Booktrailer Workflow Breakdown

and marketing math with cash dollar numbers!

So since I posted last, I took a whole day to perfect my flow, and I’ve got it down now, here’s what I’m doing on my side — lemme show you why I’m doing it though, first —

See how sexy that is?

Here’s how I did it:

• I got another MJ account (this is optional for you, I just need to have everything running all the time, for my soul, it’s how I operate, I’m a #7 Arranger peeps, I cannot help myself.)

• The MJ script I shared here awhile back — I’m now running that exclusively on my oldest machine. That machine’s too memory poor do to anything but point and click, but in regards to doing that? It does just fine!

• I slowed the script down (with my GPT’s help) to not go over relaxed mode (it’s super set it and forget it) — because now that I’ve hit the wall on one account’s hours, I’m not in any rush to do that with another.

• That said, I ran 501 prompts overnight the other night, which got me…2004 images to go through (and I still haven’t finished doing that yet, aie!).

Lemme hop back here and say I’ve spent a TON of time working with my GPT on marketing materials, so I DEFINITELY leaned into it a hella lot to give me all the prompts I needed for my wild experiments to continue

Here’s another sexy video, lol….

You can see, it’s the same videos, same narrator! Moving on!

so —

• I adjusted that original MJ script last week (and you can too! Talk to your robot buddy!) to do file uploads for me and click what I needed on alternate MJ accounts for the videos to work.

• This requires a lil’ bit of babysitting, ‘cause it is in relaxed mode — it runs OK for quite some time, but then something’ll get off a bit, and/or it queues up jobs regardless (I suspect MJ’s doing some sort of auto-limiting for heavy users, which, fair) and then I have to restart it.

• So…enter my 3rd MJ account purchase and….

• I bought another spare laptop to run shit on (with my GPT’s help.) Some refurbed number on Amazon. I explained what I needed — enough memory to hold the raw images I’m uploading, but no crazy processing speed, this’ll be a machine devoted to this, and voila, $300 later, it’s coming in next week!

(I have a mac I could make things run on, I did it with my Hailuo crack before, but, eh, no thank you :P.)

• Once I get the videos I like, I toss them into my file system and run another python program which:

• Hits up a scripts folder

• Hits up a ‘these are the 11labs voice IDs associated w/these characters in the script title’ txt file

• Goes to 11labs and uses my API key to get the narration for these scripts

• Takes those narrations, listens to them, and times the video transitions accordingly.

Now, several parts of this process are loosey goosey.

Obviously, there’s still a human involved (me!) at several junctures, AND, the video assignment is random, AND, there’s no guarantees that the snippets out of 11labs will rock. (So far they have, but all AI use has a fair bit of randomosity to it.)

So I do have to watch and listen to the final outputs and what not, to make sure everything’s come together.

However….

Well — actually, I’m busy, I’ll talk about it later, LOL — let’s just say that I’ve got RIDICULOUSLY big things planned?

OH WAIT THE MATH.

So, first off — I’m running these ads (from this booktrailer experiment) to my book Take Her, which has a sequel coming out shortly, called Love Her.

I botched Take Her’s release last year, every which way, and then, since it took me so long to write book two, there was no point in pushing book one via ads, because there weren’t enough books/pages out there to make it financially worthwhile…here’s its lifetime earnings — it does OK (considering I’m not pushing it at all!) but not great —

So — this is a REALLY clean slate to see how these FB ads do. I’ll report back in two weeks or so (‘cause of the holiday, and ‘cause of the book release) to let you know if they’re working.

And in other experiment land —

Photobomb has not done well at all —

My newsletter wasn’t prepared to shift to psychopathic thriller reader, despite me giving them the performance art piece of my life, LOL — and we never could get traction on TT (too slow, strange), YT (too fast, not direct enough path to the book) to pull things off.

And here’s how the audio’s done:

So, uh, not enough to buy a nice steak dinner — even after spending $3k on the human narrated audiobook.

(I put my $’s up here not as an apologia for using AI stuff, but just so that people can see how the math maths, yo. Sometimes using humans on a GRAND EXPERIMENT doesn’t work out — although I am truly in love with this narration, Bunny did a STELLAR job.)

BUT — lessons were learned!

And?

I still have SO MANY PLANS for this IP — first off, Imma give it this sexy video treatment in awhile (once I work my way through my other IPs that need it more) — I also think it’d make a great movie script (convienent, what with me figuring out AI movies here at LIGHTSPEED) and I’m hyped about its merits — the reviews for the book are good — I just need to learn how to reach the right people, with the right format, and I’m not giving up, just downgrading its priority for a bit here!

In other news, since it’s been awhile…..

I did a fun cover for AITA’s German translation, which’ll be coming out here in August!

The shipper called, I’ve got 3000 books LANDING NEXT WEEK AIE!

And I’ve got a softly snoring cat leaning on me.

Life is good!

Gonna get back to work and figure more stuff out!

xo!

Cassie