As usual, when things are quiet at the blog it means that I’m up to something. And I am.

I’ve been putting together a new Kickstarter project that’s not quite like my others. The object of the project is to create a limited edition archival print… but it doesn’t stop there. Because in addition to making the picture I’m going to be facing my deepest, creepiest fears by showing people how I did it.

I really hate doing that: but for you, I’ll do anything. Or, anyway, I’ll do this: while I work on the new picture I’m going to keep extensive notes, and I’ll make screen grabs and save some of my hundreds of test renderings and when it’s all done I’m going to assemble all that material into a “Making Of” video that – for backers of the project – will be about as complete a provenance as you can imagine for the limited edition prints. Expect to see and hear more about this next week when I launch the project.

But wait! There’s more!

One of the most important problems in a crowdfunding project is to get people to spread the word. All people, in fact, but especially those with a broad enough platform that they can reach a whole bunch of people themselves: bloggers, podcasters, and so on. So how do you recruit them?

There are lots of answers to that question. I guess I don’t know any of them. But the answer I’m proposing is that you offer them something that – I hope – they want. To do that I will fire up the PULP-O-MIZER‘s special, untested Here’s What You Want attachment, and I’ll offer to make customized title graphics for those brave backers who sign on for these Bonus Rewards.

The Pulp-O-Mizer rewards will kick in when the project’s funding reaches certain milestones. There will be a limited number of Pulp-O-Mizer rewards available at each level. And at each level the Pulp-O-Mizer rewards will cost a little bit more than they did at the last level. A blogger, podcaster, band or other entity that really wants a custom Pulp-O-Mizer title graphic would be well advised to get on the boat early; and if all those bonus rewards are taken, that would-be backer ought to be motivated to use every means at his or her disposal to promote the project, so that the next level will get unlocked.

See what I did there? Offer something that people with a lot of reach may want, and make them use that reach to get it. It’s a million to one chance… but it might… just… work.

Edit: it’s ALIIIIIIVE!

Because web browsers can be just as divisive as religions I try not to judge, mainly because people throw rocks at me when I do. But I probably haven’t concealed the fact that – as far as the Pulp-O-Mizer is concerned – Firefox stands out as the Village Idiot of browsers. That’s a problem, because Firefox has been gaining in popularity lately and so a large proportion of Pulp-O-Mizer operators have been getting a rockier experience than I’d like.

Within a week of the Pulp-O-Mizer’s escape from the Secret Laboratory I managed to fix almost every Firefox problem, including some unique problems with older versions of the browser. There was just one big, annoying problem left: Firefox would often draw the Pulp-O-Mizer layers twice when it was rendering a web resolution graphic.

Chances are you’d only realize that had happened when it was the distressed overlay layer that was drawn twice; some of those Firefox images turned out to be extremely distressed, as did I, when I saw them. From time to time a Firefox text layer would be also drawn behind the foreground layer – a bug so improbable that I sort of admired what Firefox had managed to do, there. This was almost certainly another instance of the same problem.

Well, about a week ago I thought of a way to work around that and this morning – when I was finally able to try it – it looks as though I did. Firefox will now draw a web resolution image slightly more slowly, but (I think!) without any risk of drawing the layers twice.

I made one other change. When I was building the T-Shirt images it turned out to be very important that I draw the text layer behind the title layer. In rare cases – when your text was overlapping the title graphic – the T-Shirt image would be slightly different than any other version. So I’ve changed that, too.

Now both the Pulp-O-Mizer preview and the web resolution images place the text layer behind the title layer; and soon I’ll change the product templates so that mugs, iPad covers, and other products will do the same thing.

Very few of you will notice that change. But the Pulp-O-Mizer knows.

But of course that’s not the only Pulp-O-Mizer update: all along I’ve been using those spare hours (!) that I find under my pillow to add more image layers for your Pulp-O-Mizing pleasure. The latest of those are the one-two tag team of Dinosaurs and Leprechauns. Dinosaurs, because… well… Dinosaurs! And Leprechauns, because we just need more choices in that Holidays section.

I’m not a big fan of early 20th century Irish American merchandising and so I don’t have a lot to do with shamrocks, leprechauns, and other Madison Avenue excesses. If I can help it. Therefore I made my leprechaun look a bit like Hunter S. Thompson. I’m a complicated person.

So, okay, that happened. It turns out that if you design something that you hope people will enjoy and play with and spread, and then you let the link go free out in the world… they enjoy it, and play with it, and spread it.

Now normally when I share a link to something of mine a few people will look at it and a small percentage of those few people will share the link with their friends. So yesterday I decided to open up the Pulp-O-Mizer to a few more people by posting the link publicly because, really, who pays any attention to me, anyway?

Well. Thousands of pageviews later I guess I have more data than I can really analyze (though mostly, things look pretty excellent). My tweet of yesterday got retweeted by several people who are more, I dunno, twittified than I am; that went on to Google+ with a surprising amount of response; and I couldn’t let my Facebook followers get outdone, could I? So I invited them in, and now the Pulp-O-Mizer has passed its unscheduled stress test with flying colors. And that’s neat. Pulp-O-Mizer images are already turning up in blogs and fora and at Tumblr and in other places.

There have been very few errors, judging by what I’ve found in the temp folders. I can’t be positive about their causes because the sheer number of page views is making it hard for me to match a file to a particular session (and its browser). But I do have a couple of things to look at.

In the meantime, I finally admitted to myself that the thing is out in the world now and so I cobbled together some changes at the Thrilling Tales site so that the Pulp-O-Mizer would be accessible through normal channels. Which I guess means I launched it. Much to my own surprise!

If you have feedback or problems with the Pulp-O-Mizer you can add them to the comments on this post. Note that off-topic comments are likely to be deleted, even if they’re brilliant.

A few notes to get you started:

When you just want to combine images to get something that you like it’s a good idea to turn all the Text Areas off. That’s why I put the On/Off buttons right in the title bar for each Text Area: you can turn them off even when the menu’s been minimized.

Look at the Presets! They’re there to give you illustrated examples of things you can do.

If you run into trouble (especially when you try to make a Pulp-O-Mized product) your first step should be to look at the manual at the bottom of the Pulp-O-Mizer page. The “Browser Compatibility” and “Trouble Shooting” chapters are especially useful.

Although it’s explained in the Users’ Guide I will mention here again that Pulp-O-Mizer images are not available for use in commercial products (like books, eBooks, or tea cozies). In any case the images you render from the Pulp-O-Mizer page are too low in resolution to be suitable for that kind of thing.

Late yesterday I launched the Indiegogo campaign that aims to send my upcoming Retropolis Public Library prints to your favorite library – and to about ten libraries that have meant something to me. The campaign’s pretty modest goal of $3200 is just enough to do that; but it’s when we meet and exceed that goal that things get really interesting.

That’s because for every 250 prints that we send to your favorite libraries I’ll be able to donate $1000 of actual cash money to my own local library. If we send off 500 prints, I get to donate $2000, and so on, up to… oh, wait. There’s no limit. That means that if we were to send 10,000 prints to your favorite libraries, I’d donate $40,000, which is an astonishing chunk of change even though I have to admit it’s not likely we’ll get quite that far.

I’m fond of my local library, but when I tell you that our town has a population of about 15,000 people in a region whose economy was once based on manufacturing, well… I think you can imagine what’s happened to every kind of local agency’s budget in the past few years in a series of reductions that – everywhere – often starts with the local library. So when I figured out what the stretch goals for this campaign might be I felt quite excited to think that I might be able to give a boost to my library’s budget.

Now of course that’s not the primary goal of the campaign. The primary goal is for people like you to do something nice, improbable and, just maybe, a little bit odd for your own local (or other favorite) libraries, by sponsoring a gift for them of one or both of these twenty by thirty inch archival ‘Public Library’ prints. When you sponsor that gift I’ll send the print(s) to your chosen library along with a letter that explains just how this happened and that you’re the one responsible.

There are other rewards (‘perks’, in indiegogospeech) including getting the prints for yourself. But the real aim is to put these retro-futuristic promotional prints on the walls of as many libraries as possible. In about thirty days.

So go look! And, I hope, decide to dive in and do something peculiar and interesting for the people who also serve by standing, waiting, and then giving you the books you want to read. Please: stop and think about how wonderful and unlikely that is. No, I mean it. Really stop and think. Then, please, join in.

I’ve continued to think about the future of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual since my last post about its troubled state. Well. When I say "its troubled state" I may be thinking about mine; but since the state of Thrilling Tales is dependent on my own state I guess that still works, whichever way you look at it.

Today I’m ignoring the question of serials and I’m looking instead at The Riddle of the Wrong Brain, Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

I’ve experimented with crowdfunding twice. The first time, I tried what I think is one of the worst Kickstarter pitches ever: "Give me money, and I’ll do what I was going to do anyway". Now that’s salesmanship. To my own surprise that fundraiser met its goal. But of course the goal was a fairly modest one.

The second time, earlier this year, I launched what I thought was a pretty good fundraiser, and its pitch, according to me, was perfect: "Give me enough money, and this thing will exist. If you don’t, it won’t." That drive was also, narrowly, successful, but I was surprised to find that it got some criticism because its rewards were almost completely limited to the object – a limited hardcover edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book. There were pretty good reasons for that: the book itself was expensive to produce, I faced a minimum order to get even that price for my print run, and the cost of any other rewards would have come out of the money that was needed for the edition itself. Adding a bunch of other rewards would have drastically increased the amount I had to raise. So I didn’t add them.

What I found was that a kind of Kickstarter culture had been trained by big projects with stretch goals, bells, whistles and hoopla, all of which are brilliant and gamelike marketing strategies that have nothing to do with the core idea of a Kickstarter project, which is: "Give me enough money, and this thing will exist. If you don’t, it won’t."

While that second Kickstarter project was successful, it didn’t make any money for me. All of its funding was needed in order to create what I think is a really nice archival edition of the book. I wanted it to exist; it was too expensive to produce on my own; and now it exists. The backers and I made that happen. But no, it didn’t make me any income. In fact it may have cost me something because the people who backed the project might otherwise have bought the paperback edition, which does make me money. This explains something important about my business sense. It’s missing.

I don’t regret anything about that. I wanted this beautiful edition to exist, and now it does. For a lot of reasons I think more about legacy than I used to and this archival edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book is a kind of legacy.

So my Kickstarter experience has been complicated and interesting. That first Thrilling Tales fundraiser was a terrible example ("Give me money and I’ll do what I was going to do anyway"). No one objected! The second project, I thought, was a very typical one because it was a simple pre-order for an edition that wouldn’t otherwise exist; but there were those who objected to it, in private correspondence and even in completely unrelated places on the web. It’s a funny old world. Once the hardcover Clockwork Book was out there I wasn’t too excited about trying crowdfunding again.

But I have been thinking about it lately, and here’s why. Unlike Kickstarter, IndieGoGo offers a flexible kind of funding that doesn’t follow the all-or-nothing Kickstarter model. A project isn’t required to meet its funding goal: if it uses the "Flexible" project type then its pledges are redeemed whether or not the project’s goal is met. That makes it possible to create a hybrid of my first Kickstarter project and my second, a project that would provide some funding for my ongoing work on Thrilling Tales, but which – only if the funding crosses a certain threshold – could also become the pre-order for an upcoming book.

This model would give me a lot more freedom in creating the rewards, which up to that threshold would offer only existing merchandise: there would be no risk to the backers. Up to the threshold, all rewards would be available immediately. Then if the threshold is crossed there would be additional rewards of the paperback edition of Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, which would ship much later, of course. If we never met the threshold, the backers would get their rewards and I’d have a nest egg that would still help me to complete The Riddle of the Wrong Brain. If we did meet the threshold, well, I’d be able to complete that book in relative comfort and the backers who selected the new book as a reward would get it as soon as it was finished.

So we’d still be without an ongoing serial, but we’d be a lot more likely to see The Riddle of the Wrong Brain in the nearish future – around April or May of next year.

It’s an interesting idea. Now one problem is that all the rewards up to that stretch goal might be things that my existing readers already have (the paperback books, bookmarks, some of the prints or t-shirts, and so on) and that might make it all the more difficult to reach the stretch goal unless there was a pretty large influx of new readers. That happens, by the way: a crowdfunding drive is in itself a form of promotion. But it could make it more difficult. Still, since the project would not fail even if we missed the goal it could still be worth a try.

Crowdfunding projects can take an awful lot of time and work, and I wouldn’t start a new one casually. But: it’s a thought.

September 6th saw the final update in the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual Feature "So! You’d Like to See Retropolis!" This sort-of a serial was a filler feature that picked up immediately after "The Lair of the Clockwork Book", and I’d hoped it would give me some breathing space during which I’d be able to get more work done on Part Two of "The Toaster With TWO BRAINS", and get the manuscript (and a few illustrations) done for the next Thrilling Tales serial.

It was a good plan: really, it was.

I did make some more headway on the illustrations for "The Riddle of the Wrong Brain" (that’s Part Two). And I did make a sizable start on the next serial, whose tentative title is – this week – "Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom". I got a bunch of character modeling done for the new Switchboard characters, too.

It’s been about four weeks since there’s been a story update at the Thrilling Tales site; so it’s pretty clear that I missed my self-imposed deadline.

Why is that? There are a couple of reasons.

Let me tell you about "Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom", or whatever its title is by the time you read this. Whereas "The Lair of the Clockwork Book" ran to about 37,000 words, the first draft of "Switchboard" is currently at just over 67,000, and it’s only about two thirds done. And… it’s a first draft. The second draft is going concentrate on vicious editing. The third draft, I hope, will go back over the wreckage and polish it up into a finished manuscript. Because these plans sometimes surprise us, there could easily be a fourth draft too.

So the first problem is that where "Lair" was a novella, this one’s a full length novel. And so in terms of building and finishing it, it turns out to be a completely different sort of beast: compare building a cottage, say, with building a skyscraper. Throughout – and even if there wasn’t that structural difference – I’ve wanted to spend more time with it, because in my need to feed the Thrilling Tales web site I’ve rushed the writing on all of its stories, and that’s curious, since the illustrations were always the genuine bottleneck. This time I’ve wanted to spend all the time it takes to make the story more worthy of the months of work that goes into its illustrations.

"All the time it takes", when it comes to something this much longer and larger, turns out to be quite a lot of time indeed.

Of course the longer length of this book – taken together with its black and white illustrations, which are so much more economical to print – means that it might rouse the interest of a traditional publisher. In view of what follows, it might be worth my while to try to attract a mass market publisher.

Because, and this is the second problem, the Thrilling Tales site is an experiment that I’ve been running for three years now – well, over two and a half years since it launched, anyway. It’s an experiment along the lines of popular Web Site Theory: give away a whole lot of content for free, and people will buy a little bit of stuff from you in return.

The Thrilling Tales site is based on the format of a web comics site. It’s just got more words, and fewer pictures. Web comic sites depend on their readers to buy books and to click on ads, because it’s only through those book and merchandise sales, plus the ad revenue, that the sites make any kind of return on the artist’s investment of time. In my case, all the ads on the Thrilling Tales site lead to other web sites of mine where I hope to shake all the change out of my readers’ pockets. But the model is still the same: a small percentage of readers will buy something, or go to an external site and buy something there, in return for all that wonderful free content. Even in the most successful sites the percentage of people who "convert", or buy something, is very low. That math is pretty much the same for everybody.

So the successful sites are the ones that attract tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of visitors every day. With that kind of traffic even the low conversion rate can result in an income.

It’s very rare for the Thrilling Tales site to see even one thousand visitors in a day. So it ought to be pretty obvious that the math is not on the side of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. If it’s not as obvious to you as it seems to me, it’s like this: in order to be successful, this kind of web site has to attract a very, very large audience, and sadly that hasn’t been the case.

If we were to ask "Why?" then I guess the answer probably wouldn’t flatter me. So we’ll avoid that, and instead we’ll look at the results.

During the fourteen months that "The Lair of the Clockwork Book" ran on the site it was effectively my full time job. Just keeping the site fed while trying to make more progress on Part Two of "TWO BRAINS" ate up almost every hour that was available in my day.

So during the feature that ran this summer I cut the number of updates down to one each week so that it would run longer and I would have more time to work.

As we’ve seen… that wasn’t enough time to keep feeding the web site. Like I said at the start: it’s been about four weeks since the site’s last update.

So although the Thrilling Tales web site isn’t dead it still won’t be seeing any new content for awhile. The next thing to appear may be Part Two of "The Toaster With TWO BRAINS", because what I now have to call The Novel is a long term project. It’ll likely be several months before it’s ready to be read – and then, of course, there are the illustrations. When the manuscript is done I might – instead of posting it to the web site – start it on the always depressing rounds of editors and literary agents. In the meantime I also have to pursue freelance work – or any kind of work – more aggressively because my Secret Laboratory’s finances are in a sad, sad state.

You’re not here to hear my Tale of Woe; in fact, there are more than enough Tales of Woe to go around, these days. It’s enough to say "I have one."

I do hope to be able to update the Thrilling Tales site in a while, but even I don’t know when "a while" is. It’s certainly farther away than "soon".

I don’t usually try to promote my books at Amazon; that’s because I make quite a bit more from sales through my own web sites compared to what Amazon pays me for a sale. But the strength of Amazon is its great big pile of customers and the idea is that you make up the difference in volume. But you’re not likely to reach all those customers without good sales ranks and reader reviews.

So if you happen to have bought one of my books, either the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual books, or the second edition of my Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections (and regardless of where you bought it) then I hope you’ll consider visiting their product pages at Amazon and writing a review there. It does a lot to push a book up in the rankings on the Amazon site. With enough pushing, maybe Amazon can make up in volume that difference in what I’m paid for a sale. That’s the theory, anyhow.

So here they are:

Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves

The Lair of the Clockwork Book

Celtic Knotwork Borders in Repeating Sections

See how lonely they look over there without a single review? If it was me, I’d want to reassure them somehow.

I’m trying to get caught up on several fronts in what are some pretty trying times, here in the Secret Laboratory, where the Recession is still Recessing its infernal brains out no matter what I do. So any help up there at Amazon is much appreciated!

I should be posting more regularly here in the near future. Like I said: trying times.

No, I aten’t dead, even though the past few weeks at the Webomator blog have looked exactly as though I was, with the only updates being the automatic posts about new pages at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. It’s just the sort of postmortem retro-futurism you should expect from me.

But in fact I’ve been spending a lot of time on a web site redesign for somebody else and spending far too little time getting ahead on the next serial for the Thrilling Tales site. That one’s far enough behind schedule that thoughtful observers, who are probably all me, take a good long look at it and go "Hmmmmm."

But anyway there are Giant Robots, as you can see here. So we can hope that all will be well.

Yesterday I mailed out the complete limited edition of The Lair of the Clockwork Book to all of those Kickstarter backers who supported it.

Now that the dust has settled, or, I guess, is settling, I have a small number of unnumbered "open edition" copies for sale.

I’ve added to these to the "Support" page at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual where you will (I hope) find them, adopt them, and find them good and interesting homes.

Really, either one of those would be fine. I know it’s not always easy to be both good and interesting. Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s worth the trouble.

The hardcover edition is a little larger than the paperback, at 8 1/2″ by 10 1/2″, and it’s printed on archival paper between its foil-stamped, linen bound covers, and then wrapped in a handsome dust jacket. It’d sure look swell on those bookshelves of yours.