So. Much. Promotion.

Helping Fellow Artists

When I started working on my master's thesis for Academy of Art University, I decided to create a blog documenting every stage. That blog still exists as Steampunk in Art and Writing. In it, I chronicled the progress of Bodacious Creed from idea to finished 3D modeling and texturing demo reel. Then, a year and a half later, I decided it was time to turn the story behind the reel into a novel.

But you can read all about that in the blog, if you like.

Here's the point that I'm getting to in a round-a-bout way. As I worked on the models and the textures, I hoped that my fellow MFA candidates and others would read the blog and get some ideas for their own work. No, I don't mean I wanted all of them to create steampunk zombie western theses. I wanted them to learn from the modeling and texturing techniques I came up with. For example, I figured out a great way to easily create symmetrical blend shapes in Zbrush and to transfer them back to Maya. (Blend shapes allow animators to do things like make a character's lips move to speech.)

Helping Now

How does this relate to the title of this blog, So. Much. Promotion.? I discovered that I really enjoyed sharing my techniques with other artists, just as I enjoy learning from tutorial videos and blogs. As a writer, I want to help other writers have some success, too. I'm a long way from being a marketing expert, but I'm learning, and when I learn something that works, I want to share it.

Wiped Out

Over the last five days, I ran a free promotion of my first two novels, which I recently re-published, Children of Rhatlan and Tamshi's Imp. I made the Kindle editions free and advertised like crazy on Facebook. I also had some intensive writing homework to finish for a class. So, this morning, after seeing my son off to school on the bus, I slept for a good five more hours.

So. Much. Promotion. As I said.

Physical exercise can wipe you out, and so can constant strategy and brain work. The brain uses a lot of energy, after all.

But, my promotion was a roaring success! In total, new fans (I say optimistically) ordered 655 Kindle copies of my books! They downloaded 427 copies of Children of Rhatlan and 238 of Tamshi's Imp! Surprisingly, it seems that most of those didn't come from Facebook, though about 200 did.

Now, I know this blog entry will not seem complete, because I've left out the tips! This is the background blog. In the next entry, I'll explain what I did to promote them.