Chances are, if you’re following me on social media over the course of the last month, you’ve seen me become a human spam-bot. In April, I jumped in face-first to the hashtags #writingcommunity and #indieapril. I told everyone I could find (mostly fellow self-publishers) about my legal thriller/urban fantasy mashup, and followed a ton of writers who followed back. I had my best month of sales ever, though at the cost of eroding a hole in my iPhone where the copy/paste prompt comes up.
I swore that at the end of April I’d chill out and stop hustling, and I did… to a degree. I stopped hawking my book everywhere, and, unsurprisingly, sales plummeted back to their barely-moving-any level. If you don’t have advertising in the self-publishing world, you don’t have anything.
But the spam didn’t end there, because I can *finally* talk about my day job. While things have been slow on Pirates of the Caribbean: Sea of Glory, our small team took it upon themselves to see if we could start a line of comic books. We’ve been at it for about a year, contacting artists, writing scripts, turning those scripts into comics pages, and all that — and we’ve finally announced a Kickstarter to get our first 6-issue run done.
My project is called Mythkillers. I’ve written a ton of promo material for it, because we’re trying to have new content to read every weekday. It’s all over at the Seasun Comics page. We’re doing everything for it that I can’t afford to do for Civil Blood — swag, giveaways, introductions to the team, featured articles, and so forth. We’re in the blitz right now (the Kickstarter runs until June 25th) so I have homework every night.
Art reviews.
Press releases.
Finding fulfillment companies.
Social media posts.
So yes, I’m a human spam-bot on Twitter for this month, too. I wish there was another way, but just like with my indie novel, every connection counts. Every visitor to our site is a victory, every backer is to be thanked. As I say on the Kickstarter page, a fan community is built up through blood, sweat, and convention appearances.
(Okay, we haven’t done any of those yet, since we’ve been chained to our desks, but our producer is going to be handing out promotional materials at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.)
All that doesn’t leave much time for writing that isn’t on the clock, so my short stories are untouched and unfinished. Eery time I tweet in promotion of my novel, it feels like I’m breaking character. Obviously I had time to tweet, so how dare I do it for a personal project?
After June 25th, the Kickstarter will be over, which of course means the real work will begin — making the books and the swag to be sent out to the backers. And, no doubt, we’re going to need someone to write press releases and posts for those months, too.
How do I end this except with the obvious?
You can check out our Kickstarter here.