Nick Bryan

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Moderate Fantasy Violence #1 – A new pop culture podcast co-featuring me!

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Hello!I don’t have time to write 1000 words on this right now, sadly, but you may be interested to hear that I am back in the field of podcasting, after a couple of years in the wilderness. The show is called Moderate Fantasy Violence and is a vehicle for myself and Alastair JR Ball of Nimbus Space to discuss the geek/pop culture world.

You can download the first episode from this link right here or use the player below. You can also subscribe via iTunes if you want to get it pushed straight to your iThing. What’s in it? Well…

In their first Moderate Fantasy Episode, Nick and Alastair discuss the new Deadpool movie (plus the importance of humour in superhero movies and which Deadpool comics are terrible), the #RIPTwitter algorithmic timeline kerfuffle (plus the inevitability of Vine porn and if anything good will ever happen to anyone) and their verdict on Netflix’s Making A Murderer (plus the omnipresent evil of John Luther and whether true crime documentaries are the same as gladiatorial combat).

Our as-yet-unnamed recommendations feature shows up at the end and waves.

Becoming An Internet Author – Week One

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The slow but determined march towards Hobson & Choi self-publication continues. A few days ago, I blogged a little about receiving professional edits on the text and my feelings on same. I think I reached equilibrium by the end, and I’m relatively okay with the direction it’s going.

However, there is obviously another side to the whole thing. If I’m self-publishing (or author-publishing or hybrid-authoring or whatever), I obviously have to do all my own promotion. Well, I’m hoping some good reviews will do a bit of the work for me, but I still have to get the book to some reviewers.

All of which means doing some tweeting, some blogging, some awkward-for-me self-advertising. Talking about myself. Becoming an Internet Author. Never mind my damn edits, how do I feel about that?

Fixed Books In Time – Even the Doctor can’t save us!

I do a little promotion for my stuff now, but it helps that I’m generally linking to recently updated items – a new post on this site, a Hobson & Choi update on Jukepop or whatever TV review I’ve recently scribed. The trouble with books – damn them – is that they’re pretty static.

Once the self-published volume goes up into the world, probably some time in July, I will need to keep plugging despite it remaining identical, no matter how self-conscious I feel about repeatedly mentioning a fixed point in time. Think I finally understand why they make Doctor Who so uncomfortable.

Still, there are thousands of authors in the world, self and traditionally published, and at least a few seem to get along without all their friends and internet followers deserting them. It must be possible. Just try and keep the ratio of ramble-to-promo strong. Don’t let the plugs get too dry and generic.

I’ll probably attempt at least some form of giveaway/competition once the book is out, so stay tuned if you want to get involved with winning stuff. It seems a nice way of doing a plug without boringly begging.

#MildyAmusing #Subheading

Aside from that, trying to improve this website. Make it clearer, more visually appealing and buy-my-stuff orientated.

Of course, anyone who has the words “writer” in their Twitter bio has probably been followed by a lot of random authors with a massive amount of followers, suspiciously similar number of people they follow, thousands of tweets about their book and almost nothing else.

To be honest, when I overthink myself to death about becoming an Internet Author, I’m mostly worrying about doing that. But only we can control our own destiny, etc. Most likely going to continue making poo jokes on social media even when I have a book published. I am a human being, not a wares-push-bot, and I’m pretty sure not everyone who follows me on Twitter is even that bothered whether I have a book out or not. Hopefully my fellow human people respect that I genuinely like what I’ve produced and am just trying to get along without being a pain in the arse.

Oh, and I might resist the urge to use ten million #hashtags as well. I kinda feel talking about your #book on the #kindle #ereader in the #crime genre might be too vague to get any traction? Correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

But if anyone wants to try and get #HobsonVsWolf trending, that’d help me a great deal. (Little injoke for Hobson & Choi readers there…)

Plugging Stuff On Twitter – ENTER THE VORTEX

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SPAM SPAM SPAMMITY SPAM

I’d already worried for a while about how much to plug my various writing endeavours on various social networks. Mostly Twitter, but others too. Recently, though, I started doing Hobson& Choi on Jukepop, and I’m telling you, I love doing it. Wanted to do something serialised ever since my comic-loving yoof.

But Jukepop operates on a competitive vote-up system, so to succeed, I need people to go vote for me. And I already felt I was pestering people to read my work quite a lot, so… is this too much? How much is too much? Is this much of a muchness?

Let’s blog about it.

The Life-Span Of The Lesser-Spotted Blog Post

There are a lot of aspiring/self-published writers on Twitter trying to get their work out there, and if you enter that community, follow a few people, you find yourself deluged with links and promo hyperbole. It’s hard to argue with the goal, but when everyone’s doing it, how do you stand out?

I tell myself at least I’m generally plugging new material – I don’t usually push work for longer than a day or two, and TV reviews I only mention once – rather than flogging the same thing repeatedly, but ultimately, it’s still a lot of links. I can’t pretend I’m on that much higher a plane here.

Ultimately, I gotta cross my fingers and pray my followers care – maybe dial it down if the audience figures slide toiletward. But by the same token, there’s only so much I can push things to the same few people, thus why I just mention things a few times to account for time zones, then drop them.

Don’t Miss The Toilet!

After all, I also have idle life updates and toilet jokes, and I’d hate people to miss out due to unfollowing. Yes, it’s my work which I’m genuinely passionate about, but for the same reason, I don’t want it to become background noise either. And there must be places online actually intended as locations to push your flash fiction/serial fiction/TV reviews, rather than just chucking them out into the general Twitter vortex and hoping they “go viral”.

Especially if I’m looking for people to not just idly click the links, but actually invest enough to vote, maybe it’s time for a little targeted marketing. What I really need is some kind of Social Media Marketing Guru to tell me about this – anyone know where I could find one?

(Or, indeed, any thoughts on the issues raised above, shout out in the comments. How much plugging is too much? Is there such a thing? Has anyone had a relative disown them due to excessive flogging of their writing?)

(Creative Commmons spam photo by Arnold Gatilao on Flickr, by the by. Okay, enough bracketed epilogues.)