|
psychopomp posted:Self-hosted sales don't boost my ratings and thus improve my visibility so... But you do keep all the revenue, minus the $20 a month or whatever you spend on hosting and Stripe fees, and you have an opportunity to create a compelling fan community ala something like Patreon. It seems like the average reader won't bother going through the effort if they discovered you through Amazon, but if they love your work or came through other channels you could offer them a better experience and more options to buy in exchange for more customer loyalty than you could generate on Amazon alone. I see it more as a value-add for True Fans, especially for serial content, than anything that could compete with the mass market Amazon experience. But I haven't really seen this done well either, so I'm curious as to what I might be missing.
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 21:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 02:03 |
|
|
The main problem with what you're saying is that Amazon is the main method you have at attracting new readers. I'm a "mid-lister" or something, meaning I have an established fan base of a few hundred people, and still I'd rather give up 30% of the profit for the increased visibility. The 30% I lose on sales to Amazon directly convert to more sales and borrows, and I'm fairly certain that the sales/borrows/rankings equal more money than the 30% I lose. The larger your subscriber list gets, the more massive the benefit on Amazon from when you email blast for a new release. Even if I get really really big, say 10,000+ subscribers or something, I don't ever foresee a tipping point where the marginal percent increase in profit I would get from direct sales is worth losing that potential rankings boost on Amazon. To sell direct, you'd have to sell at $2.00 or $2.50 or something to entice them, or even $0.99 (and keeping all the profit). Doing this though is cashing out of a single pool of people one time, and all those sales don't benefit your ranking. It's like selling long-term sales for a quick cash-out. Say you have 10,000 subs and 1,000 people will buy a book when you news blast. Probably 300 of those people would bother to buy direct from you, and at 99 cents that's $300 instead of $100, at the cost of the rankings boost that 300 sales would get you. It's extremely unlikely that the rankings boost of 300 sales is worth only $200, and no matter how you expand this (like say 1,000 sales for $700) it probably will never be worth selling away your sales. One argument you could make would be that you are insulating yourself against Amazon shenanigans, and that sacrificing the rankings boost on Amazon is more about having a base of people who you can rely on no matter what Amazon does. Probably only the biggest names out there could reliably do something like this. Start doing math on how many of your subscribers tend to buy something when you newsblast it, then determine how much money you make off a fixed set of people that grows slowly per release. If a 50k-word novel makes you only $3,000, is that a livable wage after taxes? Most authors are trying to break into higher ranks and continue growing. Each release you're hoping will catch on big and start some ripple effects on other books etc. Going to direct sales kills this effect for what feels like nebulous gains. I think Selena Kitt is one person who has done something like this, but she started her own store to compete with Amazon. Of course it's no real competition, but she likely does have a few hundred readers who buy direct from her now. She's one of the biggest names in Erotica though, so you can't exactly just copy her model and make your own store.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 21:43
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:But you do keep all the revenue, minus the $20 a month or whatever you spend on hosting and Stripe fees, and you have an opportunity to create a compelling fan community ala something like Patreon. Nobody is going to bother.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 22:13
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:The main problem with what you're saying is that Amazon is the main method you have at attracting new readers. I'm a "mid-lister" or something, meaning I have an established fan base of a few hundred people, and still I'd rather give up 30% of the profit for the increased visibility. The 30% I lose on sales to Amazon directly convert to more sales and borrows, and I'm fairly certain that the sales/borrows/rankings equal more money than the 30% I lose. The larger your subscriber list gets, the more massive the benefit on Amazon from when you email blast for a new release. Even if I get really really big, say 10,000+ subscribers or something, I don't ever foresee a tipping point where the marginal percent increase in profit I would get from direct sales is worth losing that potential rankings boost on Amazon. For 70% royalties I agree with your points, and in fact KDP Select is an exclusive agreement so you couldn't do what I'm talking about anyway. You could only use the model I'm suggesting with vanilla KDP. The model I'm suggesting would basically use Amazon purely as a market force, with the revenue from the 35% royalty you get from KDP sales being second priority to your web subscribers. Obviously you have to be where the readers are, and the readers are on Kindle, but instead of Amazon revenue being your primary goal, conversion is. The game is the same otherwise, since the higher your ranking, the more readers you are likely to convert. The point of this model is not actually to siphon casual customers from Amazon. That isn't going to happen. Anyone who just browses around their genres and hits the button to buy whatever's interesting from the kindle store isn't going to immediately jump ship and give you their credit card information on another site entirely. The point is to give people who really like your work the opportunity to get a better experience from you, in exchange for being a better, more reliable customer. I consult to professional creators and non profits. I've worked with an author that got screwed by the Hachette debacle, and the KU changes make me increasingly nervous about suggesting KDP as a primary revenue platform. My goal is to create a sustainable, somewhat predictable model and I just don't see that happening with Amazon at the reins. I do, however, see creators using Patreon, Gumroad and their own subscription platforms hitting much closer to that mark.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 22:22
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:As for the amount of borrows going up "organically" from June 2015 to July 2015, here's a historic look at the amount of borrows. If we project the data forward, we can estimate that there were probably 10% more borrows in July than June. Something like that. So any given novel might have been borrowed 10% more times in July than June. That's not enough of a jump to hide a significant number of incomplete reads in the new system. If a 250 KENPC novel got 100 borrows and $135 in June, in July it might have gotten 110 borrows and $148 under the old system. If we're guessing that this same novel might have gotten 200 borrows in July under the new system and only been read to 40% each time, I don't know where those borrows came from. quote:I have one month of data and my own numbers but I suspect that this will become more and more clear in the coming months. Novelists will not be happy that they are actually being paid less under this new system than under the old one. Is the total revenue for a given novel lower in KU2 than KU1? I have no novels so I don't know. quote:Shorts writers should be rioting but it hardly shocks me that some authors can't adapt to life outside Kindle Unlimited, I feel like I can't do it myself. There's little point in going wide while KU still exists. At least that's what the last 45 days have taught me.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 22:48
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:The point is to give people who really like your work the opportunity to get a better experience from you, in exchange for being a better, more reliable customer.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 22:51
|
|
|
moana posted:We already do this with mailing list freebies and sales. The main benefit of a street team isn't getting an extra 30% of profits from a few hundred superfans (woohoo, go buy yourself lunch with that money), it's the REVIEWS and the RELEASE DAY RANK BOOST that comes from having them buy through Amazon. That makes sense. I certainly see the point that anything that would cannibalize ranking would do more harm than good. I just can't escape the feeling that there's a way to grow the mailing list full of fans you can grow through your KDP business into something broader than Amazon. I suppose a better question to ask in this thread is: Do you have more than one revenue stream from your work? If not, doesn't that make you nervous?
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 23:10
|
|
|
Jalumibnkrayal posted:If we project the data forward, we can estimate that there were probably 10% more borrows in July than June. Yet payouts were 3% less. I mean I don't know how else to say that this was a 13% drop in payouts in a system that was already paying novelists less than what they thought they deserved. quote:If a 250 KENPC novel got 100 borrows and $135 in June, in July it might have gotten 110 borrows and $148 under the old system. Let's say those 110 borrows were at the high end of the industry and that they had a 66% read rate. That means that for each of those 110 borrows, 165 pages were read. That's a total of 18150 pages read. At 0.57 cents per page, that's $103.46. In June we made $135, in July we would have made $148 under June's system, but in reality in July we made just about $100. Note that 250 KENPC is on the low end of what we would consider a novel but still a lot of words.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 23:39
|
|
|
Dr. Fishopolis posted:Do you have more than one revenue stream from your work? If not, doesn't that make you nervous? KU 2.0 sucks balls and it's getting worse month by month to start a self-publishing career imo. I work at this with the expectation that every next month I could be making zero dollars, and I have a healthy emergency fund that is conservative even by BFC standards. I would not recommend doing this unless you have a lot of savings and/or a strong backup career.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2015 23:56
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:Yet payouts were 3% less. I mean I don't know how else to say that this was a 13% drop in payouts in a system that was already paying novelists less than what they thought they deserved. But any given novelist doesn't care about the total percentage drop in payouts. They care about boosted revenue, which is supported by the reduction in revenue to short story authors. If my check went from $5k to $9k but the pool shrunk or something, why should I care in the short term or even medium term? Long term (decades) we're all better served by lots of competent competition, but I don't know how to unfuck B&N or get Apple interested in actually selling eBooks. quote:Let's say those 110 borrows were at the high end of the industry and that they had a 66% read rate. That means that for each of those 110 borrows, 165 pages were read. That's a total of 18150 pages read. At 0.57 cents per page, that's $103.46. In June we made $135, in July we would have made $148 under June's system, but in reality in July we made just about $100. That's my point. Your contention was that novels might be borrowed way more than before but be paid way less due to obfuscation behind Pages Read. There were probably only 10% more borrows in July, and if your theory held true then novelists would have seen massively reduced revenue (as you demonstrated). But I have to defer to the novelists to offer anecdotal evidence to that regard, and the posts that I've read seem to point to higher revenue for novels under KU2, which is pretty much what we all expected to happen. I think you were right before, it's all about the adaptation. We know what the proper path is: write longer works. Now that we have our strategy we just need to execute it. This is coming from the guy who has been 9k into his first 50k novel for three weeks. I made $2 today, but the lower I go the better the rebound is going to feel.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 00:41
|
|
|
Jalumibnkrayal posted:If my check went from $5k to $9k but the pool shrunk or something, why should I care in the short term or even medium term? The change was made to benefit novelists and is not doing so, while also severely hurting people who write less than novels. If your argument here is something like "If I'm surfing to shore what do I care if all my friends are drowning?" then I won't argue, there's a lot of sociopaths in the writing community. If something is benefiting someone else, they'll deride the other person for selling out. If someone is benefiting them, all is right in the world. I'm not going to argue the math, if my above example of a novelist going from $148 to $103 isn't convincing you then it's not likely that anything will (except Hugh Howey apparently).
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 01:09
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:The change was made to benefit novelists and is not doing so, while also severely hurting people who write less than novels. With that kind of setup, it'd be hard for any reader to look sympathetically at an expose of a publisher that won't tell it's authors how much they've sold and has decimated most of their incomes. Maybe i'm just a tragic optimist, but i'd hope that if enough authors complain loud enough - especially right now - they might be forced to shift their stance. But something tells me that's just naivety.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 01:55
|
|
|
To cut through some of the gloom and doom, here is a really fun email I got from one of my readers:quote:Hi angel opportunity,
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:01
|
|
|
I'm gonna throw a few digits into the ring here... So far in August, I've had 276,238 pages read on one of my books. This book is 207 pages long according to Amazon's KENPC calculation. This is 1,334 complete reads. However, the average for actual good books is around 60% read, and this thing is a real piece of poo poo. If I am generous and assume that I share that lofty 60% read-through, that's 2,224 people. Based on the rank it reached (#377 in the store, and staying under #600 for over two weeks) and past data at comparable ranks, I have every reason to believe that there are significantly more borrows than 2,224 in the background. My first novel never dipped below rank #1000 in the pre-KU era and still sold over 4,000 copies in a month, for reference. However, since I can't prove that these other borrowers exist because Amazon no longer gives us the numbers (this is actually key to the little con of calling it an improvement for long authors)... let's just pretend the 60% applies. KENPC for those 276,238 pages: $1,574.56. $1.30 per borrow on the 2,224 people who read 60% of the way through: $2,891.20. Difference: A 45.5% decrease in earnings for a novel-length work. This is erotic romance, so what if my read-through rate is lower than 60%? What if, let's say, I'm only getting 40% read-through because people get their jollies off and then grow bored? That's 3,335 readers. We're up to $4,335.50 in $1.30 borrows now. Suddenly, this is a 63.7% decrease in royalties. What if I'm super amazing and somehow blow all the best authors away with an 80% read-through on average? $2167. I'm still losing 27% compared to the old KU system, even with a full novel-length work. The point is... almost everyone loses under KU 2.0 compared to where they would've been under KU 1.0. It doesn't matter how long your books are. You just lose a little less if you write long.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:05
|
|
|
Sundae posted:
Sorry, but this was really funny for some reason.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:17
|
|
|
Sundae posted:The point is... almost everyone loses under KU 2.0 compared to where they would've been under KU 1.0. It doesn't matter how long your books are. You just lose a little less if you write long. If Amazon isn't lying about the amount of money paid out, then it's a zero sum game. It's literally impossible for everyone to lose. If you want to say that the numbers are a lie and that they've cut the fund while saying that they increased it, then that's an entirely different conversation, but if they did pay out more to authors and you personally received less then it's either because there are more authors or because somehow some segment is benefiting from the change.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:20
|
|
|
People are suggesting taking an old novel that isn't selling anymore, removing it from KU, and throwing it into the back of your new novel. Then in the blurb have the first line say something like, "This is a full-length novel of XX,XXX words, and it includes another free, full-length novel of XX,XXX words!" lol
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:20
|
|
|
Not to get conspiracy theory or anything (this means I'm going to get conspiracy theory) but how possible is it that Amazon has a chosen handful of authors who they decided to pay the full KENPC for each borrow regardless of pages read (Hugh Howey would be within this segment). It would be like an incentive for the big name authors they want to attract, and they could finance it by loving over everyone else.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:22
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:Not to get conspiracy theory or anything (this means I'm going to get conspiracy theory) but how possible is it that Amazon has a chosen handful of authors who they decided to pay the full KENPC for each borrow regardless of pages read (Hugh Howey would be within this segment). It would be like an incentive for the big name authors they want to attract, and they could finance it by loving over everyone else. There are several self publishers noticing that Konrath and Howey are getting additional promotion while HM Ward and other outspoken critics are getting less and less. IIt's borderline conspiracy to suggest that there's connection but it's also not completely outlandish that there's some sort of quid pro quo happening.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:30
|
|
|
Mr. Belding posted:If Amazon isn't lying about the amount of money paid out, then it's a zero sum game. It's literally impossible for everyone to lose. If you want to say that the numbers are a lie and that they've cut the fund while saying that they increased it, then that's an entirely different conversation, but if they did pay out more to authors and you personally received less then it's either because there are more authors or because somehow some segment is benefiting from the change. Also, borrows are probably up 10 percent while payouts are down 3 percent. Yeah I mean some people are winners in the new system but it is NOT zero sum.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:32
|
|
|
The fact that Amazon refuses to give units borrowed data so no one can actually compare what they would have made under the two systems is so gross. Very suggestive that they are screwing over a majority of their authors, possibly to the great benefit of a select few, and don't want anyone to be able to prove it and get together and throw a real big fit that might change something. Woooooooooo. It's true that if Amazon is paying out the same/greater pool, and someone is making less, then SOMEONE is making more. The question is who and how many. I suppose also "what are you going to do about it?" Also, the real winner is always the same.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:40
|
|
|
Dr. Kloctopussy posted:It's true that if Amazon is paying out the same/greater pool, and someone is making less, then SOMEONE is making more. The definition of a zero sum game is "a situation in which each participant's gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s)." Unless you're counting Amazon as one of the participants here (which I don't think many people are), a loss for some authors does not mean a gain for other authors. If the payout had been $10m this month, would it still be a zero sum game? $1m? I got my bonus emails, exactly what I assumed plus three title bonuses. A nice surprise for me but bodes even worse for how much money people actually made.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:49
|
|
|
Sundae posted:I'm gonna throw a few digits into the ring here... Thank you for sharing, but it sounds like your novel is getting about half the KENPC it should be (assuming it's 50k words). Are you compiling a .mobi out of scrivener? If not, you really should be. My 5500 word short clocks in at 38 KENPC with no page or chapter breaks. Do you have a number of borrows for June for that title. You can probably add 10% for July and another 10% for August and see how that jives with your math. Mind you it's a work that is about 20% shorter than "barely a novel" so I would definitely expect revenue loss under KU2.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 02:51
|
|
|
No, 200-250 is about dead on for a 50K work. That's about on par (ratio-wise) with all my other novel-length works as well (range: 50K words to 144K words), and I've even asked for recalculations because they screwed up one of mine before (83,000-word story being calculated to 50-something pages originally). This also matches most of the KENPCs I'm seeing for other authors at two different forums. This one wasn't out in June or July, so I can't compare there. It was released on August 1. quote:If Amazon isn't lying about the amount of money paid out, then it's a zero sum game. It's literally impossible for everyone to lose. If you want to say that the numbers are a lie and that they've cut the fund while saying that they increased it, then that's an entirely different conversation, but if they did pay out more to authors and you personally received less then it's either because there are more authors or because somehow some segment is benefiting from the change. It is only a zero sum game if you assume Amazon doesn't arbitrarily set the total funding to whatever value they want to get for a final value, which is not supported because they've propped the fund up every single month since its inception. In particular, they increased it every month under KU 1.0 to maintain a rate of $1.30-1.35 per borrow once they got a feel for the reading habits of their customers. This implies, under KU 1.0, an intended per-borrow outcome. If they really wanted it to be a zero-sum game under KU 1.0, they would've left the fund alone and let the numbers sway. (However, this would've made people scream bloody murder and made them look terrible while fighting over royalties / payouts against TradPub in negotiations that were ongoing at thet ime.) The same scenario may (no idea with N=1 months) apply for KU 2.0. Amazon is setting that fund value to whatever best suits them as a final relative value. The funding skews now that we no longer know their general intent due to it being per page (and that we have only one month of data). All we know is that our overall predictions for the payout for July was within $0.0001 per page of the actual based on June's funding. If you assume that Amazon will never change the funding again and that you can safely assume it'll stay wherever it is, then yes it's zero-sum. Sundae fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Aug 18, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:02
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:The change was made to benefit novelists and is not doing so I haven't seen someone say "my novel made less money in KU2 than in KU1." I've seen a LOT of people saying the exact opposite, at least in the four-five figure a month club. quote:sociopaths in the writing community. Whoa hey we're all friends here- quote:then it's not likely that anything will (except Hugh Howey apparently). RAPIERS AT DAWN! But seriously, I apologize if I got under your skin. It wasn't my intention. KU2 is poo poo for short fiction, I think we can all agree on that. I have to defer to your calculation that it's poo poo for novels as well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:05
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:The definition of a zero sum game is "a situation in which each participant's gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s)." Unless you're counting Amazon as one of the participants here (which I don't think many people are), a loss for some authors does not mean a gain for other authors. If the payout had been $10m this month, would it still be a zero sum game? $1m? I should have stated all my assumptions: assuming overall borrow rates are the same, assuming the overall pool is the same/greater, etc. etc. etc. I'm not arguing with you. Like you pointed out, if borrow rates go up and the pool goes down, everyone can lose. Maybe nearly all authors are losing. Amazon's data-witholding cleverly makes it difficult to prove. I don't doubt the estimates posted in this thread; y'all have always been solid tracking your numbers. Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Also, the real winner is always the same. ^^^ yeah, I was including Amazon as one of the participants. Dr. Kloctopussy fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Aug 18, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:06
|
|
|
Amazon plays eleven dimensional chess which is why this two or, if I give myself credit, three dimensional aggressive move doesn't make much sense to me.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:17
|
|
|
Sundae posted:No, 200-250 is about dead on for a 50K work. That's about on par (ratio-wise) with all my other novel-length works as well (range: 50K words to 144K words), and I've even asked for recalculations because they screwed up one of mine before (83,000-word story being calculated to 50-something pages originally). This also matches most of the KENPCs I'm seeing for other authors at two different forums. The amount of money you're leaving on the table makes me cry. 150 words per KENPC is the target. It sounds like you're up in the 200-250 words per KENPC, which is horrific. quote:This one wasn't out in June or July, so I can't compare there. It was released on August 1. Ahh, gotcha.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:20
|
|
|
Jalumibnkrayal posted:The amount of money you're leaving on the table makes me cry. 150 words per KENPC is the target. It sounds like you're up in the 200-250 words per KENPC, which is horrific. Where are you getting this 150 words thing? Serious question, because I have nearly a hundred stories and novels and not a single one of them was under 200 words per KENPC prior to me pulling all the shorts out of KU2, and even post-recalculation I didn't get that book under 200.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:27
|
|
|
170 per KENPC is what I've been seeing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:36
|
|
|
Sundae posted:Where are you getting this 150 words thing? Serious question, because I have nearly a hundred stories and novels and not a single one of them was under 200 words per KENPC prior to me pulling all the shorts out of KU2, and even post-recalculation I didn't get that book under 200. Scrivener, 1.0 line spacing, 1em spacing to the top of paragraphs.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:43
|
|
|
Jalumibnkrayal posted:I apologize if I got under your skin. It's very frustrating to see the numbers not add up and for other people to be like "No you see Amazon and Hugh Howey say..." without any kind of numerical backing whatsoever.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 03:45
|
|
|
All right, here's a revised cover and blurb for my book (sci-fi/fantasy, if it helps), with credits and a lot of grateful thanks to the awesome goons in the thread: quote:At the edge of the known galaxy, captain Shara Torellon struggles with a crippled ship and an exhausted bank account.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 15:12
|
|
|
I like the changes you made to the text size, font positioning, but it's way too yellow. It's yellow on yellow, and it's hard to read like that. Look at the thumbnail, especially the "Book I of the..." part, and you'll notice it's almost like camouflage. The author name over those red clouds looks okay, I think. And "Sundered" over that darker part near the top also seems okay. I'm not sure what the solution would be. Some kind of dark blue or violet MIGHT work (basically look at the color wheel and see colors opposite on the wheel). In the cover I mentioned earlier, you see this working as an inverse. The title is the orange like your image, and then the text would be violet/purple like the background here:  I agree that stock image is pretty cool, but it will be a struggle to get good colors on it since it's so orange/yellow all over. Try messing around with some shades of violet and purple, including gradients from violet to purple, and see if it looks any better. Sometimes it may end up looking more readable, but still not aesthetically pleasing. Since your background is mostly warm, you want some darker and cool violets. This is a suggestion, and it may end up looking awful...I'm having a hard time visualizing it, but I think it's worth trying.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 15:20
|
|
|
Jalumibnkrayal posted:Scrivener, 1.0 line spacing, 1em spacing to the top of paragraphs. EngineerSean posted:170 words Okay - let me take a look at my settings and see if I have something weird going on. None of mine were/are sub-200. Commissar -- I still think the text could be better, but it's majorly improved over the first version. I'll take a stab at it tonight and PM you a link.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 15:22
|
|
|
I've seen people saying that certain line spacing definitely inflates the KENPC
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 15:27
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:
All right, I've recoloured the cover text. To be honest, I'm not sure if purple goes well with the cover, or whether it's just my own lack of skill that makes it look so. In any case, here are the redone covers (links, because they're big files): I'm partial to these: Aquamarine Light Aquamarine Green They're not the only ones I've got, though: Light Blue Dark Blue Slightly Dark Green Light Green Light Bluish Purple Purple
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 17:08
|
|
|
Some of those almost work, but none of them really do. Sorry! Your original yellow one looks better than most of those, and is about on par with the best of them (aquamarine ones). I may try to photoshop something tonight if I get time just because I'm curious if I could get it to look good. I'll stop suggesting stuff because clearly purple/violet is not the answer here.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 17:14
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 17:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 02:03 |
|
|
Fair enough; I'm just starting out with image editing myself, and I haven't quite got a grip on how to do all that fancy stuff with font effects and whatnot. I think what makes The Dark Forest's title work is that it's bright where it needs to be and vice versa; I'm not sure how to do that myself, so it's all one solid colour block. I tried embossing and shadowing the text, but as you can see, there's only so much I can do for now. EDIT: One final set of attempts before I go to bed: Gold Slightly Lighter Gold Silver Also, I'm guessing Draft 2 Digital isn't where I should start my literary career?  I was planning to go Kindle Unlimited anyway (it's a long book, around 100k words post-editing); is that a good idea?
CommissarMega fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Aug 18, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2015 17:20
|
|