My story Houseproud is now available in SciFutures’ City of the Future anthology: http://www.amazon.com/SciFutures-Presents-City-Future/dp/0692695982
I made a trailer for my baseball steampunk novel. The book is just now on Amazon, but I’m not promoting it yet because I’m waiting for the print and eBook listings to be merged onto one page. Apparently that takes a few days(?). Still, it can boughtened!
The trailer, and Amazon link, are on my site, which I turned into a landing page.
If anyone here signs up for the free sample, please PM me. I’m not sure I have the form’s link to my mailing list set up correctly and I’d love to test it. Many kinks to work out.
I intend to use the trailer as the basis for FB advertising, which will be my primary marketing venue at first.
That’s a pretty cool trailer. What tool did you use to make it? I am hearing Jonathan Coulton’s song Kenesaw Mountain Landis playing in the background too…
I downloaded the trial version of Adobe After Effects, then purchased this Adobe After Effects template. If anyone isn’t aware, you can find templates for just about any need at nominal costs. This one was only $33.
I created the 10 still graphics, using art from the book cover, from public domain works and some cheap stock photos. I used paint.net.
I found some great Kevin MacLeod music that worked better than the song suggested in the template. It is royalty free for mp3s, but I bought (for $5) his better quality .wav files, mainly to give him a token payment.
The template did not synch up well with the music, but I figured out that by changing the frame rate slightly, the two synched perfectly. I merged all of this in After Effects and added closing title/credits using Adobe Premier (also the free trial).
What I like is that it is less than a minute long. Book trailers longer than that are, in my view, usually too long.
And Miramon: congrats on Houseproud. I will check it out. Loved the Coulter song; had not heard that one before.
Yeah, props on the trailer. It’s got a nice crisp pace and sharp feel to it. Good luck.
That was so cool, tylertoo. I’m not a baseball guy (and not as big a steampunk guy as someone who’d put Wild Wild West in his “Top 10 Cheesy-Awesome Movies” list should be), but damned if I don’t kinda wanna buy it with real dollars now! I’d heard about stuff in that vein via the episodes of the Rocking Self-Publishing podcast I listened to a few months ago when I was binging it, but seeing it all come together is really neat!
Thanks, Armando. Your reaction is gratifying because my book is so niche, I’m hoping the trailer can bring sales from those who otherwise might avoid it.
A trailer can be a great sales tool, if done well. The challenge is doing one well on a budget. After Effects templates allow that.
Thank you for sharing it. Even just the first sentence reminded me of why I loved your book so much!
Well, I’m publishing, finally. The preorders are all live or nearly there, the release date is set, my wife (by happy chance, a freelance editor) is tearing apart my second-to-last-draft, and I’m pretty excited.
If you’re interested in hard sci-fi and/or naval adventure, you should have a look.
How do you guys get over the “I just got home from work and would rather watch TV” hump and make yourselves write?
Also: congratulation, Fishbreath! That is really cool.
Hehe, I haven’t watched TV regularly for 20 years :) But there are games and books to distract me instead. One way to get things done is to join a writing group that will give you effective deadlines for the next meeting to contribute something for critiquing. Also if you don’t workshop, don’t crit, and stay isolated there will likely be some ghastly defects in your writing you never discover otherwise.
Some days, I don’t. I put my first drafts up online as serial fiction, though, so I at least have a minimum pace I try to hit. Some weeks, I don’t write much more than the 500-700 words I have due. Other weeks, I’m in a groove, and write a few thousand. I suspect I’m going to have some groove weeks soon—editing/rewriting/publishing is proving to be a bit of a slog, and I have several stories I’m excited to pick back up once I’m done.
Also: congratulation, Fishbreath! That is really cool.
Thanks! It’s something I’ve been talking about doing for years. My wife finally told me to put up or shut up, so here we are.
Very cool. Just pre-ordered.
Get obsessed about it. Get up early. Take a bus/train instead of driving and write while you commute.
But most of all, turn off the TV.
And here’s one last tip: try a NaNoWriMo. Or Camp NaNoWriMo. They worked for me.
Why, thank you.
I’ve been meaning to read Lord Bart’s adventure for a while now. Are you on Barnes and Noble, or anywhere that sells .epub? I’m one of the rare Nook men. :P
My pleasure. Looking forward to it.
My book only just went live, and for now I’m exclusive to Amazon to be on Kindle Unlimited. Probably in 90 days I’ll launch on other platforms.
I did a soft launch because the process is new to me. I wish I’d done pre-orders like you. I plan on doing a true launch next week, with a two-day price drop. Finishing up stuff now for that. My marketing will focus on Facebook ads, because I have a good trailer. Its a great venue for targeted video ads.
Amazon preorders are kind of a wash anyway—Barnes and Noble and most other e-book retailers will count all the preorders as first-day sales, to drive you up the bestseller list. Kindle preorders count as sales for the day they’re sold, so no first-day bump.
It is nifty from a buzz perspective, though, and lets me do the little online launch party thing I have planned.
Anyway, I look forward to your wider release.
Really? I didn’t realize how that worked. That’s disappointing news.
As for the NOOK, you can easily convert MOBI to ePUB with Calibre.
I have a love/hate with amazon pre-orders. My last book in pre-order had about 1,400 pre-orders and around 1325 of those paid out. Now, from a monetary standpoint it was nice to see all of that money hit my account on release day. The downside was that I was unable to peak in any of the best seller lists. I think my best rank was around 2K. My last book that was setup as a pre-order peaked around 1K sales rank. With pre-orders I see the money upfront but then sales decline rapidly. Since I’m a full-time writer it’s a balancing act. Do I go for the big payday or stretch out sales over a few months?
Then I switched genres and didn’t do a pre-order. Sales were very slow for the first few weeks then I hit a couple of #1 best seller lists. That’s something I hadn’t seen in a long time. I don’t know that a pre-order would have been all that successful for the book.
Note: I’m all in with 'zon. I put all of my books into the kindle unlimited program as soon as they’re released.
Yeah, it’s dumb.
As for the NOOK, you can easily convert MOBI to ePUB with Calibre.
Does Amazon provide plain old .mobi downloads? If so, neat. Maybe I’ll do my part for tylertoo’s position on Amazon’s Fiction->Steampunk->Baseball bestseller list, then, instead of waiting for an epub solution.
Crusis, thanks for the perspective. (It’s always nice to hear from someone who’s in the position I’m aiming to end up in.) I may end up skipping preorders on Amazon next time. I guess I’ll just have to publish something else out of my backlog so I have something to run a comparison with.
For its preorder flaws, Amazon does have some great tools for newbies like me. I was initially concerned about pricing We Sail Off To War at $2.99—it’s a shortish novella, and my initial impulse was that 30% of a novel’s cost for 20% of a novel’s content wasn’t a great deal for buyers. Amazon’s pricing tool suggested my second impulse was right, though. I didn’t want to sell at $0.99, and the royalty percentage jump between $1.99 and $2.99 is too big for me to expect to make it up in volume. The pricing tool, which purports to look at unit sales vs. profits for books of similar genre and size, bore that thought out: $0.99 sells the most copies, but $2.99 yields the biggest author take.
One option is to do a special .99 release price. Put something along the lines of “** Release special for 2 days only - .99 **” It doesn’t make a lot of money but you can pick up a lot of sales quickly. When you price it higher you already have some sales rank.
A friend of mine who is very successful (five figures a month) tried a crazy book launch. He put his new book in Kindle Unlimited for .99. The day after release he did 3 free days. He had a ton of downloads and picked up about 50 reviews very quickly. Then the book was priced at $3.99 and it had a lot of buzz. The cool part is that he used a pen name and ended up creating a large following for his new series. Since then he’s been approached by several of the Big 5’s to see about selling the series but he politely turned them down.