#like even for indie web stuff you can use RSS

[trucksquared]

new tantycrul video yippee

[what-if-doctor-who-was-yuri-yaoi]

btw i have a couple rss feeds on my neocities ^^ u can check em out if u want :3

[sunbeamstress]

i struggled for a very long time to understand why i didn't want to make art.

it was such a mystery! some blind spot in my psyche i couldn't get a fix on.

"why haven't i drawn in months?"

"why am i sitting here playing video games? i still can barely draw hands"

"why don't i post my work online?"

"why haven't i started a webcomic yet? i wanted to over a decade ago"

why? why? why?

why was i torturing myself? all i could see in the back of my mind was my mother, seated in her armchair, the dated old phone stretching across the living room with her at the center of its web. she would always couch the phone against her cheek and shoulder and lay her knuckles against it for stability; her left hand - the one i use, myself - would reach for a pen and fill page after page of doodles into a notepad.

i remember beautiful filigree designs and landscapes and pretty flowers and sometimes an instance of something lovely in the faces of her husband or her children, captured on paper without her even having to think about it. entire worlds spilling out of her fingertips while her mind was occupied with other things.

but she stopped.

she can't draw, now. she no longer has the talent. she used to beg me to sing because my voice was a gift to god, but she had a gift from god and she left it in a dumpster. these days i don't believe in god, and i don't believe in my mother, either.

in a circumspect way i'm grateful to her for this. i'd think about her every time i picked up a pencil. this unforgivable act of waste, in my eyes, was a fire under my ass that kept my hand moving. it gives me pleasure to admit, with honesty, that while i rarely sketch or paint, i only ever seem to get better at it. to this day, i'm not half bad. in my late thirties, i'm at a skill level that i was seeing out of the very most gifted artists in their mid-twenties.

but isn't that a silly way of looking at it? "i'm 37, and i draw at least as well as a really good 24 year old". what nonsense is this? this is the sort of invasive thing that likes to run amok in my head. what sense does it make to compare myself like we're talking shonen manga power levels? why am i racing other artists? why do i have to compete?

it took me a very long time to realize that Competition Itself had supplanted what i loved about art. it wasn't something i did consciously; it just sort of happened when i was in my late teens, my early adult years, and the internet's artistic community had exploded, a detailed landscape peppered with talented people, all with their own gifts from god, gleaming and gilded and razor-edged. they were doing things i'd never imagined. they were making comics and putting their work in indie video games. they were doing animations in flash. holy shit - they were making porn! this might sound quaint to you, O reader, but by internet standards i'm what you call an "old-ass bitch" and in those days, this was pretty novel.

god, i wanted what they had so bad. i wanted a webcomic. i was going to call it "Absolute Vertigo", whatever that meant, and it would have been garbage, but i didn't care. i wanted "Absolute Vertigo by <SCREEN NAME>" at the top of a kitschy website and i wanted people to gush about how cool it was and put it into their RSS feeds and--

this was the beginning of the end, in many ways. i really wasn't cut out for competition. it would take a really long time to figure this out. my peers were putting out improbably cool stuff and i felt like i was flagging. i didn't realize it yet, but the internal language i was using to talk to myself about art was changing. suddenly i was "worse" or "better" than other artists. suddenly they were "doing more" or being more "successful" than me.

art had become a commodity.

it's wild how this sort of mindset can take a mind of its own, can build its own character, can work its way deeper into your brain. at first art was discouraging - it was this thing my mother was good at but neglected. it was this thing i felt like i was worse at than everyone else. but then it became depressing. Art, this platonic ideal of it, this idea of it in the abstract, was turning into a weapon i was using to torture myself. reader, you have no idea how many nights i couldn't sleep. to merely ideate failure was to hurl myself back through time, back to the moment i realized my mother had given up.

"why haven't i drawn in months?"

"why am i sitting here playing video games? i still can barely draw hands"

"why don't i post my work online?"

"why haven't i started a webcomic yet? i wanted to over a decade ago"

i didn't have an answer for these questions, but still they were there. they weren't important or meaningful questions, they were tools i used to torture myself. i was supposed to improve for the sake of improvement, and to enjoy art as an act of pure creation, but instead it was a hammer i would hit myself over the head with because i wasn't doing it good enough. crazy how you can talk about your own talent the way you can talk about a dead-end job.

looking back now, it's astounding that i didn't understand all of this. it seems to make so much more sense. i've always had stories and characters floating around in my head - it's literally my favorite pastime - but it took me a very long, very painful time to realize that having stories and having characters doesn't mean you're a failure if you don't immediately march to the nearest sketchbook and jot them down.

the gift of art does not obligate you to produce it. if you cast it aside, the world isn't made better or worse.

your art exists for you. it should please you, should bring a smile to your face or evoke feelings you don't dare face on your own. art should help you work through trauma. it should express when you're happy. art is a frame for the picture of you.

it should even be okay to let it go.

it's going to take me a long time to forgive my mother. but i think i understand her a little better.

[elizabethrobertajones]

(part 1) this is random but something im curious about is do you think the next few years will see a radical shift in more lead lgbt couples in shows? i feel like when supernatural started it was all about subtext/queerbating between characters we would never see canon (maybe), the last few years have seen an update in more side lgbt characters/couples and while not a lot, more main lgbt characters then we had before. I don't know if tumblr/twitter fandom translates to general audience...

Yeah, I mean, the only way is up. I feel lucky that I managed to encounter a fair amount of queer content in my formative years, whether targeted programming on TV, or taking the route of not really differentiating the perceived cultural value of independent media like webcomics and webnovels etc from the mass media as I was young enough to naturally grow up on the internet as the internet itself was growing up and web 2.0 was pretty much taking off alongside my use of the internet. And that I had liberal parents who didn’t regulate our internet, and lived in a community where culturally I didn’t really fear being discovered casually accessing all this like in particularly this terrifying seeming evangelical christian community in America.

Which really makes me feel like A: everyone should feel that comfortable in themselves via the media as I did as a mass accessible thing or B: that the world at large should be soaked in as much representation and more that I encountered as a curious teen because at the very least it did me no harm and at best helped handhold me through an awful lot. 

And then brings us to the problem that the world isn’t actually like that and for a lot of people their media is restricted one way or another, from everything such as the era of social media weirdly making us much LESS broadly travelled on the internet as I was back in the day (SO many bookmarks - I had like 100 that I would check either daily or on their weekly update schedule, with enough habit that I had pretty much memorised it all without using an RSS feed or just following everyone’s twitter and waiting for update announcements, never mind the vast pit of things which I occasionally checked to see if their sporadic but very worth it updates had occurred somewhere in the last month/year) to the vastly overwhelming amount of media accessible to us. It seems almost to flood the market and creates this panic about watching the worthiest shows and campaigning for them and raising awareness and the FOMO and how things slip by and zomg you have to watch this that and the other, when even just making this list on Netflix now contains more hours of TV than a human lifetime and also one liable to disappear from the service at some point or another without warning. 

And then on top of that you have the absolute cultural monoliths that if you’re not going to have a cohesive culture - which now includes the entire population of the world because of our connectivity on the internet and mass-joining of services - based around smaller shows and stuff, then at the very least everyone is going to watch anything under the main Disney umbrella, other superhero flicks, animated things, and all the really big studio franchises and remakes, as well as a few TV monoliths which manage to get enough people talking to make it seem like “everyone” (again - these days it seems like that’s presumed to be the entire western world plus everywhere else these things air) are watching, like Game of Thrones or whatever… THESE properties are the inescapable ones and on that basis they’re the things we have to lean on the most for representation and then again barely get any, when it comes to gender and sexuality, due to them shooting for such worldwide markets that they can’t imply gay people exist to censors in places such as China. And it exposes the cultural awfulness inherent just in getting a white female character in the lead role of some things, or the absolute garbage fire lurking underneath that if you dare have a black stormtrooper or make one of your female ghostbusters black when you’re already ruining the childhoods of so many how dare… 

In those respects, having side characters who aren’t even major well-known superheroes or jedis or ghostbusters or whatever also be gay (because even well-known lesbian Kate McKinnon didn’t manage to get her ghostbuster to be canonically gay even if we All Knew) would be absolutely groundbreaking, even if it was, like, a role that could be snipped out for the Chinese market or something. And that’s probably exactly what would happen, and cue ensuing riot from whichever fandom, along with everyone rightly pointing out that even for us who got to watch it it was still a tiny side character… I mean Disney is still at the stage of what they did with Beauty and the Beast’s ~canonical gay character~ 

So yeah… that’s thrown back to TV and smaller movies to lead the way and because the generations showing most likely the real global percentages but actually just the young western world stats on queerness in any form (like… 25% instead of 1% or whatever and that’s STILL probably too low) are still teens to young adults. The previous gayest generation above them are still just arriving in power and settling in, and the excellent changes we already have from the generation before that is what we are seeing now... But given THEIR cultural context, even their best can still seem to younger eyes, moderate and not generally placing queer characters in lead roles except in niche or indie or otherwise “acceptable” places to take those risks. I think change is always coming and culturally each generation being more open and accepting that the last is really making changes and so on, hopefully things WILL change rapidly and what was the common state of affairs in the sort of indie media I consumed as a teen will be the mainstream soon because a lot of those creators 10 years later are kicking off… 

All that said, TV in the mainstream is still controlled by Mark Pedowitz types exercising their power over the Bobos who have their Wayward Sisters pitches with the clearly labelled main character for the main teen demographic being queer. The culture is very much that we’re now pretty open and can happily have queer characters, but the main characters are still largely held separate. A good example is Riverdale, which is on the CW, a newer show with writers such as Britta Lundin, who is young, queer, and wrote a novel blatantly based on being a Destiel shipper and fan interacting with the cast and crew in fandom spaces, and whose first solo episode of Riverdale featured a looooot of the gay stuff (yay). 

But while she’s a story editor and writer for the show and can use it as a platform for writing stories for its audience using a whole range of canonically queer characters, the show still keeps all 4 of its mains at a strict remove from this. Cheryl can come out as a lesbian in the second season after a lil ho yay in the first but no clearly marked storyline about her identity, but even though Betty and Veronica kissed in the first episode it was blatant fan service (for Cheryl in-story, lol) and mostly just set the tone that they are the sort of seemingly straight girls kissing for attention while having strong romantic or physical attraction to guys. In the second season the kiss comes up again in joking that Jughead and Archie are the only ones of the main 4 who haven’t kissed, Archie gets one planted on him by a dude as a “judas kiss” moment of betrayal in season 3 and he and Jug are teased that they were expected to get together because they were close but in the same sort of homophobic undercurrent tones as early Destiel snarking from side characters, seemingly less about their relationship and more to unsettle them with implications… I mean it was a complicated moment but in the long run it didn’t seem entirely pleasant to me, especially given the overall emotional state they were in and later plot etc etc. (My mum is 1000% invested in Riverdale now as a former Archie Comics reader as a kid so this is now my life too as I was in the room when my brother callously exposed her to it, hi :P) 

Anyway that’s just one case study but aside from SPN it’s probably the most mainstream teen demographic thing I watch… Other examples would be things like B99 which had Rosa come out as bi and that’s awesome, and made us all cry a lot, but Jake, the clear main character even in a very strong and well-treated ensemble, has a great deal of bi subtext, there’s no way given Andy Samberg’s apparent habit of ad-libbing MORE progressive jokes that he’d ever be intentionally harming people if that’s how his brain works (you know, like other people quick-fire offensive stuff from their mouth working faster than brain sense of humour :P). But at the same time for all Jake’s quipping about crushes and such and the fact the show clearly knows how to be sensitive to bisexuality with Stephanie Beatriz being a strong advocate, just because Jake’s the main character and adorably married to Amy. In NO WAY can that be threatened because they’re SO GOOD, so there’s STILL uncertainty that this will pay off in the same special episode “I love my wife but I am bi” kinda way that seems obvious that could just be said. We all carry on without it affecting anything because obviously Jake’s found his soulmate so we don’t mess with that but they should know it’s important to clarify it… Even with B99′s track record, I’m nervous solely because Jake’s the main character and main characters tend not to get self-exploratory arcs about latent queerness and ESPECIALLY not if they’re happily married. If ANY show was going to do it right and trailblaze in this exact era it would be them, but… gyah :P 

Anyway I guess the conclusion right now is that the more mainstream you are the more uncertain it feels, but we are right at that cliff edge, especially with shows putting in SOME of the work. If B99 doesn’t get us there (or the Good Place where they’ll happily confirm Eleanor is bi in interviews but I believe she hasn’t said it outright on the show despite clearly showing attraction to female characters, again, the denials we know so well in SPN fandom reflect a wider audience view of dismissing this stuff as jokes and not reflective of character feeling and identification without a Special Episode dedicated to confirming it >.>) then we’re very clearly on the cusp of SOME mainstream or massively well-known show doing it at least once in a meaningful way that has an Ellen-style cultural impact on TV writing. 

Let’s make it a goal for 2019 or 2020, and hope that a NEW show with a canonically queer main from the start is pitched and becomes a mainstream hit in the next 5… Still got a ways to go before Disney level mainstream but again there IS work going pushing the envelope, especially if we get a movie of a franchise such as idk Further Legends of Korra, or Steven Universe or something else that’s massively pushed the envelope with sexuality or gender for their main character on the small screen in the experimental petri dish they’ve had there for children’s TV. Something that would force Disney to blink about a lesbian princess or Star Wars to let Finn and Poe kiss or Marvel to let Steve and Bucky hold hands or something in order to remain relevant.

Once the Big Cultural Monoliths get in on it, I expect culture as a whole to first of all react quickly on the small screen, but honestly I’ve been waiting for them to snap pretty much my whole life since adolescence and they’re taking such wee tiny baby steps, and some factors are enormous geopolitical awfulness, that the story as a whole is unpredictable and we can only really hope that things don’t slow down. 

(Where this affects SPN is just impossible to say right now, given its almost unique position in this mess due to longevity vs fandom vs almost entirely new generation of writers’ room) 

[stevensavage]

Marketing For Self-Published Authors and Artists (March 2019)

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve's Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

So as promised, every few months I’m going to update my findings on marketing for indies.  Most of this is oriented towards self-published authors like myself, but a lot of it should help artists too.

The Core Principle: The Web Of Connections

To promote yourself your various activities, giveaways, social media, and so on need to connect and reinforce each other.  If a new book comes out, promote it on your website and give away a few copies in your newsletter.  If you’re speaking on art, give out bookmarks with links to your website.  Everything ties together.

This does make finding what works a bit challenging, so I take these steps:

Do what is easy, like cross-posting sales and stuff among my social media.  Hey, it’s easy.  Then I monitor what seems to work.

Do what seems rational because let’s face it, this is complicated.  Also see if there’s any useful results that tell you what to do or what not to do.

Advance my marketing with small experiments to see what gets results.  Usually that takes a month or two to show, so I tend to do my experiments every month or every other month.

Record what I find from above.  What do you think this post is?

Over time you’ll find what works for you, what doesn’t, and how elements interact.  It might help to keep a list like this!

Have A Website

Have a website, period. A website is a place you can send people to that acts as a "hub" for your marketing efforts. It doesn't have to be complex (I've got some tips below), it has to be a place that acts as a hub for finding out more about you. The goal of a website is to have a one-stop-show for people to come to for information, and leave from to go to your various portfolios, books, social media, etc.

Follow these steps:

Get a domain name (networksolutions.com, tierra.net are recommended). Make sure the name is unique, fits you, and can be re-purposed if your plans change (FrankDoesArt.com is a bit specific, but FrankGetsCreative.com is more general).

Set up a website. Most people I know use www.dreamhost.com or www.wix.com. Just start with one page to make it easy - I've seen successful authors whose page is a blurb and a list of books.

A fast way to do it is buy a domain and redirect it to one of your social media accounts or a portfolio setup (like Twitter or LinkedIn).  You can build the site later.

Link to all your books, art, portfolio, and social media from here.

This website should be mentioned in your books, social media, etc.

Link to all your social media from the website – LinkedIn, Goodreads, whatever.  Well, whatever is appropriate, like maybe no one wants your photo collection of antique pots on that photo sharing site.

Other things to add:

A schedule of speaking engagement.

Reviews of your books.

Testimonials.

Helpful downloads - like character sheets, guides, etc.

Have Appropriate Social Media

Social media is a troublesome subject. Yes, it can let you market - or be annoying. Yes it can let you meet people - or it can waste time. However, done right it's a great way to connect with people.

Your social media should always link back to your website and in many cases, your other social media. This helps create a "web" of connections, so people are able to go to one social media source, find your others, and of course buy your stuff.

My takes on social media in rough order are:

Twitter: Twitter, for it's many flaws, has a lot of use, its simple, and with lists and filtering (and learning when to ignore it) you can meet authors, promote yourself, and be found. I'd determine what approach you want to use (from marketing to just goofing off) and do it.

LinkedIn: You should have a LinkedIn profile anyway, but how much of your "creative" life you want to share or link to depends on your goals and personal image. I also will say if you use LinkedIn don't forget all the great posting and stuff you can do there, and the communities.

Instagram and other photo-sharing sites: Some people use this to promote their work, others use it as a sort of photoblog. I'm mixed on it myself.

Facebook: Facebook keeps having issues, but it helps to have a presence. I'd keep an author page on it at the very least and see how you engage.

Amazon Author Site: Set up your Amazon Author Site at Author Central.  This also can be a place to point your web domain.

By the way, a good way to manage social media in one go is www.Hootsuite.com.

Have A Blog

Blogs are ways to post thoughts, essays, and more, turning your web presence into a kind of personal magazine/announcement/discussion board. Most authors use them, though at various rates of usage, from constant posts to "occasional speaking updates."

A blog is usually part of your author website, and thus is another reason to come there - and to go and check out your work and your other media. Most blog setups can act as your author page as well (which is what I do).

I use blogs to:

Give weekly updates on myself.

Post various essays and thoughts.

Review or promote interesting things.

In a few cases, blog posts then became other books, or I round them up to publish free "compendiums."

You can set up blogs at the following sites, with various advantages and limits. Some allow you to use your own domain name, some don't.

Most webhosts.

Wordpress.com

Blogspot.com

A few techniques:

You can get a domain and just point it at your blog or a similar site (like your Tumblr) and save time.

Some authors and artists do blog tours where they post across each other's blogs.

If you have related social media accounts (LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) consider posting your blog entries to all of them when appropriate. Just make sure they redirect to your site.

Set up an RSS feed (or find it's address in a standard setup) and put a link on your blog. I also recommend www.feedburner.comdespite it being sort of static by now.

Mailchimp.com and some other mail software programs let people subscribe to a blog feed so they get email updates. You can also load those with helpful extras and information.

An important caveat - if you're a prolific writer, you have to find the blogging/writing balance. It's not an easy call because a few long blog posts can take as much time to set up as a small fiction piece. In some cases small books may be like blog posts so you have to ask “write a book or write a set of blog posts.”  I cover that more later.

Have A Newsletter

A newsletter is the way to engage with readers and keep people informed, as well as give them cool reviews, interesting updates, and more. In some ways it's like a mailed blog, but I separate them as a newsletter is more focused and like an update, whereas blogs can be more freeform. If you don't do a blog, do a newsletter, and if you only have time for one do the newsletter.

The ruler of newsletters is www.mailchimp.com, which has an amazing free service and reasonable paid services.

Make sure that your newsletter subscription form(s) are linked to from as much social media as possible and, of course, your website.

Some newsletter tips:

Don't overdo it or underdo it - I do it twice a month or so.

Find a "feel" for your newsletter - a roundup, personal, chatty, serious, etc. Judge what works.

Include any vital updates about your work. Link to your blog, new books, cool things.

Give away "Lead Magnets" - basically free stuff like samples, an occasional free book copy, downloadable cool stuff, etc.

Use it to promote other cool things - help folks out.

Remember that most newsletter software gives you all sorts of statistics and data - you can use this to improve reaching people!

Physical Media

Many authors and artists give away cards, bookmarks, etc.  I find these different giveaways vary in effectiveness, so I’m not sure how well they work for me or you.  However, it doesn’t stop me from doing them as they’re easy, and sometimes expected.  I also figure saturating the world with references to my work helps.

The one challenge is that this costs money, and you may not want to spend money on business cards, bookmarks, etc.  So you want to balance your choices.

Here’s what I try and what I find works:

Business Cards – These are a must if you’re serious, and the only physical media I can truly say that about.  Business Cards are cheap to get, easy to give out, and even expected.  Most print shops and office supply stores have quick options.

Bookmarks – This is popular among the book crowd for obvious reasons.  I’m not sure how well they work, but they do make it easy to set out information, give them away in panels, leave at interested shops, etc.  They can be a bit pricey depending on the deal you swing,

Mini-pictures – I’ve seen artists give away small cards with their art and contact information, sort of a sample/bookmark/business card fusion.  This may be worth trying.

For printed bookmarks and the like I recommend www.clubflyers.com.

I always have business cards with me, keep some bookmarks in my car, and take bookmarks to any events I speak at.

Giveaways And Promotionals (Mostly Authors)

A great way to get people's attention is to give out stuff like free books, extras, samples, and more. With these properly done (and linked back to other works), its a great way to get attention, meet people, and of course get sales.

There's two services I recommend for authors.  For artists you may have to look for other methods.

Prolificworks.com - having both free and subscription modes, it lets you give away work and join (or create) promotionals. The paid version lets you tie giveaways into your mailing list as well. It does get a bit pricey beyond the Free level ($20 to $50 a month), so I recommend paid tiers for serious authors nly.

www.bookfunnel.com - Is a cheap ($20 a year to start) way to do book giveaways in a variety of formats, and higher tiers include features like Prolificworks.com. I'm fond of the starter tier as its a great way to make book giveaways easier (and if you don't want to host your giveaways).

To make these work you have to obviously be dedicated to it and work out strategies. I use them to:

Give away free stuff and samples to my newsletter subscribers.

Give away a few copies of new books via Prolificworks.com

Have promotional giveaways (often samples) that people can sign up to my newsletter to get.

I join groups on Prolificworks.com to do team giveaways.

I use both - Instafreebie lets me set up easy giveaways, and Prolificworks gives me all sorts of options.

If you use KDP, there's a KDP Exclusive you can use for eBooks. In exchange for making your work exclusive with Amazon, you get some tools to set up sales and giveaways.  It’s easy for starting authors.

Have A Portfolio

If you're a visual artist of any kind, have a portfolio. Put it on your website, use a social media site like Deviantart.com, whatever. People want to see your work and maybe buy it, so make it easy to do. If you take commissions, it's pretty much a way to market yourself.

Non-visual artists like authors may want a portfolio as well. This would contain:

Cover art.

Sample works.

Free giveaways.

Summaries of your work (with links to purchase it). For instance, I have a press website a lot like this.

Do Series

If you're doing fiction, you probably already have a series in mind. If your books are non-fiction, you may want to group them into series, because various bookselling sites will remind people that "X book is part of Y" series.  If you’re an artist, this may help as well.

It's near-free advertisement.

My general finding is that series help get people’s attention.  If they like something, they check the series.  If they like the series idea but not a specific piece, they may check the rest of the series.

It also shows commitment.  If you’ve got a series, you’ll be around.

I do think it takes time for a series to “take off.”  Once it starts getting attention and people buy other books, then they get more recommendations, more attention, etc.

Calculated Distribution (Authors)

This part is pretty much only for authors – and for book distribution.

For print books, your usual choices are Amazon and IngramSpark (or IngramSpark via Lulu).  Amazon doesn’t charge, the other services do, but bookstores don’t always like to stock Amazon books as it’s a competitor.

For ebooks, your choices are:

Go with Amazon’s KDP Select, where you only go through Amazon but get marketing tools like sales.  Amazon is the majority of the market, so if you go Amazon its easier.

Distribute incredibly widely.  This takes time, and you don’t get Amazon’s marketing tools, but you get the chance to make more sales.  Some authors I know find they sell more books outside of Amazon, but I haven’t figured out any rules or principles to this.

If you go broad here’s my take

Draft2Digital is the easiest way to go broad, but only does eBooks.  I also recommend managing your Amazon account separately.  Draft2Digital doesn’t have the broadest range, but it’s free (taking a cut of your sales) and very, very well done.

Smashwords is also free, but takes a larger cut and doesn’t have the extras of Draft2Digital.  It does get into a few unusual areas of distribution.

Lulu.com will do full service, but partners with Ingrahm, and there are charges.

Ingrahm is full service as well, and charges.  It’s probably a better choice than Lulu these days.

Publish Lots Of Stuff

Like it or not your goal as a creator is to be noticed so people get ahold of your work and benefit from it.  This means that you may need to create lots of works to get attention – or use work that you aren’t making public to do the same.

For instance, I realized that a lot of my blog ideas were better off as books – or could be turned into books.  There was far more benefit to turning certain ideas into small books (or expanding existing work into books) than letting things sit.  Some things just work better as a book anyway, and I have more works that people can get their hands on.

(Plus, the polishing that goes into a book made them, honestly, higher quality.)

If you’re an artist it’s probably the same thing, depending on your market.  If you have lots of different things to sell and buy and do you increase your chance to get more sold.

Advertising (Mostly for Authors)

I’ve used both Google ads and Amazon for books, though it’s been awhile since I’ve done Google (and I may want to try again).  I have done a lot with Ams, or Amazon Marketing Services.

AMS lets you set up promotional ads to appear during searches, and you can set up keywords, target them, and even decide what to pay for a clickthrough.  It’s a pretty advanced tool, and though it obviously only targets Amazon, that’s a pretty big market!  The challenge is that you have to figure out the right words, monitor progress (to avoid overspending or waste), and tweak marketing for each book.

I’ve found it effective, but it takes a lot of work.  What I do is update AMS every month or so with new terms, shut off ones that aren’t working, and try to get an idea of what works.  You can download data from each ad you set up, and then make a new ad with just the data that worked.  You honestly need to start with 100-200 search terms to get it working.

AMS works, but it takes effort – and obviously you pay for ads even if you don’t sell anything.  It’s a good advanced practice.

More To Come

So these are just what I'm doing now (and what I wrote up, I'm sure I forgot a few things). I'm always trying different promotional efforts and other ways to help people find my books.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

[brendagilliam2]

Meet the Twitter designer who shuns all social media

Jon Bell will speak at Generate San Francisco on 9 June, alongside Aaron Gustafson, Stephanie Rewis, Rachel Nabors, Steve Souders, Josh Brewer and eight other great speakers. Get your ticket today!

Please introduce yourself. What do you do? I’m a product designer that loves to write and teach. I’ve worked on lots of products from Real Player back in 2000 to consulting at Frog Design to startups to Windows Phone to my current job at Twitter. On the side, I founded a company that teaches design called UX Launchpad.

What’s life like working at Twitter? The other day I was DMing with someone in a war zone about some Twitter feature ideas that would help them to survive. That’s how life is: humbling and complicated. Everyone has ideas about what Twitter should do, and only a small group of people actually get to design and ship them. That’s always on my mind.

What’s your typical day like? I’ve mocked up a helpful chart:

I’ve been doing this work professionally for 17 years, and over 20 if you count freelance web work in the mid-90s. I’ve found the most joy in ‘leaning out‘.

It freaks people out sometimes. You come onto a team and expect the senior designer to take the hardest stuff and the junior people to have smaller tasks. But I like to flip it. Give the new people the biggest challenges, then be there for discussion. Trust them and they’ll grow faster.

Other than lots and lots of listening, I spend a lot of time helping people craft stories and writing what I call ‘design rationale’ documents. I like to write design specs like I’m a journalist or a historian. My thinking is: don’t just explain what you did, explain every single tradeoff. Explain why. This is where Design Explosions came from.

Do you still do Design Explosions? Yup! It’s like an indie band you used to love who’s taking a suspiciously long hiatus. Then after you give up on them they suddenly release one more album. You buy it out of nostalgia and think, ‘Hm, maybe they should have just stopped at the hiatus’. But I’m not that smart.

What are your top three tools that you use in your day-to-day work?

You work at Twitter but have very little online presence, even on Twitter. Please explain. Gladly! This should sum it up:

That didn’t clarify anything, did it? Darn it.

Among other things UX Launchpad teaches UX design to non-designers. How do you do that? What’s the single most important thing engineers and dev would need to get their head around? UX Launchpad’s entire reason for existing is to teach design to non-designers. Here’s the summary:

My co-founder William Van Hecke and I both feel very strongly that design is just problem solving. We spend all day demystifying design to make it as fun and hands-on as possible. 

I modelled the class on Penn & Teller. Like them, we don’t have a lot of patience for making our field an ivory tower that only some people can access. It’s way more accessible and fun than it seems when you’re talking to some arrogant jerk at a networking event about how great he is.

When engineers or product managers leave our class, they’ll often say they haven’t had that much fun with building and creating since they were much younger. Mission accomplished! If you’re not playing, you’re doing it wrong.

What’s the Design Play Manifesto? I started a design conference called Design Play that’s now approaching its fourth year. I also did a meetup in Seattle for a while called Design Play. In both cases, it all comes down to the simple (science-based) fact that people do better problem solving when they’re feeling comfortable and positive. This graph sums it up:

So the manifesto (currently in draft form) is me trying to spread the thinking a bit in an open source way. A couple of Design Play meetups have happened around the world since then, which is so cool.

The description for your Generate San Francisco session is unusual. What can people expect to take away from the talk? I purposely keep it vague because it’s a unique talk format, but for the curious I have an article I wrote about it here. And for the slightly less curious I have this marketing department-approved PR image. Share with all your friends, especially the target demographics my company is currently geo and topic targeting for maximum shareholder value. Am I doing this right?

What irritates you most about product design and how could we avoid those mistakes? I won’t answer here for fear of being blacklisted from the design community. But I’m writing a series of essays called Unpopular Opinions About Design, so if anyone is reading this, I’d love to chat with you about it at the conference! I’m a hoot in person. Don’t be shy.

What’s your advice to anyone aspiring to work at a big tech company? See previous answer. I can talk about this for hours. Literally. Like, when I get going, a crowd sometimes forms because it’s so out of place seeing someone talk so frankly and excessively. Come be a part of the freak show!

What are the three biggest lessons you’ve learned in your career?

Jon Bell will give a presentation at Generate San Francisco alongside 13 other great speakers from the likes of Netflix, NASA, Uber, Salesforce and more. Topics covered include adaptive interfaces, web animations, design and performance, prototyping, design systems… and astronaut autonomy through design. Get your ticket today!

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