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I self-pubbed something about five years ago and got very reasonable, helpful feedback from you guys on why it was a spectacular nonsuccess. I have now (yes) found a little time to look at it again. I had a scroll of the old thread to remind me what you said. I went back and read the book again, because I had forgotten the details - being only 42k words, it took me a whole two evenings. I am at peace with it. It's good. However, it does need a line edit - many commas would be better off as sentence breaks - and it desperately needs a new cover. The old one wasn't good to begin with, meanwhile the standards have become something else entirely in the past five years. Here's a jab at the cover:   The second cover has a quote from the one (and only) review the book has on amazon.com. Is that too cheeky? If it is not too cheeky, am I presenting it correctly, or does having just the url imply Jeff himself said so? The blurb was also considered to not "pop" enough. How about this? quote:After decades of decay, a vast city in space is on the brink of failure. Three generations of exile have been unkind to it. Recently, its inhabitants have been increasingly unkind towards each other, also. I assume I can go in, do a line edit and reupload the book without changing anything in the actual listing and losing the existing review? Any good resources for keywords past https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201216150 ? As you might suspect, I don't expect to make any money five years after launch. I would just like to do justice to the effort that went into it at the time. Two evenings of reading, a few hours of photoshop and a few hours more for the line edit seems like a fair price for feeling good about it. If there is something obvious that I could do with a small investment of time and no investment of money that might help people find the drat thing, it would of course be appreciated, but I understand it's much too late for effort. I have followed the thread enough to see the basics repeated. Booksprout looks very interesting and I wish I'd had something like it on hand back then. I don't expect them to be interested in a fresh edit of some old nonseller, even if the little feedback I got on it was positive. Time does bloody fly, doesn't it. Based on what I read here, one needs to write 4-6 books per year to expect long term success. I've had another, unrelated book(series) in the works. It took me a month-long holiday to write the bulk of the first installment, but it has now been sitting for two years because I haven't had one more free week to clean up the timeline (need to rewrite one chapter with the same action but more appropriate timing) and edit. An hour in the evening after work is OK for doodling in photoshop or replacing commas with dots, but not enough to get indepth. Maybe I'll have time to do this properly when I'm retired. Only a few decades to go.
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Jul 22, 2019 20:39
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Paramemetic posted:I think you'd need to cite the reviewer and not the website it's on. They'll do you up for misrepresenting an endorsement. I suspected as much, thanks. Someone's username just seemed like a strange thing to put on there. I guess it's no quote then.
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Jul 22, 2019 21:02
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Unfortunately my mother has passed, but I'll be sure to ask yours for a quote next time I see her.
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Jul 23, 2019 06:30
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If that was a serious suggestion, my response may have been too charged. I would argue a "quote" from someone obviously biased in my favour seems terribly out of place on the cover of a noir murder mystery. It might ring better on something lighthearted, give viewers a taste of the humour. It has been established that the quote will be omitted. The url is too general and would be misconstrued. Calling a (non-professional) reader out by username for reviewing the story feels outlandishly inappropriate, in addition to looking strange. As far as authority goes - ignoring the problems above for the sake of discussion - if reviews from the general reader base were without value, ARCs would not be a thing. Obviously it's a very small scale operation with this particular book and just the one review, which is why I suspected it might be too cheeky. But the review itself is real. My friends and relatives don't know I dabble. Among the many things I did wrong during launch was not marketing at all and not sending out any ARCs. I've seen in the thread that one should expect a hit rate of 1/5000 for spontaneous reviews and these will probably be negative. The fact that someone bothered to come back and say nice things, considering the very small amount of copies moved, is nothing short of astounding by that metric. Sure, not very powerful as a marketing tool, but I never expected to make any money (see mistakes made during launch again). Given this and other trickles of feedback, I'm just delighted some people liked it. Edit: Enough of that, do you think the cover is alright? Duuk fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jul 23, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 19:42
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ravenkult posted:Nope. Sigh. Thanks. I cannot in good sense justify a budget of more than zero for this endeavour, so I'll think over whether I want to spend/waste any more of my free time. It's a fun exercise coming up with the concepts but obviously I'm no professional. Your stuff is excellent, by the way. In case I have something on my hands in the future that warrants spending, you'll be among the first people to bother.
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Jul 25, 2019 08:55
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