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.

Monday, November 23rd, 2015: Fish Wielders of OryCon37!

At OryCon 37! My first table at a con!

Well! I just closed out my first experience running a table at a science fiction and fantasy convention. What an awesome event, and what fun and interesting people! I've done several signing events for my graphic novel at comicons before, but those were organized and run by Dark Horse comics, so I didn't really have to do anything but show up. This was very different. I was running a table in the "fan" section because, of course, Fish Wielder isn't actually out yet, so I didn't have any books to sign or sell. Instead, I did a promotional blitz. I gave out almost 200 buttons (mostly of Brad), tons of stickers and temporary tattoos, and dozens of Fish Wielder posters. I also gave out a bunch of copies of my graphic novel, The Helm, so that folks who couldn't see my book yet could get a taste of my writing style to see if they might be interested in the book when it comes out in August of 2016.

Overall, I'd have to say that the event felt pretty successful. Lots of folks seemed intrigued by the book, dozens of people gave me their emails for a Fish Wielder newsletter and I had a lot of fascinating conversations with warm and generous people. And a few delightfully odd ones! I also got to try out potential elevator pitches of the book, and I was given some excellent advice to help me do even better next time.

For those of you considering doing something like this in the future, here were some of my learnings:

1. Bring a big roll of painters' tape. You just never know what you might need to tape, but believe me, there will be things.

2. Bring a bowl of candy to give away! Lots of people stopped by to snag a snack and stayed to chat about the book.

3. At least at this kind of con, most people didn't want to have to lug posters around--so smaller, easier to carry swag might be better. It did help that I brought a big supply of rubber bands to keep the posters rolled.

4. Buttons seem to trump everything else (even free graphic novels).

5. Small cards--or better yet, book marks--with all the important details about release date, publisher, publisher website, my website, etc. would have been very helpful. Several people in the book selling business stopped by the table and gave me this bit of useful advice.

6. Everybody at the con seemed to be collecting ribbons to stick on their badges--so ribbons might have been good too.

7. Put out a pad of paper for people to write down their email addresses. I had intended to do that on my computer, but there was no power available. And make sure you have a pen right beside your pad, and a spare pen in case your first pen mysteriously vanishes.

I also applied a bunch of temporary tattoos at the table, so that there was an army of fish wielders walking the con. Here are a few of the brave folks who will be wearing Brad for the next week or two:

Saturday, November 7th, 2015: BlurbQuest Score! Piers Anthony Blurb and New Shirt

A Spell for Chameleon, A Blurb for Jim!

After 16 days of waiting (way sooner than I expected), Piers Anthony, New York Times Bestselling author (21 times over) wrote back and sent me a review of Fish Wielder for blurbing purposes. Here's the blurb:

"This is one wild romp! I suspect some smarter reader than I could do a doctoral dissertation just fathoming the fantasy genre's famous legends that are parodied here. I'm not sure I've seen such preposterously determined critic-baiting parody since Xanth or Asprin's Myth-begotten series. I recommend it to anyone."

Here's the longer version from the email I received on Halloween morning:

"I read Fish Wielder, by Jim Hardison. This is one wild romp! It's a deliberate parody of heroic fantasy that reminds me obscurely of the wrestler Gorgeous George. He was one who found a way to make his fame, distinguishing himself from all the other pro wrestlers in a genre noted for its flair and fakery, by getting a permanent done on his long blond hair. Fans noticed that. I remember a review that remarked that underneath all the wild showmanship was actually a pretty good wrestler. Okay, underneath layer on layer of highly unlikely characterization and adventure is actually a pretty good story, told by a writer who has a pretty fair knowledge of his craft. I suspect some smarter reader than I could do a doctoral dissertation just fathoming the Fantasy genre's famous legends that are parodied here. Just when you think that the final twisted thread has been unraveled, a whole nother level of ludicrous coincidence is unveiled. I'm not sure I've seen such preposterously determined critic-baiting parody since Xanth or Asprin's Myth-begotten series. I recommend it to anyone.

Piers Anthony"

I wish I could use more of what he said on the cover of Fish Wielder, but we'll probably wind up shortening it to "This is one wild romp! I'm not sure I've seen such preposterously determined critic-baiting parody since Xanth or Asprin's Myth-begotten series. I recommend it to anyone," because, you know, shortness. Shortness is good when it comes to blurbs.

In other BlurbQuest news, I have also finally sent the Fish Wielder manuscript off to Nick Harkaway. This makes me more than a little nervous. You'll remember that his qualifiers when agreeing to look at my manuscript were, "I blurb if something is awesome, within one of the areas where someone might give a damn what I think, and (more tricky) if I get to it in a timely fashion. I say the last one's tricky because I'm wrestling my own book atm and it's putting up a hell of a fight..." So, that's fairly stiff criteria--starting with "if it's awesome". Will he think it's awesome? Will he feel like it's in an area where people would care what he thinks? I just don't know. While all of Nick's books have a wicked sense of humor to them, they are not really comedies by any stretch. He is a serious writer and has been one of my favorites ever since I read his debut novel, "The Gone Away World". That's part of what makes me nervous. Not only is he a great writer, his work is much more serious than mine. Fish Wielder is really a very ridiculous book. While I feel that it has some serious themes (and some genuine merits, I hope), they lie deeply burried under layers and layers of silliness. Silliness, as I have learned over the years, is not to everyone's taste. Some people just don't like it. So, there is a very real possibility that Nick won't like Fish Wielder because of that--or for a dozen other potential reasons--like maybe he'll just think it sucks. And then, of course, he may think that it's not really in his genre of writing and therefore not something he should blurb about.

I wonder if other authors get this nervous when they send their work off to be read by writers they admire and respect? That's kind of a funny thing with writing--there is no objective way to qualify that something is actually, definitively good, so it opens up a lot of room for self doubt and second guessing. My graphic novel, "The Helm" was pretty well received, but there were some folks who really hated it, too.

Oh well, I guess I was pretty nervous when I sent the book off to Piers Anthony too, and that has worked out very nicely. I'll just have to wait and see...and I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

In other news, I got another test T-shirt back from the printers. This one is of the Princess Nalweegie and the image is taken from Herb Apon's excellent cover art. Here it is:

Friday, October 23rd, 2015: Odds and Ends and T-Shirts and Things

More Test T-Shirts!

Got a few more test shirts in yesterday. There were even some women's black T-shirts in the shipment, like the one on the screen right side of this picture. I'm pretty happy with the quality and look, but they are fairly expensive to make, especially because they have printing on both the front and the back. Turns out, all the dark shirts are expensive, although they are also the most popular whenever I ask for people's opinions. If I'm going to make a decent number of shirts for promotional give-aways, I've realized I will most likely have to create a one-sided white shirt option. So, I put this one together:

I've ordered two of these in different price brackets to see which one works out the best. The cheaper of the two is about half the price of a dark t-shirt, which would mean I could print double the number. Of course, double the number of shirts doesn't help if people don't want to wear them, so there's that. I still think it would be ideal to find some local t-shirt printing shop where I could check the quality of a single shirt without having to wait a couple of weeks in between ordering and getting the shirt. I hate waiting for the shirts to show up--especially when they don't turn out well. Then it's a waste of both time and money. Oh well, time to do some more T-shirt research.

In other news, I haven't heard back from anyone else on the Blurbquest front. Bruce Campbell and Eric Idle haven't responded yet. I didn't really expect to hear anything back so quickly, but that doesn't make waiting any easier. I'm not very good at waiting. I find it tiring and depressing. As I think about it now, I guess maybe I should have picked a different theater of endeavor. Being a writer generally seems to involve a lot of waiting.

I still haven't managed to find contact info for Terry Jones yet, and I haven't gotten my act together enough to get the snail mail requests written and sent off to They Might Be Giants and Kurt Russell, or to draft up a blurb request for David Wong.