Well hello! Welcome to another Little Fears; big update! In this weeks post…
Umber
Hydra in Autumn
Inktober
Capricorn
Patreon
Umber
The fine young lady as doodled for this weeks #Colour_Collective on Twatter. Pretty darned sexy if you ask me! I had in mind she was the Little Fears chief rat catcher, who isn’t very good at catching rats. That’s good because Yuffie would be peeved if Umber ate her friend Ratty!
Hydra in Autumn
Still very fears, but a slight departure in colour and style for this weeks new Threadless image. Hydra going for an Autumnal walk. Might make a good book cover for the next Little Fears book titled Seeking Hydra.
A quicky for Inktober, just wanted to show how my characters start out compared to how they end. This is, of course, Umber from the top of the post.
Capricorn
I keep getting told on social media this week I should write a book! Well, I have, three of them in fact. They are all available in print and digital from Amazon.com, with January and Spiders being funny tales and Capricorn a collection of my horror stories.
Do you want a shout out at the bottom of my weekly update posts? Head on over to Patreon and pledge $10 or more a month and not only will you help with Hydra’s feed bill, but you will also get that weekly shout out with a link back to your site. Hit me up on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/littlefears
Yeah, she’s a nice character. She came from the Inktober character spam. I tidied her up and coloured her for this weeks #Colour_Collective on Twitter. I reckon she’s a future character for the Threadless store.
Sprite & Spectre
Speaking of Threadless, Sprite and Spectre have landed on our tees as a duo. They are my favourite pairing out all the Fears. They were never meant to be a bromance, but they work so darned well together in the stories!
Spectre & Sprite are available from $12.95 on the Little Fears Threadless store.
Clouds were an Inktober theme a few days ago, would have been rude not too! Art print for next week too as well I reckon.
I have been trying out the Faber-Castell Artist Pitt pens I got for Inktober and spamming out new characters left right and centre. I have absolutely fallen for them. They shan’t replace my Poscas anytime soon for the daily tale doodles, but they have become my new go-to pen for doodling on white paper.They are also currently on sale on Amazon.co.uk
Do you want a shout out at the bottom of my weekly update posts? Head on over to Patreon and pledge $10 or more a month and not only will you help with Hydra’s feed bill, but you will also get that weekly shout out with a link back to your site. Hit me up on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/littlefears
Howdy gang! A very short Monday post this week. We’ve been talking on Twitter this weekend about character creation. Mostly because I’m farting them out left right and centre at the moment thanks to Inktober.
Point of the post, I came across two free courses this week on Skillshare. One from the WattPad team and one from Sarita Kolhatkar of Guild Wars 2. Both are 100% free. Sign up, skip anything that asks you to pay and take up the courses.
Starting with a blank slate is daunting, and in this class, Lindsey shares her favorite tool for overcoming writer’s block and starting your writing process: the character study.
This is a creative exercise that will help you develop characters that feel fresh and true to your writing style.
At the same time, this is also a practical exercise, giving you an informed starting place for the rest of your story, poem, or novel.
Once you have a character study, you can use it to write whatever fiction you want!
This class will inspire you to look at your everyday encounters and simple interactions as helpful starting points for developing a unique character. It’s perfect for everyone new to writing as well as writers looking to broaden their creative writing toolkit.
Grew up watching Disney movies? Love drawing and storytelling? The objective of this class is teach you the various processes and Photoshop techniques on creating a character from start to finish, following a detailed process from thumbnail concepts to a completed digital illustration with lighting and color, perfect for your portfolio.
This class is great for anyone with a passion for drawing, painting and a love for Disney Pixar movies, and have often asked themselves, “how do I make my characters look like that?”
Check her out, a wiggly wurm, in the fantasy sense of course. She’s one of my Inktober doodles made good for this week’s Colour Collective on Twitter. No backstory yet as she’s a fresher than fresh character. I quite like the look of her. She’s a keeper.
Dwagons
Another Inktober creature, but I adore her already. Give her a moonlit backing and shes a sexy dragon who’ll be coming back in the future. She’s available as an art print from $12 on my Threadless store.
I was fortunate to be featured on ItsOnCraft’s craft cards this week. Head on over to catch my 30-second bite of wisdom on honing your craft. Complete with a cheesy pun of course.
I haven’t had the link for the About page on this site visible, since the beginning, yet people always found it. So two weeks ago, I tidied it up, made it show up and forgot to turn comments off. Doh! Apologies if you commented, I have since cleaned off all comments from my about page. I like my info pages nice and clean.
I don’t know if it’s cause and effect, but since making it visible I have had a number of new SKillshare students, t-shirt and book sales. Interesting. The power of a good about page? How the smeg did it get over 900 likes?
Yep, still doing Inktober, Witchtober and Goretober. A collage of how this week has gone.
Inktober has provided me with new characters left, right and centre.
Lucy has continued her killing spree across the internet. Interestingly, Lucy’s campaign of death is the most popular of the four projects I have going this month. Does that say something about me or you lot?
Yuffie’s looking a little more consistent in hat shape and style for Witchtober, which was the idea. She’s having a wander about the internet with Hydra and Ratty.
Creative Market Big Bundle
You may have noticed a little banner at the bottom of my posts the last few days. They won’t be appearing every day, but if I see a product I like and I think you may find useful, I’ll be nobbling an affiliate banner for it.
Creative Market bundles are something me and the missus have been buying for the last couple of years. Every month they put together over $1000 of digital goods and sell it for $39. The goodies you get range from WordPress templates to fonts to photography to mockups. If any of you click the banner and nobble a bundle, I get a few cents. It won’t make me rich, but it may help towards a web hosting bill.
Do you want a shout out at the bottom of my weekly update posts? Head on over to Patreon and pledge $10 or more a month and not only will you help with Hydra’s feed bill, but you will also get that weekly shout out with a link back to your site. Hit me up on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/littlefears
While we are on Patreon, a quick shout out to my fantastic new Patreon supporter Barbara from letitgocoach.com A wonderful wee blog that offers food for the soul. Thanks again Barbara!
Ya’ll noticed I ran a competition last week right? I mentioned the week before I had the goal in mind of gaining experience running competitions. I still do a fair lick of PR work freelance. In 17 years, I have had a hand in running three competitions. One I ran on Facebook when Like/Share comps were legal. One pairing up with a DVD launch which my colleague signed off without asking me first. Hoo, boy did that backfire. One was with a magazine. I ‘m not big of competitions, but I learned something from each.
With this competition, I wanted to see if the rules would be followed, how many entries it would acquire naturally and if it would impact my page views.
Method
I asked participants to share my post anywhere on the internet and post a link to the share in comments on the blog post.
How to enter
Share this post anywhere. Social media, blogs, forums and anywhere else on the net you fancy. Then leave a comment below linking to where you shared the post.
At the closing time, I closed comments on the post. 11:59 pm on Saturday 7th, so nobody could continue to enter the next day.
I added the names of all entrants to a spreadsheet and randomly selected a winner (mistakes happened there, see below). It’s worth saying when people leave comments I copy pasted their exact username into the spreadsheet. That way when I selected a winner I could simply search WordPress comments for their name, and pull up their contact email or social media account they linked to. Once a winner was selected and I had the screenshots for this guide, I deleted the spreadsheet. If you run a competition and collect anything more than names, you need to check the legal implications of any country that may enter. You may need to declare what you are doing with peoples email addresses if you intend to store them or add them to email lists. By just taking names and searching comments for their contact details, I sidestepped any legal issues. Bare that in mind if you run a give away though. Data is sacred and can come with legalities.
Results
I had a very low entry, 26 people in total.
I did not push the competition. This was an experiment for me and I prefer to see followers and subscribers enter. Low entry is to be expected. However…
I did notice a lot more people shared the post than left comments to enter. I had at least 30 people shared the post on Twitter. With every Twitter share, I get an @ message. Although my icons show none, I also saw a number of Tumblr shares. I have 20 Facebook shares listed on the icons. Some people shared on their blogs as well. I’d estimate, across the board, I had 100 post shares. But only 26 people left a comment with a link. That’s quite a disparity eh?
I currently have about 28,000 WordPress followers and 40,000 social media followers. Each day my blog receives around 2,100 individual hits. Most of my views on LittleFears.co.uk come from WordPress reader, so I get no stats at all from that because most people do not actually open my posts. They are short enough to be read without opening my site. In addition, to all my main social medias (Instagram, Medium, Tumblr and Ello) I share the posts in full. So the 30,000’ish followers I have on those social media’s have no reason to come to my site. My stats will always be terrible. For the first three days, I received an extra 300 individual hits per day. On the fourth day, that dropped to 100 extra hits. Then I was back down to 2,100 hits a day. As a grand total, over the 6 days, I ran the competition, I received 1,000 extra individual hits.
I had an issue with the name selection. I had an over the top way of doing it in a guide I linked to in the original post. It did not work. The snippet of code needed to randomly select a name was easy to write myself.
Have a look at the image below. All the names from comments I added to Column A on a spreadsheet. Beneath the names is a cell with a line of code.
The selected cell with Amanda’s name in has the following line of code.
=INDEX(A1:A26, RANDBETWEEN(1, 26))
I think even as a non-software geek that’s fairly easy to follow. The A1:A26 refers to the cells the line of code is being pointed towards. The RANDBETWEEN(1, 26) is telling the spreadsheet to select a cell numbered 1 to 26. The spreadsheet then gives a random name in the cell you paste it into.
I hope that’s simple enough! If you want more advice with this, please do leave a comment and I shall do my best to help.
Takeaway
As you can tell, I learned quite a bit from running this competition.
The main take away is I need to run future competitions as simplified as possible. The difference in a number of shares I had to the number of entries was quite large. So, simplify. Ask people to take one single action anybody can do. Certainly, do not add two-step processes for running a competition like I did.
In addition, I would run a competition on one platform, so I can monitor it better. WordPress stats on poetry, haiku, short story and comic websites are notoriously unreliable. Consider Twitter or Tumblr. retweet and reshares contests would be better than a blog share contest. When someone retweets or reblogs on Twitter and Tumblr you get a listed notification. ‘Retweet this’ is as easy as I could make it, and may generate a decent outreach.
If you have any questions, please do ask. You all know I try to be as informative and transparent as possible with everything.
You’ll be happy to hear, this update doesn’t require three cups of tea to get through.
Reala
Lucy on Tee
Lucy’s Competition
Ink/Witch/Gore*Tober
Hit me up on Patreon
Reala
Our resident bartender for this weeks colour collective on Twatter. Originally named after an old Second Life avatar, I still use. Her namesake in Second Life is also a bartender, often adorned in red, white and black. She has a backstory, but that’s a tale that won’t be told until Christmas. The disadvantages in writing so far ahead heh.
Lucy on Tee
The first of Lucy’s tees, there’s going to be three of her (eventually). She’s available at Threadless on t-shirts from $12.95 and art prints from $12.
I’ve only had about 20 entries so far, so the odds of winning her are in your favour if you enter. If you want a chance to win, please do leave a comment under the post linking to your entry. I can see the post has been shared far more than 20 times, suggesting people aren’t commenting to enter.
For the bloggers out there, I shall be explaining process, stats, complications and results of running a blog competition in Monday’s blog post.
Ink/Witch/Gore*Tober
Inktober, Goretober and Witchtober are all now in full swing. I’m posting four times daily to my Twatter, Instagram and Tumblr with all the new images. If you want to keep up, click the links below and say hello!
If you read to the bottom of my last post, you may know for any new $10 and $25 Patreons I get, I’ll give you a shout out and link back each week in the Friday update posts. $25 Patreons will be also written into the daily tales. Interested? Head on over to my Patreon page for details.
This week I am giving away a copy of the nefarious Lucy. A sinister Little Fear, most known for her appearance in Capricorn. She is printed on 220gsm A4 matt card stock, 210 × 297mm. Our non-British friends are more than welcome to enter, though you may need to Amazon an A4 frame (or cut her to size).
How to enter
Share this post anywhere. Social media, blogs, forums and anywhere else on the net you fancy. Then leave a comment below linking to where you shared the post.
Finding a winner
On Sunday 8th of October, I shall pick a name at random from comments below using a spreadsheet.
Rules
Enter once anytime between now and Saturday 7th of October at 11:59 PM UK Time. You are limited to one entry. This contest is open to international residents. The contest winner will be posted on Monday, October 9th. If I am unable to contact the winner, the winner will have one week to email me via the Contact link at the top of the page.
Lucy’s a meany!
She is rather. Other Fears are available on my Threadless store in art print and tee form. Prints even come in American sizes. ~ littlefears.threadless.com
Competition Closed
It’s just past 11:59 PM, wandering on Sunday Morning. Comments have been turned off and a winner will be announced later today. Thank you to all the entrants and good luck!
Stone me, this is a big update! You’re gonna need a cuppa tea for this one.
Fawn
Spider Dance
Patreon Update
Competition
Inktober, Witchtober & Goretober
Buttons
Fenix for Esme
Darn I’m bad at Pinterest
Patreon Shoutouts
Fawn
The character at the top there is Fawn. Created as a horror character, the tale Magpies Eyes featured killer deer as a bit of a hangover. I needed her to look different from Deer from Deer Puns in the humorous stories. She walks on all fours and looks pretty ruddy menacing to me. Coloured this week to fit into the Colour Collectives, Old Lace theme.
Spider Dance
Spider Dance is back! Never been my best seller, indeed a long way behind Bird Walk, but it’s one of my fave art prints. There’s just something very cheerful about Spectre teaching the baby spiders to dance.
I have meant to add some incentives to Patreon for yonks. I’m hoping to add unique art prints monthly to high pledgers. It may have to wait until I have moved to Scotland and I am settled, I need my printer, proper inks and paper to do it justice. Blah! Until then though, I have a different idea. If any of you fine people pledge $10 a month or more, I shall give you a shout out, adding your name and a link to your website to the bottom of the weekly update posts. Not sure how that works? I’ve added the $1 & $2 supporters to the bottom of this post as a demonstration.
Yup, Lucy again. As you know, I do a fair lick of PR work freelance. In 17 years, I have had a hand in running three competitions. One I ran on Facebook when Like/Share comps were legal. One pairing up with a DVD launch which my colleague signed off without asking me first. Hoo, boy did that backfire. One was with a magazine. I ‘m not big on competitions, but I learned something from each.
Next week I will be running a contest to win an A4 art print of my favourite nefarious lady, Lucy. The intention is to discover how much interest a competition will generate for the Little Fears website. After I have a winner I shall furnish them with a copy of Lucy, then do a Monday blog post detailing the method, website stats and increase in traffic and earnings I may or may not receive. Keep an eye out next week for how to enter.
Inktober, Witchtober & Goretober
I have a problem with my doodles. They’re rarely consistent. I have trouble drawing the same character the same twice in a row. I believe I am good at conveying an idea or image in ink, but my technical abilities are quite clearly piss poor. So this October, I am entering all three of the most known draw-a-thons with the idea of building a more consistent style across a couple of characters and scene style. I’ll only be posting them on Twitter and Instagram. With a few in the weekly updates on the blog. So if you want to follow along on my themes, say hello to me on social media.
Interested in joining? By all means, please do share links below to your Twitter, Instagram or other Inktober posting outlets in the comments section below. We can come over and harass, like, and retweet your Inktober submissions.
New to Inktober? Some advice, post in full on Twitter and Instagram if you’re on the platforms. Don’t auto-share because you won’t get anywhere near the attention you should. Nobody retweets Inktobers that are just links to your Instagram account.
For Inktober I am going to practise scenes. Such as Spider Dance above.
For Witchtober I shall be drawing 31 Yuffie’s. Our resident necromancer is the right character for this, and I struggle to get her hat right each time I doodle her.
As an aside, if I notice anyone bitching about young girls drawing witches for Inktober, I will unfollow you. Last year there was a tiny minority of men spitting venom at young girls on Twitter. It came across as poncy old men, bitter that 12-year-old girls could draw better than they ever could. Man, they were noisy and man they were nasty.
Goretober has no official list that I have seen, so I shall be drawing the nefarious Lucy in Indian Red doing evil deeds each day. She’s usually pretty curvy and it would help me practice getting longer lines smoother.
I did nobble myself some new art supplies for the month of course.
Click the image to blow it up. The assembled stationary consists of:
Have you seen my new buttons? They look the bee’s knees, don’t they!
I keep getting told, and my stats show me, a lot of WordPress readers never visit my site. Folk read the flash fiction without even opening my blog post because it’s short enough to read in the preview. I then get asked where folk can buy my books and art prints. The cute buttons are in the hope someone might see and click them from my post snippets.
Some of you asked about the tip jar PayPal button. There is a way of creating a donations button in the PayPal account settings. I believe you’re limited to raising $10,000 or less through that method if you’re not a charity (haha, like any of us will get that much!). The button looks hideous though. I created my button myself by setting up a zero priced ‘buy now’ page link and adding my image. You must be registered as a business on PayPal to do this. It’s one of those things everyone with a tip jar seems to do it differently.
Fenix for Esme
My avatars body. I’ve been telling Esme I would post him for a while heh. Never used him in any stories. He’s a short bodied, long-eared Spectre. I named him Fenix after the foxes.
Darn I’m bad at Pinterest
I’m kind of hot with social media, but holy snot bags I am not good at Pinterest. I usually try to have conversations on social media to build followings. I tried this week getting into Pinterest. After 30 comments, I hit a block to prevent spam. 30 ruddy comments and I hit a block! OK, maybe it’s because I use my Pinterest as a share and forget network. Time to edumacate me though aye.
A browse of Skillshare and I have found two premium courses by Peg Fitzpatrick and one free class by Raymond Baxter. The free course is completely free, just sign up, skip anything that asks you to pay, and navigate to Raymond’s course.
The first premium course from Peg. I figure I’ll do this one first as I know my pins themselves need work. The shape of my images is all wrong, and most have no description. She has 92% in reviews http://skl.sh/2xL1BlA
The second premium course from Peg, a chuffing lot of reviews leaving her with 99%. About 2,100 students, certainly think that’s worth my time. I’ll let you know what I think when I finish. http://skl.sh/2xFrGTg
The free course from Raymond, three reviews at 100%. I’ll be taking Pegs courses myself, but I understand everyone cannot afford the Skillshare Premium subscription. This course is 100% free, no dodgy premium payment to unlock. Just sign up, skip anything that asks for money and take his course. http://skl.sh/2yciJly
Whoosh, another busy week has whizzed by! But check it out, we have new things!
Pewter Fear for Colour Collective
Fuen & Lucy on Threadless
Events, TellyTube & Socialization
Social Media for Creatives (free course)
Pewter Fear
Pewter was originally doodled for a post-apocalyptic story (3 books away in the future, ack!). All the characters are named after different metals. Alas, Pewter didn’t make the cut. But this week’s Colour Collectives is Pewter Blue. Can’t think of a more appropriate character to use. I do think she looks like H.R. Giger’s Alien. Oops!
Lucy & Fuen on Threadless
Lucy has joined the ranks on Threadless on a new art print. She’s the devilish creature who appeared in Terminal and Balcony, two stories in the Little Fears horror anthology, Capricorn.
Fuen makes another return. This is my all-time best-selling tee. Had to get the model mocks done and didn’t get everything perfect enough in time for the Threadless store relaunch last week.
Lucy’s art print prices start at $12 and Fuen is available in tee form from $12.95.
In the coming months, I shall be joining in NaNoWriMo, Inktober and reprising my daily moustached funnies for Movember. If I continue to post everything on my WordPress blog, I am going to swamp it with up to five posts a day. That’s too much, obviously. But it’s not too much for social media. My Twitter, Instagram, Ello, Tumblr and Medium will take most of it.
I am also approaching a starting point in the current Fears tales where a plotline develops. It will make no sense later on if some of the characters meet. So I have stopped posting the old tales on the blog. The blog will start running as one continuous story five days a week for the Hydra storyline with odd unrelated Capricorn horror tales twice a week. I will still put up odd January and Spiders videos on YouTube and slot them into playlists.
You can follow me on social media and YouTube by clicking a link below or the wee icons at the top and bottom of my website.
While talking about social media, a Skillshare find I thought I’d share. Social media for creatives by Chelsea Matthews. It’s about an hour and a half long and gives a pretty good overview of how to use the main platforms for marketing as a creative. It’s 100% free. If you want a few tips on social media, just sign up to Skillshare, skip anything that asks you to pay, and give this course a watch through. Linky: http://skl.sh/2fa2eyo
Now here’s a thing. I don’ know if this is a unique issue for me, or if it effects everyone. I have found with every single book release I have done, I have tried offering digital editions to you, my subscribers and followers, for free. Inevitably the Amazon freebie hunters always end up with copies and always, usually on Good Reads, they leave me a negative review.
Capricorn got a bad review for being weird fiction, January got a bad review for being just groaners and Spiders got a DNF review from someone moaning it was just jokes. In each case, I have been left scratching my head asking, if they could read even half the book, why couldn’t they read the synopsis? Go figure. To quote a Huffpost article:
Don’t trash the book because it wasn’t what you expected. Unless the book was misrepresented, it’s your responsibility to understand what you’re buying before you buy it. Trout Fishing in America isn’t really about trout fishing, and Fear of Flying is not for nervous travelers.
Anywhos! For the book writers out there, this time I asked you, the subscribing rabble, to leave a review every time I posted about the free book offer. I got twelve reviews on Amazon. Currently at 4.8 stars. The one negative review I got was from a freebie book hunter, complaining about it all being puns. On Good Reads, there’s more freebie hunters and fewer people who know me. If it wasn’t for Jan’s review, I would have 2.5 stars. That’s the difference you guys have made. Thank you.
For those 11 reviews, I gave away around one hundred free ebooks on Kindle over five days. I don’t recognize more than half of the people on Good Reads who currently have me listed ‘as reading’. So I don’t know how many freebie book hunters got my book and how many subscribers got my book.
Sales wise, I have had one sale either paperback or digital every day since I stopped offering it for free up from one per week before Spiders release. Water could be muddied there as I didn’t do an ounce of promotion for the prior three months dealing with my home issues. Then I suddenly did five days of heavy promotion. There’s also a mix of books being sold. It seems January and Capricorn have had a wee bump in sales from Spiders release.That makes sense and I have heard from a lot of authors, you need at least three books on sale before you get regular and consistent sales. For something as specialized and super niche as the Little Fears presents books, I believe a sale a day is good. My books are expensive. I am not yet famous. I can’t offer novel value prices of $2 a book.
There’s something else to learn from one review. Richard Yates questions whether what I do is flash fiction or a cartoon. I don’t know myself, to be honest. For those that followed my stories before I created the Little Fears, I wrote stories on their own and drew completely unrelated doodles and posted them elsewhere. There never used to be any connection between them. I know flash fiction circles hate jokes being called flash fiction. Y’all know I’m not gonna listen to that crowd’s opinion though right?
Richard did make me think. Now both January and Capricorn are released from Kindle Select I am looking for expanded distribution for them both. Maybe I should be turning my attention to the digital comic distribution platforms instead of just book platforms. Good thinkin’ Richard!
Do you take anything from this?
I don’t know if any of that is either helpful or relevant to any of you. I do know I have a lot of people hoping to self-publish who read this blog though, so I figure any data or experiences are helpful aye?
If you want to read a few reviews, there’s a couple more below.
And if you have any questions, y’all know I try to help by email or comments. Ask me anything about my book writing and publishing process and I will try to answer.
Little Fears 