For the ten days leading up to the release of my second novel, The Gray God, I ran a series of social media posts counting down to the launch. Each post featured an image to evoke a setting, scene, or tone from the book and a short bit of the book’s text. The idea was to tease but not spoil the reading experience. Social media being what it is, the odds of you having seen any of it are very low. So here, now, you can see the whole thing. No pesky algorithm can come between us. Rejoice and relive the countdown to The Gray God.
TL;DR
I enjoyed putting the countdown together and am pleased with images. I should have waited until only five days remained. Friends and family were on board early on, but only the most diehard followed the whole thing. If the algorithms even let them. From a marketing perspective, it was a good concept, but absent a large audience, it did not live up to its potential.
Countdown gallery
Behind the scenes
Each of the pictures was authored in Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a happy medium between MS Paint and Photoshop. It is relatively simple to use and supports layering images, quality text, and some simple but powerful effects. It’s about my speed.
At the bottom-most layer lurks the awesome cover art for The Gray God.
As the countdown progresses, more and more of the cover seeps through.
Next up is the scene image. Most of the pictures were taken by me on a field trip to the story’s setting: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I hiked through the woods around Sol Duc, east of Forks, and within the Hoh Rainforest, looking for fungi and forest scenes that I could use in my story.
As you can see, there were a few scenes where I didn’t have my own photos to work from. More on those in a bit.
The next layer in each is a scrim that dims the scene image just a bit so that the text layers above it have enough contrast with the background to be legible regardless of the image.
Yep, top two layers hold the countdown number and the excerpt text.
Beyond my camera roll
Days 1, 3, and 5 needed pictures I didn’t have. Each has a different solution.
Day 5: I started with a picture of myself in hunting clothing.
The plan was to crop it as you see above and turn my whiskers black to match the character in the scene. I could not make the color change work. At all. So, I cheated. I took the picture into Night Café’s suite of AI image generators and told it to replace my face with a “hunter with a black goatee.” After numerous iterations, I found one that satisfied me.
I used Paint.NET’s oil painting filter to smooth out the differences between my photo and the generated face.
Day 3: In the story, Joseph tells Pete about how he felt living in poverty near SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in Texas. SpaceX was kind enough to provide a nighttime launch photo that was free to use via Pexels.com.
Day 1: After a long, frustrating search for a public domain close-up of a brown iris, I returned to Night Café and asked for an “extreme close up lidless bloodshot brown eye wide with fear.” The AI obliged. Pexels ultimately provided a real-life alternative.
I was torn. I understand and am sympathetic to artists’ concerns about generative AI, but the AI eye was so much scarier. I ran the two of them past a friend with more expertise and he said the AI eye had more color, so that’s what I should use from an engagement perspective.
Day 7: I did resist the AI temptation in one case. Day 7’s scene was originally going to be when Pete arrives home to find the cops parked out front. Oh, no! Co-Pilot’s DALL-E generator did a surprisingly good job at conjuring what I had in mind for the house and the overall mood.
I abandon this Day 7 for two reasons. One was reluctance to rely so heavily on a generated image. The other was that the picture was too authoritative. It usurped the reader’s imagination. They should be free to see the shape of Pete’s house in their own mind’s eye. So that picture up there? Forget you ever saw it. It is not canon!
Playing in a small venue
Ten days before launch, I started posting the countdown pictures to both my Facebook profiles and to my author page. A few of my family and friends rallied to my cause and shared the posts, for which I am very grateful. But I haven’t earned a substantial fanbase, so most of the countdown was only seen (shown by Facebook to) a dozen or so people. The exception was Day 9. That one reached 253 people. Or something. Facebook isn’t saying why this one turned from a tiny bud into a small blossom. Being salty and cynical, I think it has something to do with bots. Or bugs in the Facebook code.
ALSO: It’s a fools errand to attempt serial storytelling using social media posts. The quality-of-service guarantee for deliver is rubbish. Don’t let Facebook, X, or whatever fool you into thinking otherwise. Rubbish, I say!
A few folks cheered me on through the countdown (bless them!), but ten days of posts is a bit much to ask anyone to follow. If I do it again, I’ll start on Day 5.
Doing it again is an open question. It took a lot of work—which I had fun doing—for very little pre-launch buzz. I think a countdown could be quite exciting for someone with a big, engaged fanbase. For someone of very small influence, attention might be more reliably drawn with another strategy. Say, making a drunken, naked spectacle of oneself on TikTok. Or whatever it is the youngsters are media-ing these days.
Thanks for reading this far. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, and share widely. Or whatever it is you do on the interwebz. I’ll be back soon with an update on Untitled Science Fiction Project.
