Claire Ryan's Blog, page 14

The Swordplay of Lord of the Rings

I have the greatest respect for the fight choreographers of Hollywood. They don’t have an easy job of it – and I know plenty of people like to talk crap about the fight scenes in movies being silly and unrealistic, which is especially unfair when those fight scenes probably took months of work to get right.

(Except for the Star Wars prequels. Frankly, those scenes were godawful.)

Fight choreography is hugely interesting to me – so much so that stage combat is part of my regular class schedule in Academie Duello here in Vancouver. I can’t help watching swordplay in movies without judging it in the back of my mind as to whether it’s actually good. Fortunately, being a writer gives me a different perspective as to how to judge ‘good’.

A caveat: I’m no expert, by any stretch of the imagination, on HEMA – historical European martial arts. My weapon of choice is the longsword, and that’s the one I know best. Anything outside of that… well, I’m a little more fuzzy. So take all this as opinion, nothing more.

I absolutely, positively, love the LOTR movies. (Not The Hobbit. We shall not speak of The Hobbit except to mention the name of Martin Freeman with reverence.) The swordplay in them, eh… sometimes gets on my nerves, though. Here’s a clip from the Battle of Amon Hen:

 

Here’s part of the fight in Moria:

Is it good?

Well, it depends. I’m usually watching Aragorn, if possible, because he uses a longsword. (Boromir uses an arming sword and shield; Gimli has his axe; Legolas has his bow; Gandalf uses a staff and longsword.) I don’t think about whether it’s historically accurate – it’s not, mostly – because it’s hard to hold that against movie swordplay whose purpose is not to be historically accurate; rather, it has to serve the rhythm of the action and the beats of the story, while still being safe for the actors involved. So to be good, it has to be interesting, and it has to be appropriate.

For the most part, the swordplay does hold up – and then I see stuff that grates across my nerves. My main issue, that keeps appearing time and time again, is that the fights almost always amount to “everybody swinging wildly as if the swords are baseball bats,” regardless of what the context is. And it just doesn’t always work! The fights of LOTR are not always chaos and should not be. I keep thinking that Peter Jackson just got hung up on large, massed battles, and never once gave a thought for anything more than having a large, insane scrum that honestly gets visually and emotionally tiring after a while.

Swordfights for the sake of swordfights. Compare the two clips above, for example – Amon Hen had a real story purpose, where the Fellowship get ambushed just as Frodo runs from Boromir and Aragorn gets his little moment of awesome. Then we get all kinds of interesting things: Boromir’s death, Frodo running away, Merry and Pippin kidnapped. The action serves the story.

In Moria, it’s basically another ambush, but good grief – it’s long, drawn out, and damn near everything moves too fast. There’s a whole lot of action and not enough story beats and everyone is spinning around like ballet dancers. It’s not good storytelling.

Moria is especially irritating because right after that, we get the Balrog. And goddamn do I ever wish Jackson had done the Balrog better… It was supposed to be this huge, terrifying creature that even Gandalf feared, and it’s revealed far too early and made far too small. It should have been Gandalf against the impossible, not Gandalf against the fantasy version of a T-Rex.

Anyway – it’s somewhat annoying for me to constantly see this baseball bat technique when we already have perfectly good techniques that could serve all kinds of different storytelling purposes. The overuse of this also suggests that these characters just don’t know how to handle their weapons, if only because it comes off as flailing instead of proper skill. Yes, movie swordplay should look good, but honestly, this is not the only answer, filmmakers.

For reference, here’s a video of “real” longsword fighting – by which I mean unscripted sparring between two very highly trained fighters, both using techniques that were reconstructed from the original historical manuals through study and practice. (They’re going at variable speeds so you can actually see what’s going on!) I think you’ll agree that swordplay can be much more than just wild swinging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLUR2...

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On the Subject of Kindle Unlimited

So… I’ve been debating Kindle Unlimited, and my biggest concern is whether it’s useful to readers. There’s already been a million words spilled on whether it’s good for authors, which is… neither here nor there, as my mother would say. The strength of it really depends on whether readers use it.

Trying to actually get info on the opinions of readers, though, is far more tricky than I thought it would be. My Google-fu is pretty strong, and I still struggled to get some basic articles written by readers or bloggers – not authors – on how much they got out of KU for the prince of $10 a month. So for what it’s worth, this is what I found – what readers think about KU.

USA Today – Reviewing Kindle Unlimited
MakeUseOf – Reviewing Kindle Unlimited
Coderanch Thread – KU vs. Libraries
TechNet Blog – Is KU Worth it? (great article)
Washington Post – Is KU Worth it?

It’s not without issues, more or less. The selection isn’t great. It can’t be, seeing as not all authors are on board with it. Then there’s the cost vs. payoff, and it depends on how many books you read. So it’s good for prolific readers, and a waste of money for lighter readers. That’s interesting to me.

So here’s what I said, way back when I listed my thoughts on what traditional publishers could do to save their business:

Hire programmers. Hire them out of Google or Microsoft if you have to. Have them build a Netflix-style service for books, tailored to an individual’s reading speed, that automatically sends new recommended books to them, with a skip function if they don’t like the blurb. But seriously, anything that Amazon can’t offer is what you need to look at.

Well… this isn’t quite what KU is. I imagined a service like this that would be priced at the number of books a person expects to read per month with a build-in discount, not a flat rate for everything. I kinda feel that that would be more in line with what readers want, and what authors would accept. I wish I could build such a thing.

Hell, I wish I could subscribe to such a thing.

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Once more with feeling

And the site is changed around again. I’ve decided that I need to get real, for once and for all, and concentrate on… well, being a writer. Doing the thing that I’ve wanted to do since I was twelve and figured out that storytelling is my calling in life.

AND SO IT BEGINS…

Anyway. I’ll be self-publishing, because I’ve spent a long, hard time staring at the traditional publishing industry and alternatively laughing or being horrified, and it looks like that isn’t going to change any time soon. Now that Amazon and the big publishing houses have settled down somewhat and all the drama is over, I figure it’s the right time to get back into the basic, hard work of narrative. The good news is I brought my longsword and I’m ready for the battle. The bad news is the damn novel isn’t finished yet and the ETA is at least three months out.

But I’ll get back to that some other day. I’m pretty sure the actual craft of writing isn’t exactly interesting to readers. Newsflash, my dears – it’s exactly like getting teeth pulled, only with more shouting and drugs. (That could just be me though.) I’ll write an article here and there on the publishing industry and various silliness thereof, but from here on out, I think I’d rather just write and post silly stuff. Like whether a longsword could defeat a rapier one-on-one.

(Psst – the answer is always “whoever is more skilled”.)

So I went into Chapters here in Vancouver over the holidays, just looking for a few presents. And indeed they had a lot of gifts on sale, which was nice even though I didn’t actually buy any of them. I think I was just a little bit depressed by the sight of the e-reader section slowly migrating across the main sales floor, buoyed up on a wave of unrelated electronics and accessories, or perhaps the vast, vast piles of completely unrelated hardcover books, prominently placed front and center due to the gargantuan marketing budgets of the traditional publishers, and none of which I had even the slightest interest in.

I swear, finding something good to read among all this kitsch is painful. At least online I have options…

And now I have work to do. I’ll be back later, assuming I haven’t fallen asleep on my keyboard.

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“Not taking sides”

I’ve been following the Amazon vs. Hachette dispute with interest, mostly for the entertainment value. I don’t have much time to write on it myself, unfortunately, but one thing has finally prompted me to say something: the fact that Doug Preston, Authors United, and David Streitfeld, for example, are supposedly impartial, and not taking sides, when it’s clearly – CLEARLY – not the case. They are the old guard, on the side of Hachette and against Amazon.

The nice thing about the Internet is that you can basically try to prove it, and, well, I just feel the need to call out this silliness.

Fun with Words

Did you know that word clouds are incredibly fascinating things? They can tell you so much about a piece of text… And Wordle is a delightful little service that will generate word clouds. Here’s what happens when you take the text of the two letters from Authors United and place it in its entirety into Wordle:

Very interesting. Notice, of course, that Amazon is the most common word, and both books and authors show up more often than Hachette. (The word readers is non existent.) Still – only four words stand out prominently, which are Amazon, authors, Hachette, and books.

Now, on to David Streitfeld. I took a representative sample of recent articles written by David for the NYT dealing specifically with the dispute:

Amazon cites Orwell but not quite correctly
Orwell is Amazon’s latest target in battle against Hachette
Plot thickens as 900 authors battle Amazon
Literary lions unite in protest over Amazon’s tactics
In latest volley against Amazon, Hachette writers target its board

And here’s the corresponding Wordle:

Again, notice how much larger Amazon is than any other. Notice, again, the relative size of the word readers. The most prominent words are Amazon, Hachette, books and writers. Notice how similar that is to the Authors United result.

Now, just for giggles, I got the text of Hugh Howey’s Change.org petition, and fed that into Wordle too. And here’s the result:

Amazon is still very big. But notice something a little different? The prominent words are Amazon, authors, Hachette, readers, books. The size spread is also much more consistent.

The Point of all this

So what does it tell us? Well, I think it’s possible to draw some conclusions, even though this is back-of-the-envelope analysis at least.

First of all – for all their protests, Preston et al are not impartial. They are most certainly taking a side, if only because their focus is squarely on Amazon in this particular dispute.

Second of all – readers are an afterthought for them, which is somewhat remarkable. Their opinion that Amazon’s actions are ostensibly damaging seems to be focused almost entirely on the effects on authors.

Third – Hugh Howey is also not impartial and places his focus on Amazon, but (crucially) I don’t recall him ever claiming to be. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that his opinion of Hachette is very low, and he’s on Amazon’s side all the way because it makes good business sense.

Fourth – readers are not an afterthought for Hugh. He mentions readers as often as Hachette and books.

This is not a qualitative argument as to who is right or wrong. But this is a look at the big ideas, as it were – the things that are front and center in the minds of those who wrote these pieces of text. And I believe it is telling, more or less, that Preston, Authors United, and David Streitfeld betray their bias in nothing more than the amount that they talk about either Amazon or Hachette. I like that Hugh has a higher focus on readers, the people who make the entire industry possible.

This kind of thing begs for a better sample size; take with a grain of salt, and all that, because it comes with its own issues. But just try it yourself. You’d be surprised what you can find.

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ABookFor.Me Amazon Listings

Whew.

Lots of work has gone into ABookForMe over the last few weeks. I’ve got some great feedback from everyone, which I’m very happy about, and I’ve made a number of improvements. Top of the list, though, is the Amazon cache – after the rebuild, it’s finally starting to return good results, even I don’t have that many books yet.

The Amazon Listings

My total tally of books is just over 100,000. Not much in comparison to the millions Amazon has, unfortunately, but it’s a start. The rebuild took about a week and a half, after I scrubbed all the keyword information for the cache.

Hopefully, the keywords will improve over time.

The ‘More Like This’ Feature

This was a suggestion from a friend – a search index based on a single book’s keywords. And, funnily enough, it does seem to work pretty well, even though it always includes the original book there despite my best efforts to filter it out. I had it limited to logged in users only, but I’ve opened it up to everyone for now.

So, for the future, I’m going to start giving out logins to people so I can start building out the user features properly. Busy busy…

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Let’s Talk to Patrick Kelly, author of Hill Country Greed

I’ve talked about the problems of online advertising before, both here on Raynfall and in The Author’s Marketing Handbook. Although I don’t recommend it in general for authors because of the danger of losing a lot of money on useless services, I do include a caveat: go for it if you know what you’re doing.

Today I’ve caught up with Patrick Kelly, a Texan with a flair for mystery thrillers, who’d like to share his experience of online advertising as an author. As a former CFO, he definitely knows what he’s doing.  Take it away, Pat!

Lessons Learned from Online Advertising

Most of the self-publishing advice I’ve read about paid online advertising goes something like this: DON’T DO IT!!!

Still . . . it’s awfully tempting to search for a magic formula.

Think about it. Each Kindle sale of my book pays a net royalty of $4.74. If I pay Google fifty cents per click-through to my book on Amazon, and one click in eight results in a new sale, I’ll be ahead by $0.74 for each book sold. That is what’s known as a money machine.

I had to try it for myself.

I decided to proceed with caution. As a general rule I limit my spending on marketing and promotions to the royalties I have already earned on my book. That accomplishes two objectives. First, it keeps me from over-spending. Second, it forces me to choose carefully between alternative marketing tactics.

I tried advertising on four large platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Goodreads. Each site allowed me to establish a daily budget and offered different algorithms for paying for my ads. In most cases I could choose to pay “per click-through” or to pay “per thousand impressions”. For my experiments, I selected the pay per click-through method, limited my bid per click-through to fifty cents, and allocated a maximum of fifteen dollars for each test.

Google Results

The Google results were the most interesting. The Google Adwords tool allowed me to aim my ad at specific search keyword combinations. Once I had selected keywords, the Adwords dashboard promptly informed me that my bid of fifty cents per click-through was not high enough to land my ad on the first search page for those keywords. Google suggested increasing the bid to $2.50 per click – too rich for me.

But a funny thing happened. At night my ad started to serve up on a few of the keyword combinations, and I got a bunch of impressions. Over the course of four days, and at a total cost of $20.00, I got 44 clicks to my website. The average cost per click-through was $0.45.

The resulting visits to my website have not generated enough incremental book sales to justify the cost; however, the results were encouraging enough for me to continue experimenting with Google using small money.

Observations from LinkedIn, Goodreads, and Facebook

Here are my observations from the other experiments. Your results may differ.

Linkedin: too expensive to be useful in advertising my novel.
Goodreads: too crowded for me to successfully attract attention to my novel.
Facebook: useful for attracting likes on my fan page and visits to my website, but not yet driving book sales.

The bottom line is I haven’t found that magic money machine, but I will continue to experiment within my budget constraints.

Advice

My advice to self-publishers is to test advertising using small money. You never know what technique might be a winner and if you do find that magic formula, the results could be extraordinary. Be disciplined about how much money you commit to the experiment and take advantage of the tools provided by the website to carefully track your results. Good luck!

Excellent advice there. I’ll also add my usual marketing advice, if you’re going to take the plunge - any method of marketing is worth trying (if you’ve got the tech know-how and financial savvy, in the case of online advertising), but if you’re not seeing results, don’t keep doing it! You should never keep paying for what clearly doesn’t work.

Thanks to Patrick for this post, and be sure to check out his new book, Hill Country Greed: An Austin, Texas Mystery over on Amazon. Check out his website for more info on Patrick himself, and his plans for his next book, Hill Country Rage.

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Organic Book Discovery

Well, this has been some time in the making. I’ve spent quite a while thinking about book discovery, and now it’s time to show my work.

That work has been in progress for a few months now. It’s called ABookForMe, and it’s possibly one of the biggest projects I’ve worked on to date.

ABFM, as I’ve taken to calling it, came about because of a question: how would I build something that could help people find books? I effectively started from there, with the problem of book discovery, and just ran with it as far as I could. The front end look and feel was all the work of Fay-Lisa, a good friend and one of the best web designers I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. The result is what you see there now: an organic search engine for books, possibly the first of its kind. It uses user-influenced keyword matching algorithms to find the right book among close to 200,000, last time I counted, for whoever is searching.

There were huge challenges involved. I’ve integrated two different APIs in order to get access to the data I need to make it all work. Amazon were predictably useless, but Smashwords stepped up and gave me all the support I could have asked for. (Mark, Doug, if you’re reading this – thank you so much.) I spent at least a week doing nothing but optimizing the database. There were many late nights spent chasing down errors, or running through the logic of different functions.

So now the first stage is ready. I’ve done as much as I can, and at this point I need beta testers. Authors and readers alike, no matter what you read, no matter what you write.

Your opinions are the only ones that matter.

Go to abookfor.me and try out the main search engine. This is available to anyone, and it works right out of the box! No need to sign up or anything. I’ll accept feedback through any channel you prefer, whether by Facebook or Twitter or carrier pigeon or whatever.

If you want to try out the user features, though, contact me here and I’ll issue you a beta test account.

 

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Facebook Advertising: A Follow Up

After posting the Veritasium video on fraud in Facebook advertising, I’ve had a while to think about it and I hope I can answer some obvious questions.

Who is scamming people here? Is it Facebook?

I believe not, or at least, not intentionally. It’s a happy coincidence for them. Ditto for the clickfarms, though their activity of paid likes is against the Facebook TOS.

Facebook is working for me. Are you sure this video is right?

So there are two types of advertising you can do here – the paid ads in the sidebar, and paying to promote your posts. The problem is when you do one and then the other.

I’ve no doubt that businesses who have spent years building up their customer base and who have mostly real people liking their page – i.e. the businesses who have not spent anything on sidebar ads – are doing quite well with the promoted posts. The point is that the number of actual people engaged with the business, versus people who are clicking on anything because they’re paid to and they have to disguise their activity, is important, and the Facebook sidebar ads (which Facebook pushes as a method to get traffic and likes for a business’s Facebook page) is apparently producing more of the latter than the former.

There’s plenty of experienced marketers who are capable of making Facebook advertising work well, but many others are just throwing money down a hole because of these circumstances.

How worried should I be?

If you’re spending money on Facebook advertising, then… be a little worried.

Look, as I’ve said before, the only thing that really counts is whether your marketing is getting you sales, or at the very least attention you can turn into sales later. (There’s something to be said for brand awareness, but I’m speaking to small scale self-published authors most of the time, where it’s not relevant.) Likes on your Facebook page should be attention you can turn into sales later, when you promote a post to your followers with a special offer on your books on your website. If that kind of promotion produces almost no clicks to your site and no sales, then something is wrong.

How do I know if it’s worth it?

This is a tough one, but I will say this much – check your organic reach. Look at how many people are seeing and engaging with your posts. Look to see who likes you, and use your best judgment as to whether those people are real or not. If you’ve already got hundreds of likes but your organic reach is awful, and the users look fake, then it’s likely your FB page is already a lost cause, because promoting anything is going to be a waste of money.

The worst part about this is that you can’t clean up this mess once it’s happened. The fake likes can’t be removed. Again, I’m sure experienced marketers have methods of fixing it, but I don’t know of any FB functionality that lets you do it. For authors, all I can say for now is to watch your pages, avoid sidebar advertising, and concentrate on getting your real readers to like and share.

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PSA: Facebook Advertising

For reference, for every author who is considering buying advertising on Facebook – please watch this video first.

Long story short, it’s a complete waste of your money. If you’re considering Facebook advertising as part of your book marketing, remove it immediately. From this point on, we can consider the mechanics of Facebook to be detrimental to actual promotion, due to the way it filters and restricts what users see. Unless you’ve got solid data to show that Facebook advertising is producing sales for you, don’t even spend time on the platform, let alone money.

A brief summary, for anyone who can’t watch the video and wants to know what’s up:

There are two ways of getting Facebook Likes – paying FB for promoted posts and advertising, and paying clickfarms for fake Likes (which isn’t allowed). Obviously paying Facebook is the way to do it if you want to get legit Likes, right?

Wrong. Here’s what you need to know.

Clickfarms don’t just like the stuff they’re being paid to like. They like all kinds of pages for free in order to mask the paid likes, so Facebook can’t detect and block them.

When users like a page, it’s not a guarantee that everything posted to the page will be seen by them. Whether it is or not depends on the organic reach – the more some number of users like and share a thing, the more it’ll be seen by other users. If you want something to be seen by all of them, you have to pay.

So here’s the cycle:

You pay for advertising on Facebook to get likes.
Clickfarms click on your ads and like your page as part of their normal operations to mask their own paid likes.
Facebook gets paid once.
You share a post in order to get people to your website. Facebook shows the post to a percentage of the people who liked your page initially.
That percentage includes a large number of clickfarm likes that are completely uninterested in whatever you just posted and will never share it.
Your organic reach drops through the floor as fewer real users get a chance to see your post – lost in the noise, as it were.
The number of people who see your post remains embarrassingly low, even though you have more likes than you did before.
You scratch your head, wonder what you’re doing wrong, and then pay Facebook to promote your post to more people.
Facebook gets paid twice.

Verdict – DO NOT GIVE MONEY TO FACEBOOK FOR ANY KIND OF ADVERTISING.

We need to see how this plays out. For now, Facebook ads should not be part of any marketing campaign for your books. Focus on getting real followers that will not be arbitrarily restricted, through newsletters if nothing else.

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Affiliate Alert: PublishingAddict.com – Spam Site

Hey, all you authors and other writers in the publishing world! Have you gotten an email like this one?

Hi,

My name is Taylor you can find me on facebook

www.fb.com/taylorreesdotcom

(I’ll get straight to the point since Christmas is almost here)

I really love your work and wanted to ask if you

might be interested in posting a guest post on

http://publishingaddict.com/help-wanted/

Anything that you think can help book authors,

Things like:

Importance of a book covers

video book trailer

how to write a book

etc

Thanks,

Taylor

P.S. If you don’t have time to post on other websites,

I would love to write an article for your website.

If you’ve seen something like this, chances are you’ve already deleted it as spam. But for anyone who’s never seen it before, allow me to help you out!

This is from an affiliate marketer.

This was not sent from a real live person – well, I mean, they’re not from who they say they are. They’re claiming to be someone called Taylor Rees, and they’ve put together a pretty good Facebook profile and website specifically for the purpose of convincing you that they are, indeed, a real person, but they’re not. This email is from an affiliate marketer, likely based somewhere cheap like the Philippines, whose job it is to send out thousands of these emails in the hopes of getting responses that will eventually turn into links for their website.

They want to do two things here – convince you to give them some content, which they will likely tweak for SEO purposes and which you are likely to link to from your own website, and see if they can write a guest post for your site, which will inevitably contain a backlink to their site.

They’re doing this because they need to get their site to the top of Google for certain keywords, and Google’s been making it pretty hard to game the rankings lately. Part of how to do it now is effectively to ‘fake’ it completely – to build a persona and site that looks exactly like the real thing, and use it to get legitimate back links and attention from regular authors.

The end goal here, if I had to guess, is to build up the traffic and then add in affiliate ads for something like AuthorHouse.

So how do I know all this?

I used to work in affiliate marketing, and this is pretty much par for the course.
No name on the email (obviously), just ‘Hi’ with no reference to anything else.
The domain is only a month old, even though the FB profile claims they’ve been around since April 2004.
Stock image used as an avatar.

I’ve checked enough to be convinced that this isn’t legit, more or less.

Long story short – you need to delete this email and ignore it. Don’t respond at all. They aren’t who they say they are, which is a big red flag. If you get something similar to this, investigate a LOT to make sure that you know who you’re talking to.

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