Today is my scheduled last stop along the Virtual Book Tour trail, but apparently there won't be a posting today after all, for reasons I'll try to explain objectively.
When I decided early last month to hire a promotion firm to handle all the bookings for this tour it was because I'd frankly run out of energy to do it myself and was wanting to get back to writing. I have to admit that I tend to get a little cranky when I'm not being productive and creative, and I was starting to feel that way back in early February, helped not at all by the oppressive winter gloom and the global economic downturn. Generally I'm a pretty upbeat and optimistic guy, but I had simply run out of motivation to continue pursuing this seemingly endless marketing campaign I'd been working on for almost half a year since
The Saga of Beowulf came out last October. I needed someone else to take the reins and do the footwork for me. And this is not the mental outlook to have when embarking on what amounts to an entire marketing campaign in itself.
Now, at the time I knew almost nothing about virtual book tours, having never done one, or even so much as followed someone else on theirs. I had a vague sense of what was involved, having done a bit of advance research when I was originally planning on setting up the whole thing myself, going so far as to create a blog tour promo package of sorts, which I posted
here way back in December when I was first working on it. Now here it is nearly April, and I'm only now finally winding up this book tour, and that with someone
else's help! Just goes to show you how vague my notion was. Those of you who have been reading this blog awhile will remember I had intended to start a new book at the beginning of this year. C'est la vie.
I've heard it said that being an author is 20% talent and 80% salesmanship, something akin to that 1%/99% inspiration-
perspiration ratio everyone bandies about as if it's somehow helpful to a starving artist. Sometimes I long for the days of patronage when guys like Michelangelo and
daVinci could sit around all day creating works of wonder for the benefit of all. But these days artists have to fend for themselves and work their magic in between other labors, one of which is selling their own wares. An artist now much sell himself, and because of this those who tend to succeed in writing (as in many other things) are not necessarily the best or most inventive at their craft, but rather the best salesmen.
Realizing this, I hired a PR firm to handle my online promotional tour, thinking naturally that they would have better contacts than I and be able to gain higher profile exposure for my book. But you get what you pay for, as they say, and I, skirting dangerously close to poverty as writers tend to do, hired the cheapest firm that I could find, because, frankly, I couldn't afford to do otherwise.
So it was that I began what would become a two month odyssey that saw the writing of a virtual novella of some 20,000 words (not counting this blog) in guest posts and interviews across the net, on sites that ran the gamut from high-ranking general news organizations like American Chronicle and
Blogcritics to genre blogs for readers of romance and fantasy, to promotional vehicles with virtually no readership at all. Much of this I've chronicled along the way, so I won't subject you to a rehash of it here. Suffice it to say that I actually sold fewer books this month than I have in any month since the book came out, rendering the initial results of my blog tour less than impressive.
That said, it must be stated that the effects of online marketing are ongoing, and the results not always immediate. The greatest probable benefit of doing a virtual book tour - or any online posting to promote your work - is its longevity. Because the
internet is such an enormous entity its effects are often slow to ripple out across the virtual pond, particularly for those just putting in a toe to test the waters for the first time. One would think that with the vast potential audience the
internet provides there would be a massive influx with each new piece of virtual bait tossed out, but this is not the case. Much like fishing in the real world, it takes patience and perseverance.
What I gained in practical terms from this book tour - aside from a handful of new friends and fans - is increased exposure through some twenty or so posts that will live on in archives accessible to search engines and via scattered links, at least from my own site. The increase in the number of incoming links will likely decrease to some degree as those links are either deleted or the hosting pages disappear. Although my incoming links more than doubled, a great many of them are from temporary scrolling widgets that will evaporate within a week. But it has improved my search rankings, and that will last awhile. Before this tour began I had already gained a fairly heavy web presence and was on the first page of Google,
MSN and Yahoo for my book title and, of course, my name. Now I rank up high in searches for "epic fantasy author" and "historical fantasy author" which, I must admit, are fairly specific search phrases not likely to be entered very often. Still, it's better than nothing, and as a first-time author you have to take what you can get and be satisfied with that.
But we authors seldom are.
Which brings me to today's tour stop that didn't happen. Yesterday I got an email from my tour promoter saying she was unhappy with my recent blog posts decrying my misfortunes in books reviews and posts that didn't show (which I paid for, she seemed to have forgotten), and telling me that I was being unfair in my evaluation of the tour (showing her in a bad light is what she meant). How, I responded, is it unfair to say a promised post didn't show up, if, in fact, it didn't? Like, for example, today's scheduled stop. In her tantrum yesterday she explained that she saw no reason to post today's interview (which, of course, I'd already completed) if I was just going to diss on her services. How, I had to wonder, would that improve my opinion? What boggles me mostly is that I've been happy with the progress of this tour overall, with the exception of some recent glitches near the end which I've already mentioned along the way.
Now, there are extenuating circumstances to some of these missing posts, like Amy at Passages To The Past who had a family emergency, which is why her book review has gone absent, or Best Fantasy Books who never got their review copy because I never got an address to send it to them (and was too busy to realize it until too late: I assumed - incorrectly - that the organizer I hired had done her job and sent me all the addresses I needed, yet another reason I'm less than satisfied with her efforts). These things happen, and I'm not bent out of shape about it. I'm just reporting the facts as I go along. Yes, I tend to be disappointed when it happens, or when I find out a site I worked hard to write a clever guest post for actually has no traffic, and is in fact run by the promoter herself (as a good half dozen or more of the sites I was hosted on were). To her credit she did put me on more sites than I was contracted for (which she was quick to point out): I signed up for the 15 stop tour, and she scheduled me for more than twenty (several of which didn't pan out or show up in the end). The question I would urge prospective future clients of hers to ask is which of these sites are the ones actually included in the package: the ones with no traffic or the high-ranked ones?
But for good or ill, today's scheduled interview has not materialized, and maybe it's just as well. The site it was to be on again gets no traffic anyway, being another front for the PR firm itself, so it's no great loss. It was a funny interview, with quirky questions like what's your favorite food and that sort, so that's unfortunate, but I might just post it here instead sometime, since I have the original copy. But by now you all have probably had about enough of interviews with me, so I'll hold off awhile. Maybe I'll just archive it on my own website along with all the other guest essays I did. Honestly, I'm just completely burned out with blathering on and on about this book for months on end, and at this point I just need to feed my creative demon before it devours me.
When I set about creating the cover art for The Saga of Beowulf I decided from the first to do it in digital rather than a traditional medium such as the pen & ink and watercolor I had done before. Initially I did this realizing I would need to composite the art together with the titles in a fairly high resolution in order to create the final jacket art, and without a large, expensive scanner the resulting image would likely be unsatisfactory. So rather than upgrading my low-quality scanner I invested in a pen tablet instead.
Still, two-dimensional painting has many limitations when it comes to shading and perspective, digital or not. And this is where 3d imaging takes a quantum leap. With the ability to add light and shadow to a fully-realized object in a virtual space the effect becomes increasingly realistic. Working in three planes instead of two not only allows you to move around your model and view it from every side in the same way you could if you were sculpting, but it also lets you interactively change the angle and intensity of your lights to create really dramatic effects. And that's just one of a seemingly infinite number of elements that you can create and manipulate.
Starting with a wire-frame model like the one above, you can lay on any textures that you like, such as wood grain and canvas for example, which you can either paint yourself or use actual photos of. I bought this particular model from the DAZ Studio website, where there are literally thousands of toys to choose from. DAZ, by the way, is a 3D art and animation program you can download for free. Poser is a higher standard tool, but DAZ will get you started and does everything you really need.
