Promotional Artwork

Getting “The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe” ready for publication includes the creation of original artwork.

I need to pick one promotional image from the three digitally composited images I’ve created here. I worked hard on them all, but I’m having a hard time deciding which one to use, so I’m hoping you will help me choose the best one.

Blue Flame Hand #1

Incident at Union Station #1
“The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe” ~ Promotional Artwork
on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurelrusswurm/13676212375/

Blue Flame Hand #2

Incident at Union Station #2
“The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe” ~ Promotional Artwork
on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurelrusswurm/13676183175/in/photostream/

Blue Flame Hand #3

Incident at Union Station #3
“The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe” ~ Promotional Artwork
on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/laurelrusswurm/13676353894/in/photostream/

I’d really appreciate it if you can tell me which one do you think is the most effective.  Which one looks the most real?  Which image do you like best?

I’ll be sharing this across all my social networks in search of feedback because I can use any help you can offer, whether its a aimple “I like this one” or a detailed critique would, or anything in between. Let me know what you think with a comment here, or an email, or messaging me through social media.

Thanks for your help! 🙂


Image Credits:

While the Union Station, the cell phone and the hand photos are all my own, the photographs of blood I incorporated were created by Jo Naylor and released with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License

Technorati

sign on the door at the old location of "The Bookworm"Promotion is necessary to sell books.  That’s one of the distasteful jobs traditional publishers saved novelists from.  Although many self publishers have a hard time doing this, it needs to get done.

In today’s world, we need an online presence.   Authors need blogs, whether we self publish or not.  Registering our blogs with Technorati is supposed to help promote them.  When you sign up with Technorati, you can fill in a profile.  But to register your blog you need to “claim it” which you do by posting the unique code Technorati assigns to you (for this blog, it’s K76X4UNJWKR9 ) in a blog post.  What this does is prove to Technorati that you have the keys to the blog you say you own, so Technorati validates that you do actually control it.   Of course, this can be annoying, since once posted, the code needs to stay in the blog forever to guarantee your continued Technorati accreditation.

Another big part of self publishing is being your own boss.  Self Publishers get to make our own decisions, and that includes learning to use our time effectively.   Which is why I have not bothered to go through the rigorous Technorati process with all my blogs.  In my experience there have always been glitches in the process.

For instance, today I upgraded my personal Technorati profile. There were several new fields to which I could add information if I chose, including links to various web platforms like Facebook. But after getting all the information, when I pressed the “save” button, Technorati didn’t like the facebook URL for my Facebook author page. But in rejecting it, all the other information I had added or changed in the profile was wiped out.   This is a mistake common to many online forms, and it is always annoying and a waste of the user’s time.  Silly me, I went through the whole process again, this time using my personal Facebook URL. But Technorati rejected that too, again wiping out everything I input.  For my next attempt, I filled in the other info one field at a time, saving after each.

And again my Facebook URL was rejected.  One of the things I have learned not to waste my time on is trying to contact a human being at giant web platforms like Facebook, since it’s generally pretty futile.

I decided at that point to “claim” this Libreleft Books blog on Technorati.  Again, after accepting my g+ Libreleft Books page, Technorati refused the link to my Libreleft Books Facebook Page. This tells me something is broken, whether at Facebook or Technorati I can’t say.

Nor can I say whether having verified blogs has been particularly helpful or not.  This might be different if I involved myself in Technorati in other ways, but I am spread too thin as it is.  If you have any experience, I’d appreciate hearing Technorati feedback either way.