Luke George's Blog

The human race are just the black and white square in the corner of the screen before the adverts during the program that is our planet. There was a part 1 before we arrived. They'll be a brief pause after we leave. Then the action will resume in part 2 without nothing but a vague memory of our existence.

I've been trying to encourage more reviews on Amazon and so have just ran a 2 day free promotion on Kindle.
The promotion was successful with The Injustice Cure hitting #14 in the Top 100 Free Comics & Graphic Novels on Amazon. So thanks to everyone who downloaded a copy.
Now I have to wait for readers to finish the book and hope they enjoy it enough to feel compelled to write a review.

It's been a week now since my story went on amazon and so far sales haven't exactly been spectacular. Amazon's rules forbid me from disclosing sales figures but put it this way, I'm yet to cover the cost of the jar of instant coffee I drank whilst writing it, let alone the cost of the cover, a few marketing exercises (see below) and not to mention the hours I put into it. Although this is slightly disappointing, I am trying not to be too disheartened. It has only been a week.

I thought I'd put together a quick article on what I've been doing so far to spread the word of my novel. This is specifically aimed at short term gains rather than the long term strategy that I am also working on because I'm impatient and I want results now, now, NOW!

The first thing I tried was trying to get the novel reviewed on a blog. I did some searching and made a list of blogs that I thought were relevant to my novel (superhero, sci-fi etc.). I then made a personal approach to each of them asking for a review. So off went 14 emails, most with a copy of the novel attached, and a week later, I've only had 2 responses both of which offered to mention the novel in a news item but not an actual review. Still a good result and I'm very grateful for their offer but it's disappointing that the other 12 didn't respond at all. One of the news items went live and the other is promised for some point in the future. My sales figures showed no change when one went live although this blog has received a number of hits referred from that site so I guess that's a partial success in terms of exposure. I'm still feeling quite mixed about this approach and intend to target more blogs for reviews. However I'm a little apprehensive because my gut feeling is that these sites are probably messaged by hundreds of authors all trying to get their book reviewed which would explain the lack of response.

There are lots of articles from some very successful authors each with their own suggestions for how you should market your novel and make it stand out. The problem is that every other self published author is reading these articles and following the same advice so the channels that are advocated end up being swamped and no one stands out. So by this point I was, and still am, trying to think outside the box for ways to target my audience that other authors don't typically use to try and get out of the white noise of the thousands of books generated by self published authors each month.

To do this I thought about the target readership of my novel. It's a superhero novel which is quite a small genre and not one that is traditionally classified as a genre in itself, usually being lumped in with the general sci-fi. The fans of superheroes are, generally, comic book and graphic novel readers. Luckily for me timing was on my side and yesterday was a worldwide promotional day for comics known as Free Comic Book Day (FCBD) but in my case I decided to make it Free Superhero Novel Day and ran a one day free promotion on kindle. The FCBD event was something I intended to participate in as a consumer of comics and had planned a day out around it so I could genuinely use social media to get involved and, as well as posting comments on the general discussion of FCBD, I dropped in some comments that I was running my own FCBD which in context didn't seem like shameless self promotion. The free promotion led to nearly 100 free downloads of the novel. This isn't anything like the success story numbers you see some first time authors show but I was pleased with the results. Just seeing the number of downloads in my author dashboard going up throughout the day was a welcome motivational boost.

One other thing that I'm trying which is still in motion and too early to judge is running a competition on deviantart. The competition is for people to draw characters from my novel and the prize is some deviantart points. I didn't want to make the competition too serious as I really wanted the people who enjoy drawing superheroes to enter it out of fun and hope that a few of them might be curious enough to buy the book off the back of it. Even if they don't I get to see some cool drawings of my characters so it's all good.

This is my experience after one week and, from what I've read, publishing on kindle is a long term game so hopefully some of the strategies I've employed so far will bear more fruit as time goes on. What I haven't had so far though is an independent review of the book on amazon or anywhere else. I've been offered review swaps from other authors and paid reviews but I'm holding out for the real thing. Hopefully the increased readership off the back of my free giveaway will result in one and that in itself will have a bigger impact on sales than anything I can do myself. I just have to sit and wait.

I've just launched a competition over on deviant art asking people to draw the characters from The Injustice Cure. Hopefully I'll be able to post some of the best up here.

http://forum.deviantart.com/community/projects/1858948/

I've started work on my next piece which I've given the working title of 'Corporation Superhero'.

The Injustice Cure is available now from the amazon kindle store.

Buy The Injustice Cure here

Currently it's in ebook only format but a paper version is coming soon.

So I received the design for the cover recently and decided to share it on here.

The artwork was done by the brilliant Dan McDaid

Hope you like it:


The first edit was finished last night so hopefully it should be released in the coming weeks.

Launch price will be 99p/99c. Bargain!

I saw Watchmen and the recent Batman trilogy and saw the emotional side of being a superhero shining through on the screen. That inspired a train of thought in my head and before I knew it there was a story in there.

I thought about the best way to portray this story and, as I'm not a film director, had to choose between comic/graphic novel and a literary novel.

Superheroes are colourful, visually stunning and constantly engaged in action against the world's worst villains. All that action and visual effect is the reason why comics or graphic novels are the usually the best way to portray a story about a superhero. But I was going for the emotional side, my story needed more detail of the mind-set of the character than you could portray in an image or series of images.

That's why I chose a literary novel.

P.S.
Also I'm not that good at drawing so a comic book version would have sucked! But that wasn't the reason I chose literary novel. If I thought a comic book would have been the best medium then I just wouldn't have bothered writing the story.

Today I finished the first draft of my novel.

I must've written over 100,000 words in the end and because of restarts and cuts I've ended up with only 25,000 of them in the first draft.

I'm letting it lie a few days before I pick it up again and start polishing but I'm very excited about getting it finished.

The novel is about a cowardly man who must prove to his wife that he can be brave. Along the way he gains superpowers and an attraction so one of the women he saves.

The title I'm thinking of at the moment is something along the lines of "The Brave Act of Clive Silver" but I'm not decided on it yet.

I found this picture online of a storm trooper and his son in the rain. It's by an artist named Kristina Alexanderson and it's awesome.



There's more of them in the full article in the Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052456/Evil-Star-Wars-Stormtrooper-photographed-loving-scenes-young-son.html#ixzz1bjUv1tYt