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.
That’s the text I usually send to my buddy Troy in the middle of the night. As we get older, I’ve sent him less 3am text messages with ideas, taking advantage of how sleepy he was to get a favorable and positive response over the most madcap concepts. And I’ve had some doozies.
But this latest idea is grounded and consistent with reality and that’s far more dangerous than usual because instead of ‘what COULD happen’ … it’s an idea based on ‘what IS happening’ and there’s enough data to get me to market sooner than later.
It’s centered around the use of EBooks and mixed media. Scratch ‘scratches’ the surface. The arrival of EPub 3.0, HTML 5 and the latest generation of EBook readers that can tap the internet got me thinking in 6D (six dimensions). Let’s just say … God is funny as hell and I think I’m finally figured out why he’s been hammering storytelling, audio theater and my ‘motion comic’-grade animation since the early 1990′s.
Oh my God … I’m starting to think like … Steve Jobs.
Still no Wozniack but I can manage.
So, SCRATCH divulging anything, and keeping this journal as a living record, let’s just identify it moving forward as PROJECT SLEEPER and keep it moving.
The litmus test to part of Project Sleeper has to doScratchhe reception of SCRATCH. Damn…. let me make sure I make a category for that here in the blog.
Like Butta‘, I’ve made Scratch available for free for one day … today only … to get it out there and into the market. What has proven to happen is after the free day, the book continues in regular purchasing rotation. This book is more than .99 this time around (bumped up to $2.50 from the original $1.99. I under valued the story and production I put into it so I said … what the hell… lets jack it up but not too much. Still less than the big league $2.99 jammies)
I’m wise to the game now and won’t be as excited as I was the first time around about where the book places in the ranking. While still a GREAT thing for one day watching it rise to the top (hopefully), it’s not so much my interest in rank numbers but how many people get it and test out the audio and video added to the book, the links to the YouTube if it didn’t embed and which Kindles it worked on and which it didn’t.
That data is valuable, in addition to what people thought of the story, that helps place the foundation under Project Sleeper.
I can totally re-imagine my sought after career in film into EBooks if I pull this off.
With an overhead of just about …oh … Zilch. I have the background, coding/programming experience, animation background, audio editing experience, video experience website development skills and Epub/Mobi intermediate skills too.
Shit… I’m set. No need to hire a ‘WozScratch AM my own Wozniak.
I’ll keep this journal active with rolling details as I get them on the success and/or failures of Scratch’s reception. Right now, too early to tell but downloads are as regular as what Butta‘ did weeks ago. Great but let’s keep the perspective.
For February, it will be Scratch. Even as I write this journal entry, Scratch is in ‘publishing’ status. This after being ‘in review’ which I swore I was going to get rejected. Let me tell you something … I do have to thank SMASHWORDS for their initial manual on how to develop the layout of an EBook. Not that this process went by easier, but it’s through them that I learned that Microsoft Word is my best friend in this process.
I tore up Google for everything else. There are so many intricate little things you have to do in order to make a Kindle .mobi file work and you have to be considerate of the latest versions of Kindles PLUS the older versions. Some details I glossed over since my Smashwords tutorials so I knew I would be accepted. But Amazon has guidelines for their latest generation of Kindle that are HTML compliant as well and it was a hard road to walk.
I won’t even TRY to embarrass myself in giving you my version of a ‘How To Make a Kindle’ EBook so I’ll drop the links of sites I visited (lived at) in order to get the job done. These sites are valuable resources, at this time since things always change, that helped me get Scratch online. I mean, really … I might see glaring errors and watch Scratch be brought down by the problems, not errors because of these websites … but lets hope for the best:
http://www.helenhanson.com … Author Helen Hanson gives the most comprehensive break down of the basic files needed to make your own EBook for Kindle. She has a few errors but she catches most of them. Some are because of changes in Kindle’s requirements and not her’s.
http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com/ … Straight up information on getting your EBook Kindle-ized with no chasers. I used this site to translate the crap I didn’t understand in Amazon’s 67 page Kindle Publishing Guidelines pdf.
http://www.w3schools.com/ … For understanding specific codes for HTML 5. For instance, Amazon’s adding of audio and video use HTML 5 coding in the HTML which don’t work in regular Html … So Amazon instructs that you use <audio> and <video> enclosures … but doesn’t tell you to start your HTML with <!DOCTYPE html> which I read is required for those codes to be read. Or maybe it doesnt matter … we shall see. In my HTML I started with that and just crossed my fingers.
Essential downloads will be the latest version of Amazon’s Kindle Guidelines: A MUST. I won’t post it here because it’s always evolving, I’m sure: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin
From there you can get the KindleGen and all the nifty info and downloads they offer to help you get to their standards. (For me, in the end, KindleGen and the Previewer just FAILED. I was so pissed.)
http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/default.asp …. MobiPocket creator and viewer cause everyone you look up will be spouting about Mobicreator as if it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and when you get it it’s going to do some things that need and FAIL on everything else. Get it because it’s the only thing in your arsenal that will create a real PRC file
http://calibre-ebook.com/ …. I think it’s essential because it converts your book into multiple formats. While the above sites dont talk about it much, you’ll find Calibre does the work very few things … including Kindle’s own previewer … can’t.
http://mobiforge.com/ … good site that talks about Mobi crap. Remember: Kindle’s are Mobi compliant. However, their new KD8 or something like that is stepping away from .mobi so that may be a problem (more changes…grrrrr).
http://www.sophieproject.org/ … a way of making an interactive EBook similar to IBooks. The only issue is the end results need ‘Sophie’ viewers and what not. When they export to mobi or Epub, they’ll be the place to chill at.
Everyone is moving toward interactive multi-media Ebooks (at least the big guys) and the little guys are trying to swim through the confusion. We’ve come a long way with much more to go. We all want to do IBooks, but you have to own a Mac. Well, I’m currently trying to work out this Mac Emulator that allows me to run IOS LION on my system … I’ll let you know how thats working. So far … promising.
Until then, we try to survive the Amazon war against the publishing industry and tell a few good stories along the way.
Scratch is still in publishing mode. This oughta be good. Can’t wait to see how it turns out.
Meanwhile …. Preview the credits video and a clip of audio from the eBook:
