Saturday, July 9th, 2016: WesterCon, M&M's and Measuring Success?

Herb Apon doodles another character sketch at our booth at WesterCon69

I have migrated this Diary page from a sub-page of my site to a blog page on Blogger in order to make it more convenient to update more frequently, and to make it possible for people to leave comments. I looked into a number of different blogging possibilities, but wound up sticking with Blogger because I already use it for other writing things and I am familiar with it and how it works. I'd love to hear what you all use for blogging and why you chose what you chose. Unless you just do it yourself in HTML (which is how I know I'm supposed to be doing it, but I'm too lazy or harassed or something to figure it out) so no need to tell me.

In case I haven't ever mentioned it, I created the Fish Wielder website with Adobe DreamWeaver. I've found it to be user-friendly enough that I've been able to get the site up and looking generally acceptable without ever having read the manual or take any formal training. That's probably not the best approach to creating a website, but it fits with my general "do it yourself, even if you're kind of half-assed about it" model of getting things done. It means I'm frequently scratching my head about how to do something (like enable people to leave comments) or to figure out why something isn't working right (where did that page go?), but that's what YouTube tutorial videos were designed to address, right?! But enough about that.

Lots of things have happened since the last update. For example, the book is finally available for pre-order! That was a big milestone that was much delayed. Fish Wielder is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and iBooks.

The pre-order thing is kind of interesting and frustrating. Paying attention to my pre-order sales rank is a little like what I imaging being addicted to gambling or drugs might be like. There's enough intermittent positive reward involved in checking pre-order stats that I keep doing it (sometimes, kind of obsessively), but the high of seeing a bump in the numbers doesn't last very long and does nothing to sustain me through the times when the numbers crash. And really, on the whole, the numbers are going down more often then they are going up because people buy the book less often then they don't buy the book.

The pre-order thing is also interesting because some of the retailers, like Amazon, display the "sales rank" of the book, which allows you to get a rough idea of how the book is doing. It's frustrating though, because you only get an approximate idea of how the book is doing. Why only an approximate? Because the "sales" rank doesn't tell you how many copies have been pre-ordered, it just tells you your relative rank in comparison to other books. While it's engaging (and sometimes nerve-wracking) to watch your rank go up and down (I can even graph it on Amazon), it still makes it hard to gauge the effectiveness of your promotional efforts.

For example, Herb Apon and I just attended WesterCon 69. That's the fourth Con I've had a table at to promote the book and the third one Herb has joined me at to sign posters and dazzle people with his charm and wit. We gave away all kinds of free swag (Fish Wielder bags, buttons, collectors' cards, book marks, stickers, temporary tattoos, coloring pages, posters, mugs, socks and even M&Ms)

to get people interested and we made a point of telling pretty much everybody that the book was available for preorder. After the con, I checked Fish Wielder's Amazon sales rankings for the paperback and the ebook editions.

The paperback version of Fish Wielder shows a significant spike on day one of WesterCon! Yay!

There was a significant spike on day one of the con for pre-orders of the paperback version of the book. The rank rose from around #700,000 to around #110,000. That looks awesome! That looks like success! But how many pre-orders is that, exactly? Is that ten, or is that one? I have no idea and there is no good way I can think of to figure it out. Let's look at the ebook pre-orders:

The ebook versions shows a spike on day two!

So wow! A big spike on day 2 of the con (apparently, no one wanted an ebook version on day one). The ebook pre-order rank jumped from #900,000 to about #110,000. That seems like a big jump. But again, how many pre-orders does that represent? It's difficult to figure because Amazon is basing the sales rank not just on the number of copies pre-ordered, but also on how many have been ordered over time and how fast/steadily the orders come in. They call this "sales velocity" and, while I'm sure it's useful to them, what it does is makes it really really hard to figure out the number of copies ordered. My publisher will eventually get that data, but not until after the book is released.

So, was all the time and effort that went into getting a table at WesterCon, manning if for four days and giving away all kinds of free stuff worth it? That's very difficult to say from a pre-orders perspective. Did our efforts lead to two pre-orders or ten or twenty? I can't say, and that's frustrating and makes me understand why people prefer to put their money and effort into things (like FaceBook advertising) where they can measure their return on investment much more accurately.

Pre-order numbers aside, WesterCon (and the other three Cons) have all been great and worthwhile experiences. I've gotten to meet some great people, seen some folks become very enthusiastic about the book, and have made some lasting connections with people who have become supporters of Fish Wielder in an ongoing way. From an investment of time and effort perspective, it has been worth every second I've put into it.

One other cool thing that comes out of cons is that, whenever Herb Apon gets bored, he draws on the left over scraps of paper that come packed between the copies of The Helm graphic novel that I also give away to interested folks. He usually draws the characters from the book, using them as little signs to let people know that we are giving things away for free... Because about a third of all the people who come to our table are suspicious that we are up to something other than giving things away. Anyway, over the course of three cons, he's now drawn quite a few of these. Here they are:

Apart from the con, I also did a sock giveaway event at a local sock shop called Sock Dreams on the 25th of June. If you go back to the pre-order sales rank graphs, you will see that there were spikes in sales on both graphs on and around that date. I was in the store for roughly three hours and managed to give away about 50 pairs of socks. I worked with a very nice lady named Rae at Sock Dreams, who organized the whole event and did a great job promoting it. Thanks, Rae!

This was the promo poster I put together for the Sock Dreams event

I also got another author blurb:

"With Fish Wielder, J.R.R.R. (Jim) Hardison has created a unique and hilarious, fast-paced, action-packed tale that pokes fun at, but also lovingly celebrates, the fantasy genre. I have never read anything like it and I enjoyed the hell out of it."

–Mike Wellins, author of Mountain of the Dead, Upon My Worst Enemy 

and the Stella's Baby-Sitting Service series

Mike is a great writer (you should read his books) and he also runs a museum of oddities in Portland called The Peculiarium. You should visit it if you ever get the chance.

Well, that's it for this update. Now that I've got this page running on the Blogger site and I can post to it from my phone and don't have to worry about updating the whole Fish Wielder website to make a change, I hope to post more frequently. That will probably be a good thing, considering that we are getting closer to the actual launch of the book!

Wednesday, April 27th, 2016: Pros, Cons, Trailers and Playtestings

A doodle Herb Apon drew for our Emerald City Comic Con appearance

Lots of things going on! I had a booth (not an Artist's Alley table, an actual Booth!) at Emerald City Comic Con. Herb Apon, the cover artist for Fish Wielder, joined me in the booth to autograph posters and generally impress people with his mad art skills. And boy, was having a booth a learning experience. I'm glad I built up to it slowly. My first con was the smallish OryCon, at which I had a fan table. My next Con was the pretty big Wizard World Con, where I had an Artist's Alley table. Emerald City was gigantic (80,000 people), and I was pretty nervous going in. I actually hadn't planned to go because it's in Seattle, which is three hours drive from Portland, so I didn't even inquire about a table at the con until very late in the game. I asked about an Artists' Alley table, but they were completely booked and had been for months. In fact, they had been completely sold out since December. I thought about giving up on the idea, but decided I'd send the management team an email, just in case. And then, just about a month before the show, they contacted me to say that someone had dropped out and a booth was open! Of course, a booth was significantly more expensive and higher exposure than an Artists' Alley table, but Herb told me he'd man the booth with me, so I signed on.

That meant that I suddenly had to hustle to make sure I had enough swag to make having a booth worth while and to ensure that I'd have things to give away for the whole four days of the con. So, I ordered another batch of Fish Wielder socks and also put in an order for T-shirts. I'd been wary about ordering T-shirts through any of the online T-shirt places I've worked with before. First, the on-demand printers I've worked with previously didn't always deliver consistent quality with dark T-shirts because each shirt was a one off. That made it iffy to put in a big order. Second, the shirts were very expensive--about $30 each, which meant that I wouldn't be able to order very many shirts. But then Herb recommended a local shop called Bomm Apparel. They turned out to be great and even went so far as to run me a test print on a dark green shirt so I could approve the quality. They were awesome, said they could get the shirts done on time for the con, and could print the shirts for less than a third of the price! So bam!

I went with the same sock guys I used before and they put a rush on the order so that I could get them on time for the con too. Love those guys at Eversox.

In addition to T-shirts and socks, I also got a bunch of copies of my graphic novel The Helm, from Dark Horse, to give away, I ordered another 1,000 buttons (two varieties--Brad buttons and Cover Art buttons), some business cards with a QR code for the book trailer, more Brad stickers, cover art stickers, QR code stickers, and a re-designed tote bag that is bigger, brighter and has a QR code for the website. I also had a bunch of book marks left over from the previous con, a bunch of temporary tattoos, and a bunch of posters as well. And then, my excellent publisher created a series of Character collector's cards and promotional postcards from some new Herb Apon art and put a rush on the order so that I'd have them on time. Here's the whole collection:

SWAG! SWAG! And more SWAG!

So, despite the tight turn around time, and all the things that could have gone wrong, everyone came through and everything arrived on time! I even used Herb's art from the character cards to make up some coloring book pages to give away in case there were bored kids at the convention (I brought boxes of crayons too that I branded with Brad stickers and QR Code stickers).

And the con went great! Well, there was a little hiccough at the beginning. When we got to the convention center on the day of the con, we discovered that there was no booth for us--just a gap where our booth was supposed to be. We found that out with a few hours to go before the floor opened for guests. But we managed to parlay that error into a free second table for our booth! Score.

We met lots of great people who seemed very interested and enthusiastic about the book. We gave away tons of stuff. And, we even met a couple of people who were already familiar with the book and had even read this page!

For those of you who may make your own con appearances in support of your books, here are some things that worked:

1. We put out an email sign up sheet and got several hundred email addresses.

2. We offered our big, bright, branded bags to anyone who walked by with their hands full. We managed to give out 500 bags, each with the book title and a QR code for the website on them--which gave us a big traffic boost to the website and also a lot of exposure at the con from people walking around with our bags.

3. The coloring book pages were actually a big hit, and more with adults than with kids. I guess adult coloring is a super-fast growing publishing segment these days.

4. We mostly gave away the high value swag (socks or T-shirts) to people who watched the book trailer and came back to the booth to tell us about it. That helped drive a lot of traffic to the trailer on YouTube.

As long as I'm on the topic of the trailer, I should mention that there's a new trailer that's going to be released soon. See, the deal with the first trailer was that it was supposed to go live on the day the book went on pre-sale. The plan was to get people excited about the book with the trailer so that they would click a link to buy the book on presale. Only, due to some technical difficulties, the book wasn't ready for pre-sale on time for the trailer launch. But the trailer launch couldn't be cancelled because a whole bunch of blogs and websites had already agreed to link to it on the reveal day. So, we launched the trailer with no book to buy.

A still from the new trailer

That wasn't a huge problem, but it bothered me a bit that we didn't get to use the trailer to drive sales. So... I started thinking about creating a second trailer to launch when the pre-sales actually go live. Once again, I didn't want it to be a standard issue, dissolves-between-still-images-set-to-music kind of thing, so I decided to do another animation. But I did learn my lesson from the last one. Fully animated character's take a long time to set up and even longer to render. I didn't want to make that mistake again and wind up white knuckling it to make a deadline, so I wrote the new trailer using the animation from Monty Python as my inspiration. With any luck, the new trailer and the book pre-sales should both be going live around the end of this week. When they do, I'll put up another post about the making of the second trailer.

And finally, once the new trailer was complete, the con was over and my breathing had returned to normal, I started thinking about other ways to promote the book. One of the interesting things that happened at ECCC was that people would come over to the booth, see the characters cards and assume that we were selling a table top game. The whole card game idea has been banging around in the back of my head ever since my publisher suggested making character cards. So Herb and I fell to talking about card games and Herb told me he'd be happy to create illustrations for a game if I designed one. So...I did. I've been working on it for the last few weeks and am almost done with it now. It's tentatively titled "CARD WIELDER" and it's been through three rounds of play testing so far. In fact, I just ran a playtesting session at my local game store, Cloud Cap Games, tonight. Designing and play testing a card game has been an interesting experience. I've learned something new and had to make modifications to the rules every time I sit down to play the game with folks.

I think the prototype and the rules are basically done, and response to the game has been enthusiastic enough that I think now it's time to start figuring out how to produce the game and whether it's something I can afford to do as a promo for the book.

Card Wielder, the epically silly Fish Wielder epic card game!

Friday, February 26th, 2016: Editing, Animating, Socking and "Con-ing"

Some character sketches Herb Apon drew while at Wizard World Portland.

Well dang! It's been months since I've made a diary entry here...so just like my real life diary, I guess. Shameful. But I have been busy. Let's see, what have I been up to?

For starters, I got my round-1 edits from my editor on January 17th and had to dive into the first revisions I've done on the book in over a year. That was...interesting. For the most part, I was tasked with fixing some of the remaining laziness in my writing. Too many repeats of a particular word or another, too much reliance on those hated adverbs, and too frequent use of the word, "said." Going back through and tweaking the language (and a few other minor things) took me two full weeks. While there were occasional moments of worrying at a single word for far too long, for the most part, the experience was weirdly enjoyable. But I did notice a sneaky desire to tweak a few little things I wasn't asked to tweak. I tried to resist, but resisting fixing things turned out to take a lot more effort than fixing them. Anyway, the manuscript is back in my editor's capable hands and I am waiting for my round-2 edits to arrive.

   A wireframe of a scene from the upcoming Fish Wielder trailer

And the same frame fully rendered with all the bells and whistles

In the meanwhile, I'm running on about an hour's sleep for the third time in four days, so I'm a little punchy. You see, I've been working on putting a book trailer together to debut on March 1st. My publisher would have been quite content to handle putting the book trailer together for me, but I had these grandiose dreams of doing something animated. I actually have an animation background, professionally. I was a computer animator, technical director and director for almost a decade in television commercials and entertainment. You know those animated M&M's? I worked on those. You ever watch the UPN stop-motion series Gary & Mike? I worked on that.

When I first hatched my animation idea, I actually looked into hiring some of my friends who still work in the industry. They were all eager to help me out, but even cutting me massive deals, it would have been too expensive or taken up so much of their time that it would have made me feel guilty. So I thought, "Come on, how hard can it be? I know how to do this stuff...basically." But the last time I animated anything was almost 15 years ago now...and the technology has changed quite a bit.

I swear, if someone was trying to write a comedy film about a guy bumbling his way through every blunder and mistake it is possible to make when trying to animate a book trailer, my own personal comedy of errors would put it to shame. I had computer crashes, bones for animating characters that didn't work, bones that did work but caused the characters to become un-animateable, computer crashes, scenes that I saved in the office that wouldn't open at home, scenes I saved at home that wouldn't open at the office, computer crashes, characters that seemed ready to go but immediately turned themselves inside-out as soon as I tried to play the animation, and of course, frames that took so long for the computer to generate that the whole thing would take months to render before anyone could see it. And don't even get me started about my grand misadventures trying to locate a render farm that could render the frames for me! That's a post all in and of itself. But in the end, and after many sleepless nights and days spent in a daze, I finally finished it with three days to spare!

I have to give a shout out here to three talented friends who helped me immensely:

Steve Bailey, who helped me figure out how to make Brad

Nick Childs, who performed the voice of Brad

Brett Caudle, who did the excellent soundtrack music for the trailer.

For those of you interested in the technical details, I did all the animation in Poser 11 Pro, which I had never used before I first fired it up for this project. It is a great value for the money, and an excellent amateur animation tool. It has some significant shortcomings when you need to use it in a more professional way--like it doesn't do distributive rendering, which is why my book trailer is not rendered in HiDef resolution. From the time I started my first shot to the moment I finished my final render it took exactly one month. I started on January 26th, and here I am, finished on February 26th.

Side by side comparison: Printed versus Embroidered

And now, on to the socks. Who would have thought that getting good promotional socks would turn out to be a big deal? I sure didn't. And yet...

It's actually really easy to get custom printed socks. The only problem is that they are printed on an ink jet printer, which means they look good from a distance, but they don't hold up so well when you examine them closely and they feel terrible on your feet. I'm kind of a sock guy. I like socks a lot, so the inferior printed socks did not really do it for me. That's when I started looking into embroidered socks. Again, you'd think it would be easy. In this case, the problem was that various sock places, while very helpful, would give me back proofs where my fish looked like crappy graphics from the most ancient of home video games back in the dark ages of the mid 1970's.

I tried out three different sock places, each time expecting that I had finally found the one that could make my socks, but being bitterly disappointed with the results each time. And then, I found EVERSOX. And they rocked it. Of course, preparing my fish image to be properly translated onto a sock took a bit of doing. I had to reduce Brad from the brilliant full color art Herb Apon drew down to a five color image. I wound up using Adobe Illustrator to do that.

Five color separation. White and black count as colors!

And then the final bit for today! I had a table in the artist's alley at Wizard World Portland, where I promoted the daylights out of the book. I was there from Friday, when they opened, to Sunday, when they closed. I gave out 300 hundred tote bags, 400 buttons, 250 book marks, 3 dozen pairs of socks, 50 tattoos and a whole bunch of Helm comics to get people familiar with my writing style. Also, the wonderful and talented Herb Apon joined me at my table on Saturday and Sunday to autograph copies of the Fish Wielder poster. We gave out about 200 posters!

No telling whether that fairly large investment in the Con and in the swag will pay off in the end, but it was nice to get to talk to people and see them get excited about the book. A few folks have begun following the Fish Wielder Facebook page and there was a big uptick in traffic on this website as well. There were also a lot of people who signed up for the Fish Wielder email list. The first email they are going to get will be the one telling them that the trailer is done and debuts on March 1st! March 1st! MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

OK, that's it for today. I hope I get the next entry up here in a more timely manner! Thanks for reading.

Saturday, December 19th, 2015: Bookmarks, Black Marks and Landmarks

Book Marks!

 I took the advice I got at Orycon37 to heart and had some bookmarks printed up (as well as a couple of other things, like the socks, and some things that haven't arrived yet). The bookmarks just came in from the printer last week and the socks arrived on Friday. I had the bookmarks done at www.24hourwristbands.com so that I'd be able to give some away at NewCon, in January. Unfortunately, NewCon informed me (after the bookmarks arrived) that they are all sold out of vendor space. Their artists' alley is also closed, so I guess I won't be giving anything away at NewCon. Dang. I know it's not a personal rejection, but it still feels like a black mark on the month. With that denial still stinging, I immediately went to the Wizard World Con website and booked a table in the artists' alley. Surprisingly, they not only had room, I even got a corner table. Wizard World Con will be February 19-21st, 2016, and I've asked my friend (and the artist who drew the cover illustration for Fish Wielder) Herb Apon, if he will join me at my table. He has tentatively agreed and thinks he may be able to get another extra special guest to join us as well. I'll hold off on the name until I hear whether he'll come or not.

I am also going to send off my application for a table at Westercon 69 today, but that one's not until July. The book won't be ready in July, but I'm hoping I may have some advanced copies or something. I should also have lots of other goodies to hand out, in addition to the posters, buttons, stickers, tattoos and bookmarks.

In Blurbquest news, I haven't heard anything back from either They Might Be Giants (whom I reached out to through their management group), or from author Nick Harkaway (whom I contacted through Facebook). TMBG hasn't responded in any way, which is sad, but at least they haven't read the book and then decided not to write a blurb. Mr. Harkaway, on the other hand, has been sent a copy of the book...so the fact that I haven't heard anything back could be bad. I know he is very busy writing his own book at the moment, so I don't want to bother him by checking in, but it is a bit agonizing waiting to hear back and worrying that if he has decided not to blurb Fish Wielder, I may never hear anything. I suppose not knowing is slightly better than being rejected definitively, but not by much. In other Blurbquest news, I also wrote to Cressida Cowell, who wrote the excellent "How to Train Your Dragon" series. I contacted her through her website and asked if she'd consider writing a blurb for the book. She wrote me a lovely email back this morning, but declined to do a blurb. She told me she never writes blurbs for anyone because she gets requests all the time, often from people she knows, and it's awkward to have to decline anyone because she doesn't like their book, so she just doesn't write them for anyone. I totally understand that position. She was very nice about it and even said, "If it's any consolation, I've never had a quote from another writer on the covers of any of my books, and they still did well, even before the movies came out...so although it might be a nice thing to have, it isn't essential." Then she wished me luck with my book. Nice lady and a very engaging writer. I just finished reading the last of the "How to Train Your Dragon" books with my ten year old and we found it both very entertaining and even moving. I'd recommend them to anyone with kids.

On to the "landmarks" bit. I signed a contract with Fiery Seas Publishing on November 10th, 2015. That makes things officially official now! WHOOT. And after that, I got assigned my very own editor. I am waiting to hear her thoughts on the manuscript. Rest assured, I will keep you all posted on how that process goes. So far, I have only had great experiences with my editors, so I'm hoping to continue the streak.



Oh, and I am investigating having socks made.

That's all for now. I hope everyone is having an excellent holiday season so far.