The old cover is on the left, and the new one is on the right.
So, what do you think? Would you buy the book on the right?
So, in January of 2017, I self-published a book on Amazon Kindle. It was a 123 page novella called A Tale of Two Ladies, the first book of my steampunk fantasy, The Mechanical Bird.
The story is about two women. Alicia Reynard is a country girl who dreams of building a flying carriage to explore the world. Elena Singleton is a noblewoman who loves mathematics and wants to build a mechanical computer. Yet, they have expectations because of their gender and stations in life. Elena is expected to marry and continue the line of succession for her house. Alicia is stuck helping her family's farm.
Then their country goes to war, not unlike The Great War. In this story, the men are drafted to fight for the King and the women now find themselves with an opportunity to change their place in society and that's how the story begins.
I wrote this story for NaNoWriMo in 2016, and alright, if we take a step back further in time, it actually is a story I started writing in 2009. It was a series of short tales featuring Alicia -- Elena didn't exist at all. She rode around the world in her mechanical bird and helped people. This would be a prequel to that idea and vastly different since it's a serialized longer piece of work.
I only got to book 1 and then I moved and became discouraged with the idea. Bad reviews. Lack of time and energy. Other distractions.
Well now a year and a half later it's become important again. I'm using it to try and understand the Kindle self-pub business better and to see if I can't revive this project.
If you read about indie authors, the basic idea is to write a series, because books in a series sell. Your first book is a reader magnet and whale readers want multiple books in a series.
That's great, but how do you get multiple books in a series?
You write super fast and crank it out. There's a couple of reasons for that. Chiefly, Amazon's algorithm has this 30 day cliff where it stops promoting you. If you write a second novel in that time you can capitalize off of your presence on the charts -- if your first book did any good. You still have to lay the ground work for success but everyone's path to success is different.
I have one book floating out there. It's past the expiration date for Amazon's algorithm. But I can buy ads on Amazon and see if I can get anywhere. I started to tweak the book's blurb and more notably I needed to change the cover.
The old cover sucks.
Most people read it as steampunk, which is great, cause that's what it's supposed to be. Some folks saw it as a western which... kinda works but it's not exactly what it is. And actually after doing some more market research, I started to even wonder if I was limited myself with steampunk. So, I'm starting to think of the story as a young adult fantasy. The keywords show that there's more interest there than steampunk as well.
With the cover, I wanted to evoke more of the Victorian era look and feel and that old cover wasn't doing it. The fonts make it look western, but this time I found and bought a Victorian style font.
Another issue with the old cover is that I had the series name ("The Mechanical Bird") really big and the book name small ("A Tale of Two Ladies).
That needed to be flipped.
The idea there is that you're buying this individual book and you should see the title up front. Second to that you'd learn it's apart of a book series.
So that's what I did. Also, I really wanted that dope looking slant that vintage Victorian posters have and I feel like the new cover gives me this.
It's still not ideal.
What might be more perfect is to have something with the characters on the cover -- like models in costume, but since this self-pub enterprise is run on a shoestring budget that's out of the question. It doesn't mean that I couldn't relaunch the books later with even better covers.
So, now what I really need is Book 2 of The Mechanical Bird. I have the manuscript edited. It needs a final read through from me. I need to make a cover using the same Victorian style. So that's next on the docket.
If I don't find anything egregious with this cover, I'll update Book 1 with it tomorrow,.
Making the Cover
If you've read this far and you're curious, this cover was made using Inkscape.
No Adobe products here.
The original fonts on the old cover are free ones I found online. This time, I spent $19 USD on a Victorian style font and put this together last night. I've probably spent 10 hours on it total. Part of that was hunting for a font but this is the font that will represent the entire series. Sure, I could hire someone to do this work, but hey, I'm putting on my artist, design, and typography hats and learning it by doing it.
If you look closely at that Inkscape screen you can see a lot of the other design elements I've made and experimented with.
You might notice a lot of wings as a motif. I did draw that wing and inked it. Inkscape has a great trick where you can turn a pixel drawing into an SVG file without any hassle. If you want, I can write up a tutorial on how to do that.
So, even with all this work, I'm fully aware that this could still fail, since I don't have any traction on Amazon's charts, but this is me trying something and failing my way to success.
If you have questions abut Inkscape or the indie self-pub business, I can try and answer you. I'm still plankton and I'm learning and trying to get there.
I actually like the original cover because of the overtly antique feel with the parchment-colored background and the worn look of the word “bird”; but the new one is definitely better for marketability, has way more pop, and is a technically stronger design.
Your thinking on all this sounds spot-on. I could never bring myself to do it, because the second I start to feel marketability creeping into my thinking, I become irate.
The artist is confronted with an impossible problem (as is the philosopher, the freedom advocate, or anyone with a shred of wisdom or true conscience), namely that to have your voice heard, you must be popular, but to be popular you must appease the inane, irrational, impatient, immoral and uninformed. In other words, the culture is one of deliberate dumbing down and reptilian-brained money worship.
That doesn’t mean works of integrity can’t make it - they do - but they always have to bend, to yield, to account for the mongrel in the room. By rights, the beast doesn’t deserve an inch; in fact, he’s not fit to be in the same room. It’s an affront that his voice can even be heard, that his presence is permitted to taint the air with his wretched stink, and yet there he his - making the edits, calling the shots, ruling the entire world, while the Godly starve in the streets and beg the devil for a crumb. Pathetic.
If you can pump out quality content rapid-pace - and some can - then have at it. You seem quite capable and thoughtful.
In school they teach you "don't judge a book by it's cover." Completely the opposite when you get to self-pub and making books from what I've learned. Have a good cover, good blurb. Whatever high-minded artistic notions you have, throw 'em out the door, because you're ultimately in it to sell products. People read your book by looking at it's cover first as a thumbnail on Amazon and yeah, if you can't catch 'em in that second, you lose a potential sale.
A lot of these indie authors also talking about writing to market. Read what's there and make something that hits those checkboxes/tropes while walking the thin line of holding onto your artistic integrity (or not, I dunno). I can't really argue against it, because it worked for them. It doesn't mean it'll work for me -- I realize that. Although the guy who started the 20BooksTo50K (indie author) group interestingly doesn't quite fit that mold of writing to market.
This leads me to the other interesting thing I've seen in the self-publishing world (and webcomics, indie games too): quantity over quality. The quality comes later, but to get there you gotta pump content out at a rapid pace. I'm kinda wondering if that's also a way to attract attention. Everyone, even the introduction to Steemit talks about making content regularly on a schedule, tag it proper, and don't get discouraged because the people will come over time, but you need content first. And then to learn the marketing stuff to make it palatable.
The indie authors talk about doing 50k novels in 21 day cycles repeatedly. If you look at user reviews they'll have 4-5 stars overall, but lots of 1-star reviews that go along the line "The writing sucks, but I love the story." You see that on every book in the series. Not to sound like I'm compromising, but damn if that isn't a bad thing. You hated every book I wrote, but you bought them all anyway cause you want to know what happened. It almost makes me think I'm putting too much effort in to revising, but then hey, I have a certain integrity as an artist I want to put into each book/thing I make.
Definitely making things your own way makes them harder to sell. When I worked at a big game publisher, I never understood why we had to bend to marketing. Shouldn't we make a cool thing and they figure out how to sell it?
That's my entire mindset with my original work. Like, in reference to my comic, a gothic lolita deity as a hero? That's a look that's hard to sell. It doesn't fit a formula. Marketing wants a formula because it makes their lives easier and I don't blame them for it. So I can see why you'd want to tick off tropes because that makes it easier to blend in.
Absolutely. Your analogy to Steemit is highly relevant. I think a decision has to be made - not just about this particular topic, but about nearly everything... Bend to the culture and win, or carve your own path and lose. Now, of course, this isn't always so black and white - many people carve their own path and win, but there are no guarantees by that method. You must be prepared to lose (or better said, be indifferent to outcome), and sometimes you get lucky and people "get it".
If your goal is to make money, the trend is your friend. If you goal is to be revolutionary, or express yourself authentically, then the trend is a cage. Some people take the former tack, then switch to the latter once they have a following, dragging everyone along into new territory. This, of course, can backfire, as people want to see you do your old trick, and love tearing down heroes. You have options along the spectrum of safety and innovation.
There's always ways to worm your innovation or larger message into canned products, as well. Allegory, metaphor, these can relieve that pent up inner voice without breaking the mold. The Matrix had leather jackets and mind-blowing action (for it's time) to ground its deeper message. People saw it because it was cool and were able to handle a little philosophy along the way.
They could dip their toe in and have their little "Whoa man" moment, then go back to their inane lives, or they could dig in to the bottom of the pot and get the whole thing. The choice wasn't forced on them; the story met them where they were and didn't inspire the adversarial rebuke which comes with presenting new ideas in an aggressive way.
I read the first two Chapters of TMC and very much enjoyed it (though it would be cool if it was more user-friendly like a web comic, but I get that the site is really intended to showcase the artwork). Chang'e being a unique case is quite compelling. It's rather sad, but destiny can have a way of altering our course quite suddenly.
I'm reminded of the exchange between Gandalf and Frodo (at least relative to the lamentation being expressed):
Thanks for checking out the comic. Yeah, I don't feel the comic reader is very user friendly. Partially because the art is so big and I made it complex. I have a lot of things I'd like to try, if I were to do another comic, but I am not mentally prepared for that at this moment and that means the site will probably languish...
The Matrix is a good example of taking something that is easily accessible and then takes you down the rabbit hole. One of my favorite anime TV shows of yesteryear, Neon Genesis Evangelion, does this too. It's a big robot anime and for 1994 it looked snazzy. The big robots and amazing animation brings you in, but the show delves into the psyche of the children who pilot the mecha and weaves in a complex story with philosophical and pseudo-religious (and Christian) elements. For years after it's debut, it was incredibly popular probably because it touched on other elements that Japan's youth was going through at the time as reflected in the main character.
I’ve only made it a few episodes into Neon Genesis - perhaps it warrants a revisit.