TikTok account, but I was only consuming until this past week. So right now, potential readers will have to find Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine by searching Amazon or even the whole internet for it. Suddenly, that wordy title is starting to seem like a better idea. (I also think it sounds steampunk-y.) This is why I feel like it was important to end with my cover image.

I don’t know if anyone has chased the book down yet. It doesn’t launch for another 5 days. It’s available for presale on Kindle, but that’s it. Either it’s impossible find out how many preorders there are or I don’t know how to figure it out. I guess the third option is that there have been none, but that would be knowing how many (zero is a perfectly good number, just not preferable in the wallet).

What am I definitely doing wrong?

I may be making several mistakes that I don’t realize, but there’s one I’ve definitely fumbled. Katie say to get a few “burner accounts” to post from as well as your main account. I haven’t done this, mostly because I don’t quite understand what the nature of the account should be. If the profile page is important, then what’s on the profile page of my burner? Some fictional reader that is allegedly posting fan-art for the book? Are they all supposed to be new vids or should these burner accounts be reposting the originals? I couldn’t wrap my head around that, so I haven’t made that leap. I’m 48; this is already a little overwhelming for me.

Am I reaching people?

Not as many as I’d hoped, but maybe more than I legitimately expected.

My first carousel (the one with the whole excerpt on one slide) has the most views and the most likes (261 and 7, respectively). Most of those were in the first couple hours. None of the others have topped 200 views.

The least-viewed is the wedding one, which has a female cover of “In the Air Tonight” that has been used over 100k times. I had expected the most interest in that one. My intention is to make some adjustments to that one and try posting it again (may change the song, but I like the fit). My research has suggested that there are a lot of variables at play for how many people see any given post, so reposting duds is a fair strategy.

These numbers don’t sound like a lot. They are well below the ones Katie cited in her video. I think established accounts have better reach. That’s why I’m not going to throw in the towel just yet. I’m hoping the needle will move by the end of July.

What else have I tried?

I mentioned that I dipped a toe into YouTube. What I really did was post my one outreach video as a Short.

Yes, I did make a video for TikTok that wasn’t a slideshow and wasn’t an ad for the book. This was a “What is Steampunk?” video. Please hold for my great shame: I made the video with PowerPoint.

Hey, I’m a teacher and I am very good with PowerPoint. Use what you know. I promise, my kid has thoroughly skewered me for it.

Anyway, this video analyzes steampunk as both an aesthetic and a literary genre. It’s about a minute. (I had to speed my voice up a little; noticeable but not terrible.) I do need to improve my audio recording skills; there’s a slight echo. The video ends with the book’s title and release date. There is a link to the Kindle preorder in the video description.

So was this little video popular? Not on TikTok. It’s neck-and-neck with my wedding carousel. On YouTube however? Just over 2000 views, 18 likes. (That’s almost 1% like-age…not sure if that’s good…doesn’t sound awesome.)

What’s next?

For now, I’m going to keep working the system. I’ll either pull some more passages from the book or repackage the ones I’ve used with altered hooks, songs, and/or images. Every time one gets 100 views, that’s more eyes (some new, some repeating) that see the book. The repeat views are possibly the most important since I heard somewhere recently (might have been Katie?) that it takes 8 exposures to a stimulus before someone takes action.

I’m also going to experiment with turning some of the carousels into videos (still the slides but they cycle for you). TikTok is a largely passive platform, so maybe it will hit differently. Remember the one video I did post didn’t get many views, but it also didn’t have a viral sound attached. This way I can also hit YouTube with them.

I’ll put some of this on Facebook too. I’m not an Instagrammer, so I’ll avoid that.

Is it worth it?

The labor end of things has been fairly mild (picture hunts were consuming but also fun). Honestly, I’m hoping that being in a niche subgenre like steampunk will help this book along. And If someone is looking through steampunk books and sees a cover they recognize, that could be the difference between them buying my book or someone else’s. Maybe something like this will help get enough of a bump to make a dent on the Amazon top sellers list for steampunk. Or maybe this whole exercise will just help me grow my TikTok footprint enough that the next publication’s ads (and there will be more) will have a little more reach.

Oh, don’t take my word for all this. Make sure you check out Katie Wismer’s video. And please, if anyone here has experience with this kind of advertising that could help me or others, please share it in the comments!

Kindle Vella: serialized fiction for the modern reader

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I confess; I had never heard of Kindle Vella before my wife texted me that ad on the right. $62,000 is a number that can grab a writer’s attention, especially one that’s brought in $0 writing over the past couple years. (Teaching pays the bills and eats a lot of time and attention.) Attention grabbed, I did a little homework.

Vella is Kindle’s serialized story community. If you’re familiar with Wattpad, it’s similar but no fan fiction allowed. (Another confession: I didn’t know Wattpad, but my kid did.) So I started wondering whether I had a story that would lend itself to serialization. I did. I do. It’s one that’s too long for most traditional zines but not long enough to be a novel. Seemed a good candidate for Vella.

That’s not to say I jumped in with both feet. I approached it like a math problem. $62,000 is a big number. 15 is not, but that’s how many prizes will be issued, many of them just a grand. Hey, I’d be thrilled to make a grand with my writing. There was a year when that happened once, but that was my Writers of the Future year when I got prize money and a pro rate for that story. And a trip. It was a big deal. But back to the math. I’m sure there will be thousands of people entering this contest, including the people that already post serials on Vella. So if I’m thinking of serializing a story for the prize money, that’s a longshot in a pipedream on Fat-Chance Island.

The Vellys aren’t going to be good for the writers. They’re going to be great for Amazon though. Think about it, $62,000 is a drop in the advertising budget bucket for them. That drop got my wife’s attention who got my attention. Now Amazon’s Kindle Vella is about to be inundated with new story serials. Lots of content is probably good for the brand, right? Unfortunately, that also means that finding a good story in the haystack is going to be that much harder. There’s no editorial process at play here. People who want to write put their stuff out a chapter at a time and it’s up to the consumer to sift through it and find something good. So yeah, good for Amazon, not so good for writers or readers.

Still, not so good doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Yes, the Vellys will bring a slew of writers and projects to Vella, but each of those writers will be raising awareness of Vella (like I am here), so potential readers increase. So maybe my story gets read by someone, right?

But what about money? Okay, that’s a tough one. Everything I’ve found suggests Amazon is operating Vella at a significant loss. For instance, I watched one video where a woman shared her recent months’ financials from Vella. She earned$4 in royalties through tokens (I’ll explain those shortly). Not a typo; four bucks. However, she didn’t just make four bucks that month. She got a bonus of several hundred dollars. Why? She didn’t know. Likely it was related to her posting frequency and free reads and back-catalog…but she couldn’t even trace a pattern from month to month when the bonus would rise and fall. All she was sure of was that she was averaging monthly bonuses in the hundreds. How old was that video? Er…I don’t remember. At least a couple years old, probably. So if I’m looking to make bank on monthly bonuses, that’s pretty unlikely. Maybe if I get a bunch of stories established I can expect some sort of consistent income from it, but my first story isn’t likely to pay out anytime soon.

Would I be better off just publishing it on Kindle as a novella? Maybe. On the upside, that’s still a possibility after the story is complete on Vella.

So how does all of this work? Well, the episodes are posted by the writer at whatever frequency they desire. Again, no real editorial oversight. Readers get to read the first ten (10) episodes for free. After that, it’s 10 tokens per episode. How much does a token cost? About a penny. Yup. You can get 100 tokens for 99 cents. [Click to see for yourself.] That puts a 20,000-word story (low-end novella length) at $2. Oops, we forgot the free episodes. Assuming a 1000-word episode, that’s a story for a buck. The writer earns half of that. A beefy 100,000-word novel devoured piecemeal like this would be nine bucks.

Pretty decent deal for the reader if the stories are good. That’s where this comes back to the writer’s benefit…kind of. Once a reader finds a diamond in the rough, the odds of them returning to that author seem excellent. So when sales are made, I’d anticipate high likelihood of the next story selling to the same reader. So can this be a way to cultivate fans? Hopefully. I feel like this could be especially beneficial for concepts that are incredibly niche (like steampunk fairytale retellings?) so a story can float to the top of certain categories more readily than it would for say urban romance or chosen one fantasy.

So the question arises: Do I try putting a story on Vella? This would be a pretty long post for a no, wouldn’t it? I just posted the first two episodes today.

cover: Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine

“Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine” is a steampunk retelling of the Grimm fairytale “Godfather Death”. It’s one of the more obscure Grimm tales, but it lends itself incredibly well to the steampunk genre. Death isn’t the grim reaper but a man with so many prosthetic body parts that he resembles a metallic skeleton.

This was a story I wrote for an anthology of steampunk fairytales, but it was rightly rejected by the editor (a good friend of mine). Why? I committed some cardinal sins of storytelling. For instance, you can’t have the train heist take place offscreen. Happily, the heist is now in there (around episode 10 or so) and I’m feeling really good about the story’s quality. My current plan is to drop episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays until the story is complete.

I don’t have any romantic hopes of prizes and windfalls (though I won’t turn them away). I ad run out of ideas as to what to do with this story. It was the first thing I thought of when I realized what Vella is. I reread it and found that the episodes were already fully formed in the structure of the story as scene breaks. For the most part, episodes will be between 1000 and 2000 words for a grand total of 14 episodes…maybe more. If this proves to be a positive experience, I bet I have some other pieces that would lend themselves to serialization as well. And of course I could write some with serialization in mind. At the moment, this is a big experiment for me. I’m eager to collect and analyze the results.

So if you enjoy steampunk stories and/or serialized stories, go check out “Godfather Death and the Amazing Diagnostic Machine”. If you’re steampunk-curious, it might prove a good place to dip in a toe. Same if you’re serial-curious. Remember, the first ten episodes are free. That’ll be over half the story for this one. If you enjoy it, please give it a like or a comment or a fave or…whatever the system is. (I’m still figuring this community out).

Fixing the end broke the middle

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Today I finally stuck a fork in the first draft of my Steampunk fairytale story.  It had taken a long time to tinker with the next to last scene to make the action build correctly.  I wasn’t thrilled with what I had, but I had something workable and moved on to the scene with the final confrontation.  (Maybe it was more than one final scene, but that’s beside the point.)  The ending from the previous draft worked okay, so I tweaked it a bit and put it in…and realized my new middle scene had made the ending impossible.

Boo.

The easiest thing to do is probably to change the ending.  Heck, it’s the last four paragraphs that need to be changed.  That’s it.  But changing the ending to fit the middle (that I wasn’t thrilled with) takes away the cruel poetry imparted on the bad guy.  So instead I really need to change that &@#$ middle scene.

So what’s up with the middle scene?  Well, it’s a heist subplot (or event) in the middle of a story.  The heist will end up successful, that much is certain (to make the story work).  That doesn’t mean it has to go smoothly.  In fact it should not go smoothly.  When I ask myself, as the writer, “does their plan work?” the answer needs to be either “yes, but…” or “not quite, yet…”  I have kind of pinched myself into a corner with it.  Based on the surrounding material, the answer pretty much just needs to be “yes, it works.”  Not acceptable in this story.  (That’s only entertaining if George Clooney and Brad Pitt do it…and not in a sequel.)  Too cut-and-dry.  Too tidy.  The story doesn’t need tidy there; it needs to be messy.  It needs to dial up the tension.

I think the solution is going to force changes on the end, unfortunately.  I mean, there needs to be a cost to the heist.  It could cost a character’s life, but I’m not prepared to go there.  So the cost needs to be in terms of assets.  The main asset the “good guys” have is…that would be spoiling, but it was needed for the ending.  Alas, I see no way around that.  I think I can make the heist more successful than planned in order to trick the ending into working again.  Basically, plan to use asset X to procure target Y; X is destroyed in the process of obtaining Y, but they also get bonus Z.

Hmm…did blogging just solve my dilemma?  That would be pretty sweet.  I’m sure this story has other issues.  Perhaps some more vague rambling will help me devise fixes for those too.

Back to the drawing board and loving it

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I’m not blogging as much as I’d prefer.  I’ve groaned about that recently and I groan here again.  The day job has become a bit more demanding of late with new evaluation protocols and such.  Add to that my daughter’s soccer schedule (which I help coach) and my time shrinks to teeny-tiny bits scattered randomly.  I like to use those bits for writing when I can.  But don’t give up on Chaos Out of Chaos; I’m still here, just more sporadic than I used to be.

I recently had a steampunk adaptation of a fairy tale rejected from an anthology for being too fairy tale and only superficially steampunk.  Ever gotten a rejection and nodded?  That’s what I did because it was right, the steampunk was mostly just window dressing.  Moreover, it wasn’t an adaptation so much as a retelling in different style.  Ping, two for two in the nod department.

The editor (both editors in concert, actually) offered this analogy:

Consider two movies based off gang-interpretations of Romeo and Juliet: West Side Story and Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrman).  West Side Story is an adaptation, twisting the skeleton of the story to make sense in the new setting with new characters and new events.  Romeo + Juliet simply used guns instead of swords and used a modern setting; they used the Shakespearean words, for crying out loud.  Not an adaptation, just a change of clothes.

The editor is looking for a new story that fits the mold of the fairy tale, the way Willow was really Star Wars or how Avatar is really Dances with Wolves.  O Brother, Where Art Thou is likely too perfectly like The Odyssey.  The (bad) movie Barb Wire is too perfectly Casablanca.

Anyway, I hit the drawing board with the same fairy tale but a new plan, to make a new story that fit the mold of the fairy tale.  It helped to take (most of) the fantasy aspects out of it.  Now I have a skeleton for a stand-alone story that is a true adaptation.  Character names will likely stay the same, but the rest is history.  Who people are will change, changing their interactions and motivations, changing the events, changing the final outcome.  Whole new story that will still mimic the original in concept.  All it took was a little suggestion from the editor on how to change a key character’s role to get this whole new story tumbling out.

I confess, I was pretty happy with the first story.  If someone wants a pure fairy tale dressed in steampunk, I think it’s a winner.  Still, I felt it was too loyal to the fairy tale structure and too far from the more modern storytelling style that I usually write in, so it wasn’t quite me.  This one will be more me and I like it that much better.  As soon as I figure out where to start it, I’ll get this thing written.  Still have a while before this new draft is due, but this idea is kicking hard and is taking precedence over my Codex contest story, which is almost done but needs a significant rewrite to insert theme and structure into the freeform glob I wrote on first pass.  The glob may get submitted to the contest in favor of time for this story.  We’ll see.  Hopefully I’ll have time to write SOMETHING soon.

First Foray into Steampunk

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

For reasons that have been hinted at previously and are still too underdeveloped to divulge, I have recently dipped my toe into the steampunk swimming pool.  For those that have never bathed in steampunk (yeah,I’ve already worn that metaphor out), you can get a crash course at the Wikipedia steampunk page.  I won’t overwhelm you with details here.  Just imagine that the Victorian Era (roughly 1840-1900; on this side of the pond, think a couple decades on each side of the Civil War) just kept progressing rather than being diverted by WWI.  Not helping?  Picure steam and clockwork-style machinery being responsible for a lot of what electricity and electronics do now.  (Not that steampunk is devoid of electricity; Tesla is a very important steampunk figure…but I digress.)  Got it?  Good.

Steampunk is very hot right now, particularly in the aesthetic world.  Interior design, con costuming, that one episode of Castle…but that’s all a very visual thing.  I am not a visual artist.  I do my painting with words on the mind’s canvas and all the blah-blah-blah we writers say about that.  Bottom line, I find myself doing a lot of describing of visuals.  I end up visualizing everything in brass and mahogany.  Fortunately, there are a LOT of steampunk images on the internet for me to scour before I decide on what to describe.  Lamps, tables, beds, lots of “computers” (which hasn’t come up for me, but they’re there), bathtubs, and clothes clothes clothes.  I keep looking for pictures for everything I want to describe, which slows the writing down, but I also keep finding the pictures.  I seldom use any single image I find, rather merging several.

So if I can find things so readily, what’s the problem?  Okay, there isn’t a problem per se, just a tricky balance.  As in any story, I don’t want to put in any details that aren’t useful.  I could give a character a steam powered artificial limb or a clockwork cat, but why?  Things need to have reasons to be steampunky.  As was mentioned on the steampunk panel at ConCarolinas, it’s not just “sci-fi in sepia” (that domain name is available if you want to buy it).  Things are falling together pretty well in the story, but I know the edit-fairy will be clocking overtime once I finish my draft.

Here’s the real problem: I am not a steampunk reader.  (Pauses for the gasps of horror and threats referencing the circles of hell reserved for those that write what they do not read.)  I’ve read some.  Gra Linnea’s story “Life in Steam” in WotF 25 was as steampunk as it gets.  And I’ve read Michael Moorecock to great enjoyment, particularly the Hawkmoon series, and steampunk discussions are not officially licensed as such until his name comes up at least twice.  Airships, gyrocopters, electricity guns, gears, steam…I know the basics.  I’ve also gotten a recent crash course in the importance of both social class and intellect in steampunk storytelling.  I just bought a steampunk novel on my Kindle (oxymoron?).  I am doing my homework, but it isn’t natural to me.  Maybe that’s why I feel like the story is shaping up so nicely: the construction is all very deliberate.  I just hope that won’t get in the way of flow and storytelling.

Anyway, it’s fun exploring this new (to me) subgenre and navigating its twists and turns.  I feel like it’s bringing some old fashioned spark back into my technique.  I’m probably half done with the first draft already (not a very long story) and I may have reason to follow up with another similar one.  I understand how people can get immersed into steampunk; it’s so visually striking.  I just hope I end up doing it justice.