Day 113

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

29 Jun 2016

Set up this journal as a reblog-series to Tumblr; so far I have one follower, lol. But one of my Instagram posts went micro-viral yesterday (30+ likes and a couple follows; big progress for me so far!), so there’s that. Unfortunately, the post was travel-related, rather than having anything to do with my ‘author’ identity, and almost certainly did well based on the hashtags alone, but something, in this case, is definitely better than nothing. I’m told that less extreme use of filters and enhancements would be a smart move as well (lol.) Between one thing and another, I’ve actually scored a few website page views too; mostly from Facebook. So from the first few weeks of intentional social marketing, I’m finding that Instagram is a good way to create content, but not a particularly useful networking platform, Twitter basically doesn’t care, and Facebook has low-level but high-value interaction for an existing audience. Tumblr, so far, also doesn’t care, but I’m switching the content strategy to involve more blog content and not just commented photos, which will hopefully boost that avenue. I need a platform with higher discoverability; thinking about serializing the draft on Wattpad (need to look into whether that can be undone and what it means for rights) in order to drum up interest, or at least start to get feedback.

In other news, ‘Blind the eyes’ is in the lead with 5 votes to 2 so far (lol), and since I’m also leaning in that direction, I’ll try to find time to clean up the cover mockup and release it to announce the winner this week. As Beta Reader Kevin Epp pointed out, Gold (Probably Gold & Silver) have some potential as a series name instead. From a marketing standpoint, although I love the simplicity and conciseness of one-word sequence titling for series and clean-edged graphic art for covers, I may be able to get more mileage and attract the right audience by working as much as I can into the title and cover art. Some positive feedback on the cover blurb was a pleasant surprise too; maybe I can do some sort of combined graphic post with the cover draft and the blurb to get link backs and generate more interest? Still not entirely sure the blurb represents the story (or the tagging, but I can’t bring myself to call it a dystopian supernatural romance, so I’ll keep sticking thriller on at the end for now, even thought it doesn’t totally fit). It’s weirdly hard to have perspective and good judgement; by the end of the first draft, I had serious concerns about the plot integrity of the whole thing. Now ~20 chapters in to rewrites, it’s actually holding up… not terribly, anyways. Success! But yeah, already bracing myself for the kick in the stomach that Beta readers will inevitably need to administer. If I get indignant over less than thrilled feedback from 100word freelancing throwaways, I can’t imagine how I’ll take feedback on something of this magnitude…

Also trying to figure out the best way to launch Beta copies. Hardbound and mailed? Epub or PDF with instructions on how to open in digital readers and markup? Word format, with markup? The general consensus seems to be that it’s hardly worth anyone else’s trouble to mess with your creative work, so security and privacy aren’t really the issue… But maybe I should work on building out a more robust website or mailer section on how to beta read? And of course, I should really get around to setting up a mailing list… and then creating content for it… euugh. What would be super cool from a coding standpoint, is to build out a markup-ready text where users could comment out specific sections, publicly or privately, in the browser. I think someone on Medium’s already doing this… but that’s also kind of crummy for the beta readers to have to read in the browser, and really the experience for them should be as seamless as possible… so maybe I should just invest some time in getting the draft into epub format and launch with that for now.

Wednesday

Start time: 11:30 am

Location: couch/living room

Drinking: cardamom water

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