25 Apr 2012, Posted by caburkes in 40 To Go, Butta, Butta worldwide, Coming Soon, DesktopEpics, Meagan Good as Butta', 0 Comments Tagged Butta Worldwide, LOL, Mac Mini

Progressive and Rotating Facebook Covers

With the release of Butta‘:Worldwide rapidly approaching, marketing has begun at least on the Facebook fan pages with what I’m calling progressive covers. This is inspired by an old Back to The Future III poster campaign I saw years back where every few weeks they updated the poster with a little bit more of an image. First it was the horses being pulled into the scene. Then a little bit more of the horses pulling the Delorian until the title was revealed.

The Butta: Worldwide covers start with the tip of a motorcycle. Side note: the reason it’s doing a wheelie is primarily because the way Facebook covers are designed, I can’t remove the headshot profile box in the bottom left corner. LOL…so the wheelie is lifted above the box and turned out to be a nice image to continue with moving forward.

Each week, leading up to the release date, there will be a little bit more of the scene which is taken directly from the sequel.

Each cover will also have a quote from either the first book or the sequel. ‘finally’ is exactly how I feel about it. I came a long way from 2007. I can’t thank Ebony and Neil Phillips enough for starting this brake-less rocket and it’s been an adventure.

Also …

40 To Go stumbled but has a strong following that seems to be waiting. So, to clear the air and any confusion, 40 To Go will be a series of enhanced ebooks for the iPad. Armed with my Mac Mini, iPad and months of HTML5 experience, it’s on. Same rules apply, just different and all the actors you kow and love will still be portraying the characters that they were assigned … just different. Similar to the sample version I posted online, the novel will interject audio and video in sections with clips of animation.

Not motion comic animation.

Animation. Thus the need for slight character redesign, also. The cover for 40 To Go is not progressive, but rotating. Showcaseing every character in the series until the book releases.

Date? Don’t hold me to one, please. LOL … but you know it’s almost there when you hear me talking about recording schedule’s with the actors and we run through all 17 characters in the covers.

First up … Julissa:

18 Apr 2012, Posted by caburkes in Random Crap, 0 Comments Tagged Butta Worldwide, LOL, Storyboarding Demo Reel

What’s is he doing?

He (me) is doing the following:

1. Finalizing a workable workflow between Daz 3D Studio 4, 3DS Max and MotionBuilder to create characters, skinned and boned properly and animated with a return back to 3DS Max. All for the cause of animation.
2. Partially into the next Leslie Road Detective Mystery Short Story to follow Toasted!. 
3. Partially finished the video tutorial detailing how I do a book cover from start to finished. It’s really just an overview
4. Walkthru #1 of the Butta‘:Worldwide edits almost complete
5. Photography of Tiffany tonight for face mapping for animation (Demo Reel). I’ll have to wait till Aaron and Sariya show up during the summer.
6. Writing 40 To Go novel
7. Staging “I Got A Man” animation for DesktopEpics Storytellers.
8. Storyboarding Demo Reel
9. Storyboarding 40 To Go Book Trailer.

08 Mar 2012, Posted by caburkes in DesktopEpics, Gravity Gone, 0 Comments Tagged Butta Worldwide, EVERYBODY, FLASH, HTML

Gravity Gone Animated Gif Ad

I purchased ad space on a bloggers site and I created an animated gif instead of a generic jpg image. We’re trying it out on her site soon. This is what it looks like:

Animated gifs are old school (remember when EVERYBODY was flooding their web pages with some sort of moving gif? They sorta died out (or died down) and most ads on peoples pages are stationary or FLASH. But even Flash is about to suffer downgrading since HTML 5.

Between this and the forthcoming book trailer, I hope it will drum up more attention to the eBook itself. While I’m not depending on the success of either to push Gravity (while it could help tremendously), it’s really the stepping stones toward where this same marketing path will be used for Butta: Worldwide and others.

05 Mar 2012, Posted by caburkes in Butta worldwide, DesktopEpics, 0 Comments Tagged Butta Worldwide, Donna Swan

Butta: Worldwide Release date – Monday May 21st Midnight

I never had a release date for Butta: Worldwide because I wasn’t sure when the editing would be done. I knew May was the cut off, but now I’m sure especially with review copies being dispersed to various locations.

Donna Swan, my brilliant first-reader and truth teller (as she’ll be the first to tell me a story sucks provided I give it to her to read) has informed me she liked it better than the first novel and spent a day yelling at me about characters and why they did this and why they did that and when the third novel was coming out to resolve her anxiety.

So that tells me it’s a winner.

Lot’s of action and thrills. Until then, Butta’: Worldwide sample excerpt can be found on Smashwords

Oh and yes…. Meagan Good is Butta‘ … lol

03 Mar 2012, Posted by caburkes in eBooks, 0 Comments Tagged Android Galaxy Tablet, Butta Worldwide, EBook, Response Possibly

EBook Pricing Strategy – The Walmart Attack Plan

How much is an EBook worth to you? Since I can’t hear your response, I’ll have to put myself in my own shoes and ask the same question: How much is an EBook worth to me?

I don’t own an eReader except what I can get on my IPod Touch and the screen is too small to really take it seriously. When I first put IBooks on the IPod, it was a cute novelty. But let’s face it … the screen is too small and I’m not getting any younger. I recently had my hands on an Android Galaxy Tablet and LOVED it. I could even type somewhat of a novel on it on the go.

That said, tablets are the way to go when reading ebooks and I don’t even have one of those yet.

So I don’t buy ebooks like some readers do. I’m not a good candidate for that study. Also … I really don’t do too much reading with this explosive amount of writing I’ve been doing. Too distracting.

So if I did go and buy an eBook, how much would I pay for it? Any author? Considering I don’t do too much reading and lets say the author is new … plus I don’t have the right device to put it on. All that considered …

.99 cents seems about right.

I’m looking at the sales of Butta‘ compared to the other novels out there of my own and see that the price point is almost 100% of it’s own marketing. I changed the price of Scratch from $1.99 to .99 cents and its already moving better than it did prior. same story. Same great reviews at $1.99, but it’s selling more at .99 cents.

My ego and pride started bothering me and don’t want to accept that what I’m writing is worth .99 cents. I create a few short stories to keep my name circulating on the net and I put them out for free as part of the overall strategy. But the stuff with a price point needed, I thought, to stand pat! To sort of offset the free stuff with ‘something’ generating money.

Well, .99 cents is generating money and I shouldn’t complain, right?

Well that’s what this journal is for: my place to bitch and complain.

Butta‘: Worldwide is coming in May and I don’t think I should be charging .99 cents for it. All of this is that haunting ‘Kickstarter’ annoyance again. Always a discussion over how much I should set a price and what people would pay. Meanwhile, other people are charging $4.99 or more for their EBooks. Rule of thought on that matter are the following:

a) Maybe they’re a better writer? Response: Then why am I getting great reviews and massive downloads of my free short stories?

b) Maybe they aren’t really selling? Response: Possibly. I don’t have access to their financial records so I can only go by ranking on Amazon … and some of them rank fairly high.

Generally speaking, you price your work to draw quality buyers. Barney’s New York is for the buying elite. Shoppers who want quality. so much so, they don’t even show the price on anything. It’s always hidden as if discussing price isn’t cool. If I tried that with my books they’d gather dust.

But to be honest, an EBook pricing strategy equates to an EBook Quality Standard strategy. How you perceive the quality of your book is based, in the mind of the buyer, by the price of your book and then followed by the formatting and so on. I think my EBooks have a very good quality and down the line, I plan to offer more incentives (i.e. gimmicks) to enhance the ownership of one of my ebooks. I can see a book of mine priced at $4.99 because you not only get a great story, but you also get all the extras like a Blu-Ray DVD with features and more. That’s MY kind of EBook. Shit, if I charged $100 for an EBook it would be because you get a full length motion picture with it.

That would certainly make news: First EBook ever priced at $100. Didn’t I see that recently? Hmmmm….

The pill I’m swallowing 3 months into the year is that I am a new author no matter how long I’ve been writing and the industry and readers are just getting to know me. Once I get past that, I can start pricing in the reasonable range.

Here’s a for instance:

Butta‘ has sold over 1000 copies since January. Will likely sell, at this rate, close to 2500 by May. Butta:Worldwide comes out in May and I should charge at minimum $2.99. Reasonably and logically, if the story is as interesting as people have expressed, they’d pay $2.99 for it without complaint. It’s the next episode in the series and people have enjoyed it. Early reviews of the sequel have been amazing.

I can take the position that if an EBook was like a hard copy, I couldn’t change the price and be forced to market hard. changing the price of an Ebook is almost too easy and gives me an easy out if I fear no one is biting. If it was a hard coded price, I’d be forced to make it work. For hard copies of novels, you can’t change a $15.99 price the next day after 1000 copies have the price printed on the back.

Maybe I’m being lazy when I fear no one buying at higher prices. I can go a year at .99 cents only on everything and collect a pretty nice check with multiple books coming in at 30% revenue on each book. One book … no. Multiple books … yes. Roughly 30 cents per book.

So, picture this … currently, every day, Butta‘ brings in about $1.80 ($0.30 cents x 6 books). Average 6-10 books daily.

Scratch just sold 3 books …that’s .90 cents. If I can get Scratch to sell like Butta‘, then suddenly that’s $3.60 a day. That’s not the case right now, but it’s still money in the bank.

I drop the price of Gravity Gone to .99 cents and post another novel soon at either .99 cents or something whacked out like $1.19. If I can generate 2-3 books a day from all of them, including the regular sales of Butta‘, suddenly this book selling thing has become interesting as I’m making roughly around $5 to $7 a day over four or five books … give or take.

Yes, going for the gold at $4.99 would be fantastic … but we need to take it back to the drug dealer mentality and create series that will be interesting to readers and starting at .99 (the first one is always free, sort of speak) and then once addicted, jack the price up. Such is the case with Butta‘.

That settles it. I needed to write this through to really figure things out and time stamp this strategy. Part of me hates to do it but its a working plan: for 2012 EVERYTHING I put out (not a short story) will be .99 cents, with a window of play up to $1.50. I’m going to try crazy numbers like $1.05 and $1.09.

Ahhhhh Walmart … my Assistant Manager past is coming back to roost. Gotta pull out all my Walmart sales techniques and paperwork.

Give me a ‘W’ …