When the Master Becomes the Student

I hadn't realized it, but Wednesday's post and this post both fit pretty well into the IWSG monthly theme about covers.  That was a happy accident.

I mentioned last month I was invited to a Discord group with some people who write similar things to what I do.  And there was a group project that didn't really work out great for me, though I did write some stories for myself because of it.  Their books have started coming out this last week; you can find the complete list on this blog entry I made on Wordpress.

When I joined I had this egotistical thought that maybe since I had been around for a long time, they would want to partake of my wisdom.  Instead, I was the one who did some learning about things.  So let me share some of that wisdom with Phantom Readers:

On Covers:  I really got schooled on my covers.  I wasn't particularly proud of this cover, but it seemed workable enough:

Then someone harangued me about it.  And I got what she was saying.  The bamboo-type font I thought would be fun since it's supposed to be on a tropical island.  But finding one that would really work, was difficult and this one still wasn't great, especially shrunk down to thumbnail size.

She told me to not use fun fonts and just use some basic, boring fonts.  And be consistent with them for "branding" purposes.  She suggested "Futura" font, which I guess is cliché but widely in use.  And she said to use a different model because she didn't think that one was sexy enough.  Sorry, whoever you are in that picture.  With that in mind, I came up with another draft:

The first one I used had the big title in red.  I copied the format from some other books, so while it's not really original, I guess maybe it's more professional.  This person said that the red has a tendency to look kind of fuzzy for some reason.  Kind of an optical illusion.  Now that I've mentioned it, maybe you'll see it that way.

So finally I changed it to a blue.  Hooray.

Another thing I learned:  the format you upload your book in can change how you many Kindle Pages Read your book gets if you use the Kindle Unlimited thing.  I usually just used a Word DOC but people in this group mentioned they were getting more page reads using Amazon's Kindle Create or a program like Vellum.  Unfortunately, Vellum is $249 and only for Macs, so I couldn't use that.  But I did start using Kindle Create for my books instead.  Is there a huge difference?  Probably not, but I think part of the difference is with the Kindle Create you can have more control over formatting things like drop caps and space between scene breaks and a lot of stuff like that.  That probably accounts for a lot of the difference.

Unfortunately I can't use Kindle Create files on my old Kindle Touch so I still create a MOBI on Draft2Digital.

Always Recycle:  A good thing about standalone stories versus series is you can recycle them again and again in bundles.  It seems pretty cynical to me, but it can help to earn some extra profit.  And maybe it gets people more interested in other books.  So I went through to find all the standalone books I had and then put them into categories.  Here was my first one:

There weren't a ton of sales, but there were a lot of KDP Pages read, so that helps to add some money to my coffers.  And like I said, maybe it gets some other sales and helps me get noticed in Amazon's algorithms and all that stuff.  I made a few other ones to release every now and then.

And then I suppose after a while I could take those bundles and remix them into new bundles!  Plus add any new standalone stories.  Or maybe bundle a couple of series.

Like I said, it's cynical, but it's what toy companies like Hasbro have done since the 80s:  take one figure and repaint it and release it as a "new" figure.  It's why Prowl, Bluestreak, and Smokescreen all looked the same.  As did Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp.  Then they just put the nosecone up on the head and changed the wings a little to make Ramjet, Thrust, and Dirge.  So I guess this is just taking from their playbook. 

Those were a couple of key things where I really got schooled.  I guess in general I've been too complacent or set in my ways.  It was good to talk with some other people (or sometimes just listen) and see other ways to do things.  Maybe better ways!  Or maybe not.

Some of the other stuff I learned is more specific to my niches.  I guess regular crossdressing or "feminization" is more popular than actual gender swap.  Which makes me think that even transgender people (or just transgender fans) can be kind of conservative in reading habits.  Dressing up as a girl and hiding your penis is OK, but actually becoming a girl?  No way!  That's too weird.  I would say, isn't that really just the logical endpoint of crossdressing but I suppose that varies among individuals.

Also, less surprising, is that romance is more popular than erotica.  It also takes a lot less time to get books published as Amazon gives it a lot less scrutiny.  But even if you put a book in the romance category, if your cover or description or keywords are too "spicy," Amazon might still put your book in erotica and then it can be a pain to send them emails (probably more than one since like insurance companies the first one almost always seems to just blow you off) to get it moved.  So if your book isn't "spicy" and you want it in romance, you have to be careful.

While it was a learning experience, I had to quit the group after about six weeks or so.  I mentioned in the "Collaboration Conflagration" post about how they just had to poo-poo or ignore every single thing I suggested about a group project.  After a little while it got to feeling like that with most everything else too.  Especially this one who had more success than me--six-figure sales that let her buy a farm!--would just poo-poo anything I said because Ms. Know-It-All has to be the Queen Bee.  Therefore any suggestions anyone else makes have to be shot down.  

The straw that broke the camel's back was someone had mentioned this DepositPhotos site was having a deal through another app where for $35 you could get 100 pictures--with no expiration date!  That is a really good deal, so I got that, but while using the site, I saw where you could search for free photos too, though they weren't in the biggest size.  Still, they didn't count against your 100 downloads, so I looked around for anything that might be of use later on.

And of course when I mention this, Ms. Queen Bee is like, "I wouldn't use those, TBH." Blah blah blah.  Yeah, maybe you don't get as good of a selection or whatever, but not all of us makes $100,000 a year or more on selling silly erotica books.  Some of us might be on a little more of a budget that we might want to stretch.

I wanted to say that, but I've been on the Internet long enough to know how that's going to play out, so I decided to avoid the inevitable flame war and drop out.  That wasn't the first time either.  There was the attempted group project and another time I mentioned how Goodreads doesn't put in descriptions on newer books when it adds them and she was like, "I wouldn't bother with Goodreads" blah blah blah.  Well, excuuuuuuuuse me!  Just in general she kept treating me like a newb instead of someone who had been doing this shit as long as she had.  While learning some different ways to do things is nice, there's only so much condescension and bullshit a person can take.

By that point I had probably learned most of what I was going to and Ms. Queen Bee and other bigger authors weren't participating in newsletter swaps or anything so it wasn't really doing much for cross-marketing either.  Which, I don't know why they couldn't mention some other authors in their newsletters; it's not like it costs anything.  Ms. Queen Bee and others would probably whine about "hurting their brand" or some stupid shit like that like they're Stephen King or John Grisham or something. [eye roll]

I really had no problem putting a couple of extra books by other people in my newsletter.  I think a couple of people did that for me and while I don't think it really led to tons of sales, it's the thought that counts, right?  Maybe some of these other people are worried it'd take sales away from them or something.  Which then sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a group anyway.

So it goes.