Marketing Soulwoven Part One: Wattpad

I realized after I promised another marketing post on Friday that talking about the commercialization strategy for Soulwoven was going to take up several posts' worth of space. Figuring out how to share this book with the world has taken, literally, years. Not as long as it took to write it, but a long time.

The story starts in 2012.

If you've read any of the promo material for Soulwoven, you've seen me trumpeting the success it's had on Wattpad. For those of you who don't know, Wattpad is a story-sharing site. You sign up for an account, and you can post stories on there and read the stories that other people post. The whole thing is free. I'm not sure how they make money, or if they are making money (it's a tech startup; they often go a long time without making any money).

I heard about Wattpad through Publisher's Weekly, a trade publication I used to read every day and wish I still had time to read every day. They ran an article about an author with a huge Wattpad following in late 2011. Shortly thereafter, she got a huge deal. I took notice, signed up for a Wattpad account, and started lurking and thinking and thinking and lurking.

At the time, I wasn't sure how to use it. I still wanted to publish Soulwoven traditionally, and I was afraid that putting it on Wattpad might trounce its chances. So I started asking around. Six months later, after I asked several literary agents about Wattpad and they asked me back, "What's that?" I decided that this was going to be The Next Big Thing and I ought to get involved before it hit that point (I was partially right; it's bigger now, and I think it's much harder to catch their attention).

So I started revising Soulwoven and posting chapters of it on Wattpad. I had enormously high hopes, as I always tend to. The results didn't live up to them. People read it. People liked it. But it didn't go gangbusters and generate huge word of mouth and suddenly shoot to the top of Wattpad's rankings (it did crack the top 25 at one point, but it dropped off from there pretty quickly).

I blogged about the experience though, and my blog posts caught the eye of a Wattpad community manager, and she contacted me and asked if I was interested in having Soulwoven featured on the site.

One of the principles of book marketing (and writing, for that matter, because it enters into how you construct your first page) I cottoned on to pretty early on in the process was the importance of setting reader expectations. I noticed that I gave authors extra slack if I had seen their work before or it came with laudatory quotes from authors or reviewers I trusted (or best yet, from friends). Neil Gaiman's American Gods took most of the book to hook me, but I stuck with it because it was Neil Gaiman, and I had faith it would get there. I put A Game of Thrones down after the first chapter because I didn't like it, only to pick it up later, read farther, and fall in love with it after it was recommended to me repeatedly by friends.

Marketing a first novel, especially if you're self-publishing, is difficult because you don't have any of that credit with readers. They bring no positive preconceptions to your book, which means you get very little slack from them. I wanted to do as much as I could to set readers up to enjoy the book before they even opened it, and having Soulwoven featured on Wattpad let me do that.

It worked in two ways: first, I could plug the fact that it was featured. A lot of readers haven't heard of Wattpad, but they know the word "featured" and that it's a good thing. Second, before I launched Soulwoven, it generated over 500,000 reads on Wattpad (Wattpad's "reads" are essentially page views; Wattpad is cagey about how it calculates things, but as far as I can tell, it counts a read anytime a user opens a new chapter of the book). Again, you don't have to know Wattpad to see "half a million" and think "good thing." When it came time for the Kickstarter campaign, I could point to my success on Wattpad and say, "You should fund this book because people already love it," and that was immensely helpful.

But on top of giving me some means with which to make myself sound good, having the book up on Wattpad gave me a wealth of useful information about it. I got to see who was reading it and liking it (at least as much as they shared with me), and I got to see what people were saying about it and what they liked about it. I learned that about half of people who were starting the book weren't reading past the first chapter, and I could compare that to the numbers of other successful books on Wattpad and see that it stacked up pretty well. I could also see that Soulwoven wasn't the kind of book that people JUST HAD TO SHARE OMG. I eventually concluded that it was a middling success on Wattpad and was likely to be a middling success commercially. So far, that's exactly what it's been.

I still have the book up on Wattpad. The sanity of that decision has been questioned, but I'll talk more about that when I get to the pricing part of this series (much in the future). But put shortly, all the evidence I've seen shows that Wattpad users aren't big book buyers, and that big book buyers aren't Wattpad users. The ecosystems exist more or less independently, and I benefit immensely from having Soulwoven up. It crossed 750,000 reads this weekend. When it hits a million, I'll update my promo info with the new, flashier number.

Plus, people are reading it who otherwise wouldn't be, and in the end, that's more important than anything else. I don't write fiction solely to make money. I make a hell of a lot more money writing things that aren't fiction. I write fiction to move people and make a positive influence on the world, and the only reason I'm after money for it at all is because if I can make a living at it, I can do more of it and do it better.

And that's worth keeping in mind whenever we talk marketing. There are dueling goals of art and commerce for every author, and I do my best to privilege the artistic over the commercial whenever I can.

News for the Week of 7.9.13: Ohhh Yeah, Impending Kickstarter...

Dear Friends and Readers,

It’s time for another Fantastically Tardy Update!

And more importantly, the Soulwoven Kickstarter is coming closer and closer to reality, and I am super excited. I spent today in Denver filming the video with Frazer Lockhart of F-Stop Productions, a stand-up guy and killer videographer who’s helping with the project because he believes in it.

That’s sort of a trend, actually. The team’s all assembled and just waiting on the funding to get to work, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Copy editor Michael Valsted is waiting in the wings to polish the thing and make it bookworthy. Amazing web cartoonist Abby Howard is on board to do maps and illustrations. Killer editor Rose Fox is ready to help me rein in the story and make it leaner, sleeker, meaner, and better all around.

We’re going to make art, and it’s going to be awesome.

And in the meantime, Backer Rewards! Signed copies! Personalized, doodled-in, and mused-over copies! Meetings! Skype calls! World-exclusive backer updates! Short story collections! More stuff I can’t wait to share!

All we need is 25 people to pledge $25 to make this thing fly, and those 25 people are going to love what they get out of the deal, I guarantee it. Beyond that, it’s just going to get better and better.

The Kickstarter goes live on August 1. Mark your calendars. You’ll want to be one of those first 25, trust me. And then you’ll want to tell your friends and get them on board too, because the more money we raise the more awesome the book gets. Kickstarter’s great that way.

This thing is going to take over my world for a little while, so I apologize if all you hear from me for the next month or so is about Kickstarter. Other things are going on too, but this is The Important One, and the one that you guys can jump in and be a part of most easily, and I want to make sure everyone knows about it.

Hope you’re ready. It’s gonna be fun.

-Jeff

One for the Locker: Austin Grossman on Video Games and Writing

If any of you have ever taken the time to peruse my old blog, you'll see that I've learned a lot of things about storytelling from playing video games. I now no longer have so much time to do that (sad! Although I have a smashing idea that will give me an excuse to play for 24 hours straight next Fall, so stay tuned), but I still think often about the writing in video games and what an amazing playground it looks like to me from the outside.

Anyway, this article is about what it looks like from the inside, and its author reminded me a bit of myself. Except that I applied for jobs writing video games and got one in publishing instead.

Funny ol' world, innit?

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/18/4231940/opinion-video-games-taught-me-how-to-write

Three Dances Launch Party Speechifying, Part Two: Thank You

Just another short clip from the Three Dances launch party speech. A lot of the speech was taken up with thanking people who helped specifically on the book, but I spent a minute or so talking about the ways in which people have helped me generally, sometimes without even realizing it.

And I wanted to share that bit with people who weren't there, because I think sometimes we have a tendency to tell ourselves that people don't want or need our encouragement. And a lot of times that's simply not true.

Enjoy!

Countdown to Three Dances: Do It Now

I don't cry often.

It's not so much because I think I must be manly (although I sometimes do) as because I think I must be calm. I don't like letting my emotions get the better of me. When things get hard, I try to get rational and quiet and thoughtful.

But I cried last weekend.

Those of you who have been following the Three Dances posts will remember that I talked about a subject that made my stomach churn and my eyes tear up. This is it. And I am now three paragraphs into talking about it without having talked about it at all. That's how hard it is to write about for me.

One of my grandmothers did the art for Three Dances. She is an amazing, wonderful woman; donated her time and art to the book; and has been a mentor and a guiding light to me in ways I don't think she fully understands, because she is also a humble person.

But she's not the grandmother who has been most supportive of my writing over the course of my life.

Since I was a teenager, my other grandmother has encouraged me to be a writer. When she visited, she asked how my writing was going. When I was in college, she was thrilled to hear that I was studying writing, even though everyone knew it was never likely to be particularly remunerative. When we talked, she always, at some point, said, "Now, you're still writing, aren't you?" She was never pushy, but I always knew that she thought it was amazing that I was writing, and that she would be proud as a peach when my first book came out.

After my grandfather died, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, or something so much like it that nobody other than a doctor is likely to care about the difference.

But still, she knew I was a writer. During the times when the disease was just taking hold and she would only forget my name and not my face, she knew I was a writer. When we spoke, she still wanted to make sure that I was writing. It was very important to her. That's one of the funny things about that disease; you get to see what's important to people, because they talk about the same things over and over again.

In the last year, her disease has gotten much worse. I don't think she really knows who I am anymore. When we see each other, she gives me a huge smile and a hug and a kiss and says, "Oh, what a good-looking young man!" because, even as her brain wanders away from her, she is still just that kind of a person.

Last weekend I brought the proof copy of Three Dances to my parents' house so that I could share it with them and my grandmothers. And as I sat a table and waited for her to arrive, I realized that the grandmother who for years had encouraged me to write books would never really know that I had finished one, and that it was being published.

So I cried. And I'm crying again now, as I write this.

Because I could have done better. I could have done sooner. I could have published Three Dances, or Soulwoven, or something very much like them, while she was still capable of recognizing me and truly, deeply knowing that I had done something she had always wanted me to do.

So my advice to you is this: whatever thing you want to do with your life, do it now. Don't wait. There are people to whom your dreams are more important than you yet realize. And if you wait too long to make things happen, you may lose the chance to share wonderful moments with them.

I will never know what my grandmother's reaction to my first book would have been if it had come out five years ago. When I was younger, she was a very deep and thoughtful person. I wish I could know what she would have said and done.

Last weekend, her reaction was "That's wonderful! You wrote this? Where can I buy this? [pause, during which conversation moves on a little] I will give you two dollars for this!"

I told her her copy was on its way, and I laughed, because that reaction was so much better than what it could have been.

But still. Do it now. Whatever it is. Don't wait. We all only get so much time.

-Jeff

You can buy Three Dances here, here, or here.

News for the Week of 4.10.13: Three Dances is Live, and I Am Still Writing Soulwoven: Exile

Greetings Friends and Readers.

Three Dances. Is. LIVE! You can go buy a copy at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or CreateSpace or my website right now. The commercial editions come with illustrations and extras, and the knowledge that you’re supporting the creation of more stories like the ones you enjoy. For the next couple of weeks, I’m probably going to get a little proselytize-y about this book, so fair warning. But I’m very proud of it, and I want to get it into people’s hands.

So buy a copy, please. Or buy one for someone else. The print version is only $5.99 and the e-book version is available on my website for whatever you think is a fair price (as long as it’s at least $1; that’s as low as the fulfillment people will let me go).

Thanks.

In other news: Soulwoven! And Nadya!

Something rotten seems to be afoot with the read counting machines on Wattpad, but you guys have been amazing in your support for the book lately anyway. There are squillions of new votes, lots of people are tuning in and following, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Work on the sequel is going well. I’m also buying a house and launching Three Dances and planning a move and a wedding, all on top of my day job as a freelance writer and editor, so things have felt a little hectic.

But every day I’m taking an hour or two, whether I have the time or not, to keep telling stories for you. I’m a little over halfway through this draft of the book, which broadens and shifts focus a bit. You’ll learn a lot more about Tsu’min in it, for instance, and Leramis takes center stage for longer than he has before. Some terrible things that lead to wonderful (or maybe even more terrible) things happen to Ryse.

I think you’re going to enjoy it.

Once this draft is done it goes off to my trusty inner circle of early readers and critics, and then I’ll start final review and posting chapters of it. In the meantime, I’m going to cram in one final revision of Nadya before she goes back out into the world of traditional publishing submissions.

Thanks again for following, all.

And please, check out Three Dances. :-)

Yours in ink and sleepless nights,

Jeff

Countdown to Three Dances: Images

Various versions of Three Dances are under final review at Amazon and B&N. The print version, actually, is live here: you can buy one (or ten, or a hundred) if you want, and I will get paid for it.

For some reason, this is terrifying to me.

So in order to stay clear of being afraid, I'm going to put up a blog post I wrote months ago with the plan of posting it in the runup to the Three Dances launch, mostly because I thought it was interesting and also because I thought it might drive some attention. Warning: It's long and gets a bit technical in places.

Anyway, here goes:

--

Today I want to talk about the art for the collection, and the interesting challenges it has presented for me-as-publisher.

I decided to include art in the collection because I wanted something to help it stand out from the crowd. There's so much being self-published right now, and it's so easy to just chuck something up on Amazon as an e-book, that I wanted to provide my readers with immediate proof that I had not just chucked the book up on the Internet. That, in fact, it had been planned and plotted and slaved and sweated over, and was going to be worth their few dollars of money and few hours of time to experience.

Including custom art seemed to be a good way to do that.

Originally, I was going to have a friend of mine who does amazing things with spraypaint and stencils and letters make the art, but his schedule got too crazy, and he had to back out. I then approached my grandmother, who has been making art for the better part of a century, about helping out.

Luckily for me, she was excited about the project, too.

Working with her has been a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime experience worthy of its own blog post, but one of the upshots of it has been that I'm left doing the digitization of her artwork completely on my own. Computers are not her thing.

I'm using a free program called GIMP, which was introduced to me by the folks at Wattpad, to do it. Process breakdown below:

First, I receive the finished art from my grandmother. It's not exactly in ready-to-display shape, but we're on deadline here, and she's working for free, and I'm happy just to have it at all.

Next, I wait for good, natural light in my apartment, take a digital photo of the artwork, and shovel it onto my computer. It looks something like this:

Next, I crop and rotate the photo in GIMP.

At this point, it's still far from ready for production. The whites aren't white, and there are a lot of extraneous lines left to be cleaned up. My first thought was to attempt to go through and clean everything by hand, but that very quickly proved to be an untenable amount of work.

Luckily, GIMP has a tool called "Color Select" that selects everything in an image that's the same or a similar color. The tool has been a godsend for me. So next I create a new image with the same dimensions as the original, select everything that's black in the source image, and copy it over onto the new image. It gives me something like this:

Pretty big improvement, right? But we're not done yet. It looks a little washed out, like it's been copied poorly on a machine. So next I go after the gray tones.

It takes several steps, but eventually, I get this:

Still not perfect, but it's getting closer, and we're now at the point where manual touch-up becomes feasible. So I go in with my GIMP paintbrush/pencil tool (they work kind of the same) and eraser, and I blacken in lines that I think are meant to be blacked and get rid of lines that I think were not meant to appear in the final product. It takes some fiddling and a little artistic interpretation on my part, but eventually, I end up with an image that looks more like this:

Finally, I print off a test page, which includes the image and the text roughly as I think they'll appear in the finished version. I then put it under a good light and circle areas of the image that I think need further retouching, like so:

Then, after I go back through and do some more image correction, I come out with what's approaching a final version:

Now I still have to get it laid out for real and wait for proofs, and there's a chance that the image will need some tweaking at that stage, but for now, it's done! And in much less time than one might think, as well. This one probably only took me three or four hours of work, and I was figuring everything out as I went. Future images should take even less time than that.

--

The image I used as an example here is one of the black-and-white ones that appears in the print and basic digital (for black-and-white ereaders like the basic Kindle and Nook) editions of the book. Creating the Digital Deluxe Edition's colorized images was a bit more fun. I'll pop back on the blog to talk about that sometime next week.

I also have a Three Dances-related blog post in the back of my head that churns my stomach and brings tears to my eyes to think of. I will write it when I think I have the mental space to do it justice, and I will share it with you before the book's official launch on the 13th.

I promise.

Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Ch. 4

I put up two chapters of Soulwoven this week, to make up for the fact that I'm going to be deep in the woods and out of Internet range next weekend. Unfortunately, Chapter 4 went up a little late, because I spent the weekend being chased off of mountains by thunderstorms and having adventures in automobile repair (if anyone knows what on earth a neutral switch does, other than cause your reverse lights to be on semi-permanently if you confuse it with your reverse light switch while replacing the latter, please let me know).

And with that out of the way, on to the craft breakdown for Soulwoven Chapter 4 (Spoilers to follow. Go read it here first!).

Chapter 4 is one of several of what I think of as "breather" chapters in Soulwoven. We've just had two chapters of pretty intense action, and I want to give the reader time to take a breath, put the book down (I mentioned I was going to break rules, right?) and go grab a cup of tea, walk the dog, do some math homework, talk to a family member--whatever--and process. I do this because a lot of my favorite books have these moments, and because I want my readers to be thinking. Dan Brown writes great page-turners, but I don't remember having a single productive thought while reading The Da Vinci Code. Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, writes books that I frequently put down, but I gain much more overall from reading them. Somewhere in the middle falls George R. R. Martin, who can keep seven or eight page-turning plots going in every book, but gives me time to take breaks between them as I switch from character to character.

So. Action is slower in Chapter 4. Litnig has his dream. It's weird, and then it's scary, and that's about it. The chapter is very short, even by my standards. In terms of plot, I'm working mainly on deepening the mysteries surrounding Litnig. We already know that he had a dream and it was weird. We then ran off on a big adventure through two other characters' heads. I want to remind the reader that Litnig had a dream, and it was important, so I bring them back to it in this chapter. Hopefully, the reader understands that Litnig's dream is not an ordinary dream, and will not be surprised when it keeps popping back up throughout the book. I'm not entirely sure if the repetition and positioning of the dream alone achieves this, but I hope that it does.

Because this chapter doesn't have a lot of action, it's also a bit of a litmus test for my writing. I mentioned Martin above. One of the reasons I think he's successful is because he has enough faith in his own abilities to do things like break the tension or kill off major characters and trust that he can keep the reader interested in other ways or develop new characters they'll love just as much. I aspire to that level of writing, and I figure the best way to learn how to get there is to attempt it. In this chapter, I'm counting on two things to keep the reader interested. One is the shock of horror Litnig gets once the dark statue starts moving, but that happens three-quarters of the way through. In the meantime, my writing has to carry the burden alone. For a few pages, my descriptions, my voice, my capability to generate a creepy and threatening atmosphere, are all I'm counting on to carry the reader forward. If I can pull that off, I'll know I'm in a good place as a writer, and the reader, hopefully, will respect the hell out of me. If I can't, the chapter will fail.

I don't think I've talked much yet about taking risks in these posts. But as a writer, as a reader, and as an editor, I love writers who take risks. They may (and in fact do, in my experience reading submissions) fail more often than not. But when they succeed, that's where the magic happens. So I do the same in my writing, and I do my best to make it work, and then I cross my fingers and hope for the best.

I want to make a brief mention as well that this chapter is more of a horror story than a fantasy story in my mind. I've structured it that way---I start with a character in a situation that he knows is wrong, then allow him to pull himself deeper and deeper into it against his instincts because he can't rationalize why it's wrong, and finally show him why it's wrong when it's too late for him to get out of it without being scarred. Another thing I respect in other writers is weaving multiple genres together, and I'm trying, briefly, to do that here as well.

So that's it for Chapter 4! As I said, it's a risk-taking, rule-breaking, genre-bending effort, and I'm more than a little nervous as to how well it works. I'd love to get some opinions on it.

For the Locker: Neil Gaiman on Art

Not much more to say than that, really, other than that this speech is inspiring and interesting, and that the shots of the students remind me that I only graduated from college three years ago. I remember sitting in the audience, sleepless, terrified, and vaguely disappointed, vividly and viscerally. I do not remember a word of any of the speeches given.

Since then, somehow, I have done many enjoyable things. And I have a career that exists at least partly in the arts.

Sometimes I forget what an accomplishment that is.

For the Locker: A Writer on Suffering

From the Guardian: an article on suffering in art, and why it isn't necessary.

I have a hunch I may someday have cause to refer someone to this, rather than trying to paraphrase it off the top of my head. So into the locker it goes!