#edit phew added descriptions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fantasy-anatomy-analyst · 4 years

Text

(Previous post is my fix of the dnd 5e brass dragon)

Now honestly I could fix up every DnD dragon design but I really want to talk about all the different fun things that can be done with dragon designs. So I did the brass dragon and now I've also finished the black dragon, so here it is!

(description: The official D&D black dragon illustration with anatomical notes I will detail below. It is a four legged dragon with shredded membranous wings, huge horns, a large membranous neck frill, and a lot of large spikes. Its body is dark grey with a few green stripes, and a yellow belly.)

I have many issues with this design. So let’s just get through them one by one:

- The wings. Shredded tissue paper membrane with weirdly knobby fingers that end in barely attached bony claws. A common visual trope for dragon designs, but I still dislike it. Also its wing elbow has a bony spike and I’m not sure how it’s attached to the membrane.

- Shrink wrapped skin, oh boy. Not only is the skin vacuum sealed to the perfectly sculpted muscles, but the face just looks like a skull with a thin layer of scales over it. The eye looks like it is floating inside an open eye socket. Which would be great for an undead dragon, but this is a very alive dragon.

- The hind legs have that dreadful Z shape that plagues so many digitigrade creature designs. They’re too long for the body, so they end up looking like they’re squatting.

- There is a pretty clear attempt here to reference crocodiles by giving it webbing between its claws, making its teeth super exposed, and having very clearly defined scales, but the scales have very little shape and size variation, looking more like polished cobblestone.

- Bone spikes, the huge horns, and the neck fan. Look, lots of reptiles are incredibly spiky. But those spikes are generally not actually made of bone extending from the skeleton. They’re osteoderms, which is a type of bony skin deposit. The black dragon just has so many weirdly conical large bone spikes all over its skull, and at nearly every joint of its limbs. Then we have its horns that extend straight out alongside its jaw like elephant tusks, except it has a massive underbite and no trunk. So I’m not sure how it can eat with those horns in the way of its mouth. And the neck fan, which just seems excessive next to everything else.

So here’s an edit to fix all that (an edit that took longer than I wanted it to):

(Description: The black dragon, heavily edited in ways I will discuss below. The edits I made did end up giving it darker and more vibrant coloration.)

This took too long because I totally redid the scales. But here is a list of my fixes:

- No more shredded wings and weird wing claws. I smoothed them out and extended the membrane so it has better wing surface area to fly with. Bigger creatures that can fly will always need more wing surface area. (added stripes too because I can)

- I smoothed out the limbs so the skin was no longer shrink wrapped to the muscles, added more flesh to the face including a proper nose, and made the scales more varied all over the body, like a crocodile. I also gave it a pouchy neck like a crocodile because I am tired of dragons with stiff, thin necks.

- Leg shape has been straightened out to get rid of the severe Z leg. Also added a dewclaw on the closer hindlimb to match the other one and adjusted toe positions.

- And of course all the accessory flair like spikes and such. The face horns have been resized so they won’t interfere with the mouth. Instead of big conical bone spikes and a weird fin, I gave it iguana-like spines all along its neck and back, down to the tip of its tail. Tall skinny osteoderms, no membrane between them. There is a smaller row of them along the top of its throat, and a few along its jaw.

Phew, that was quite the tough project lol. More dragon designs should make use of osteoderms and the fact that reptilian skin actually has a lot of sagginess to it, like dewlaps.

Next up I’m just going to make a post about all the ways you can make dragons as spiky as you please without relying on extended bones and big horns.

#accessible art #accessible images #image description #dragons #dnd 5e dragons #anatomy critique #fantasy anatomy

84 notes · View notes

izupie · 5 years

Note

I'll take... Any scene for 500! Kidding! :P but for real, you're so good at imagery and description all of your scenes really come alive! I've harped at you about this before, but it's true! If I had to pick one off hand that I haven't seen picked yet, I'd have to say Stronger Than Our Nightmares, particularly the opening scene. I just love how well you conveyed the cold loneliness, and how well and paced you moved into cozy companionship. It's such a good one!!

Sorry for the late reply~

Thank you so muchhhhh aaaaaa

It’s one of the things I get really nervous about in my writing (the other being dialogue //sweats//) so it makes me really happy to think that I might be doing something right there~

Oh gosh yes. I spent soooo long editing that part too! Over and over and over. Tweaking a word here and there or adding a line in, or even splitting sentences to make them shorter and punchier. Phew.

I wanted it to be like you can almost feel the cold, so that by the time you get to Izuku you can really feel the mood shift and warm up just by being in his presence in the story. Or something. ahaha

#izu replies #:)

8 notes · View notes

lynxgriffin · 5 years

Text

PT on the sidebar

Yo, just a quick note here that tumblr FINALLY let me actually edit my page profile, so that Paper Trail is now added to the side bar! So now it’s easy to find and you don’t have to dig back through the tags for the masterpost. Also, edited my page description to include mention of/updates for Paper Trail. Phew!

#PT related

94 notes · View notes

rouninfan · 6 years

Text

finished with the first draft, phew.

there's still a lot of work/editing left: there's some research to do, and my descriptions are lacking, so it will be a lot of adding details to the right places. i'm also checking for word usage and sentence structure, such is the life of the esl writer.

expected finishing stats: 10 chapters, 25~30k words

planned posting schedule: regular weekly updates (none of the trauma of discontinued / irregularly updated fics!)

i really hope to finish it to 99% in august and then start posting ^^

#still writing that jikook fic #bts #jikook #kaf #fanfiction

4 notes · View notes

wakaechan · 7 years

Text

More about the Handsome Festival 2016 DVD

I finally found the time to write down some more detailed thoughts about the Handsome Festival 2016 DVD. This is sort of a continuation of this post here. Some additional details about FLASH (performed by Kamiki, Oryo, Dori, Uetaku, Ruito, and Kimito) can be found in this short conversation with @the50-person over here.

Overall, the 2016 DVD is absolutely the fullest recording of all the SHL events so far. The 2014 DVD already feels rather complete, but it’s still not as nearly complete as the 2016 DVD. They really did their best to give us all the highlights of the live show, especially the MC parts, so many thanks to the team at Amuse. I hope they can continue giving us fuller versions of the shows from now on (btw really looking forward to getting some news about whether there will be a Handsome event this year).

I may be asking for too much, but I really hope they will be able to make blu-ray versions of the show in the future. The quality of the DVD is very high, but I still feel like the resolution can be higher. For some reason, my 2016 DVD does not appear as high-def as my 2014 one, though the difference is very small. Of course, it’s totally possible that there is just something wrong with my eyes or my DVD player, I don’t know for sure, haha.

Okay, moving on to the performances. Here are some additional things that I found interesting (apart from what I wrote earlier):

They added in some angles shot from the left and right sides of the stage, so once in a while you can see the performance from the side. Sometimes it looks great, sometimes it looks weird.

Everyone has more equal screen time when compared to the Abema tv version.

I think Koudai has improved a lot since the 2014 show. He was always good, but now he’s great and the quality of his performances is very high. He’s definitely the very hard-working type.

FLASH still takes my breath away every time I watch it. However, they cut out the few last seconds of it where the group made a final pose -- now it almost cuts directly to the first note of sHi-tai!. Yuta’s voice really suits sHi-tai!.

I remember some sweeping camera movements in Music Hour in the Abema tv version that made me a little dizzy, so I’m glad they took those out in the DVD.

The editing and effects of the rap portion of それがすべてさ are very cool.

They did some VERY CLOSE close-ups of Dori and Uetaku in the two PERFECT HUMAN performances. As a Dori fan, I’m definitely not complaining, but boy it’s a little awkward seeing their faces that close up on a large tv screen, haha.

The opening of PLEASURE FLAG is really nice -- the animated DearDream on the screen sort of directly fades into their real-life performers in the exact same pose on the stage.

The sound quality of ARRIVAL-KUROFUNE Sail Away- seems so much better.

SIGN. I just love SIGN so much. Too bad Dori wasn’t performing in it. Maybe it’s because he already has PERFECT HUMAN and White Serenade. Oryo is very pretty in SIGN.

The sound quality of White Serenade has been enhanced. Still no idea why they made it a faster song this year and changed the intro music, though.

Game Corner has been edited... They cut out a lot of the more conversational parts (and even the descriptions of the situations!), but the meat of it is fully there. No worries -- Oryo and Kamiki’s segment is very complete. There are lots of added close-ups and new camera angles as well.

In Yes! We Can!, I noticed that Yuta was in the wrong position during the second part of the song and had to rush to the correct position when it was his turn to sing together with Koudai, haha. He mentioned this in an interview, so I was looking for this specifically and found it.

There is a very touching part in ベストスマイル in the encore. I really can’t describe it well in English, but I’m sure you’ll know it when you see it.

The ending MC is too precious. Everyone said a few words, and there was some crying. It makes me a little worried about how some of the older members may be graduating after the 2016 show. Hope I’m just over-worrying.

Again, ALICE gets me in tears every time. Kamiki’s singing was very emotional.

Some of the members moved all the way to the left and right sides of the hall to sing near the end, so they were very close to the audience.

The making video is also awesome. I love behind-the-scenes stuff and seeing Team Handsome backstage is very fun. Here are some of the highlights:

Soichi overslept on the morning of the 17th and was almost late.

Ruito going out to get food in the hallway.

Kyohou showing how his hand was shaking from nervousness and Sangmin telling him it’s going to be fine.

Someone took Shota’s 2017 calendar out from Shota’s bag, and Seyoung was showing the pages to the camera while Shota was (jokingly) protesting (his calendar is still selling on Asmart so you can’t just show everyone what’s inside right there!). Btw, Kamiki looks really good in the background in this part.

Kamiki, Yoshitaku (and Koudai and Naoto, I think) bought bandanas (made as goods for the show I guess, didn’t see them on Asmart though) to wear near the end of the show.

Some of them practicing the dances a bit. Dori looks awesome in one of the scenes here while they were practicing THIS IS THE TIME.

Uetaku and Shota had a very funny short conversation about hair (yes, hair) while they were stretching.

The battle-call thingy that they do before each show are always great to watch.

Oryo actually made his famous Wikipedia speech to Soichi a couple minutes before the evening show.

Seeing the newcomers getting nervous and eventually fully enjoying the process at the end was very nice.

Finally, the slipcase and booklet are all of very nice quality. As I mentioned in my previous post, I love how the booklet included lots of photos (six full pages!) of the Game Corner segments from the shows on the 17th and 18th as well. Lots of hugging, head-patting, and hand-kissing shots. They do have a pretty good idea of what the fans want to see. :)

Phew, I think that’s what I have. I love the 2016 show so much and feel like I’ve been waiting forever for the DVD, so I’m sorry about how I just go on and on about small, insignificant things in this post! Please, please give us a 2017 show this year, Amuse!

#Amuse #handsome festival 2016

6 notes · View notes

narrative-arts · 7 years

Text

Fae’s narrative arts thingy for Uni that’s being posted on the group blog so the lecturers know how much f*ckin work I put in this thing: Ver 0.15

Whoo, me first:

So I’ll be talking about the Dragon Age games by BioWare and their comics published by Dark Horse Comics.

To help you understand the connection between the comics and the games, you’ll need to know a bit about how these games work first.

Dragon age: Origins & Awakening are role-playing video games, while Dragon Age 2 & Dragon Age: Inquisition are seen as Action role-playing games.

I don’t know why they added the ‘Action’ part to the last two games

oh well

In the Dragon Age games, you are the main character and you get to create a player-controlled protagonist whom you can customise by choosing what race, gender and class you wanna them to be.

*cough cough* Except in Dragon Age 2. Where you can only be human and choose your class and gender. *cough cough*

The races you can choose from are Human, Dwarf & Elf, with Qunari becoming an option in DA:Inquisition. The classes you can choose from are Warrior, Mage or Rogue.

Now, the Dragon Age games are well known and loved/hated for the moral choices they force you as the player to make. These choices each affect the story & world of Dragon Age in a small or large way.

An example of this would be how in the first game, you are given the choice of who will rule the country of ‘Ferelden’: You’re friendly loveable companion, Alistair or the previous Queen of Ferelden, Anora.

Choices like these are scattered all over the Dragon Age games, meaning that your playthrough will be different to someone else; creating a unique experience each time.

phew

Now that we’ve got the run down out of the way, we can actually look at the comics.

The Dragon age Comics do their best to stay away from the events of the games. Either by using characters that don’t appear in the games, ’Dragon Age: Magekiller’, creating prequels to the games’Dragon Age: Knight Errant’ or just keep the story line away from the events of the game.

I will be looking at the comics in ‘Dragon Age Library Edition Volume 1’

Which are made up of ‘Dragon Age: The Silent Grove’, ‘Dragon Age: Those Who Speak’ and ‘Dragon Age: Until We Sleep’ all stuck in one book.

Funny enough, the player-controlled protagonist you makes and plays as in games, you know as the main character, is not in any of these comics. This makes a lot of sense considering the massive level personalisation the player has over their character. The player character from the first game isn’t even mentioned in the comics, so we don’t know what gender, class or race they are.

The comics are told from a different POV from the games by having the main character in the comics ‘The Silent Grove’, ‘Those Who Speak’ and ‘Until We Sleep’ be King Alistair from the first game.

Which is funny for me cause I distinctly remember having him executed in the first game…

*Pause*

Alistair’s two companions in the comics are Isabela, a pirate raider, and Varric Tethras, a merchant prince of Kirkwall. Isabela and Varric are pervious companions of the player character, Hawk in Dragon Age 2.

Which is also funny for me cause I distinctly remember betraying Isabela and handing her over to Arishok…

*Pause*

Varric’s still around, Varric’s cool.

The point I was making is that the comics can be very different from your personal playthrough of the games.

This three-part comic series was co-written by Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider and Alexander Freed.These comic have their own cannon, often referred to as ‘Biowares’s Cannon’ by fans. David Gaider, in an interview, was asked about the canonicity of the novels and comics. His answer was a followed:

"The two prequel novels are canon-- there is nothing for them to conflict with.

And it is fine to assume that, if your particularly playthrough matches up with the events depicted in Asunder or the comics, those events occurred in the way they're portrayed and will be treated as such in future games. If your particular playthrough does not, then those events either happened differently or not at all. In a game we have the luxury of that kind of variability. In either case, you'll only see how it works once DA3 comes out".

*Pause*

Yeah, I’m not reading that out.

His reply can basically be summed up as, if what happens in the novels or comics matches up with your playthrough, then it happened. If they don’t match up, then the events either happened differently or not at all. The games have a level of variability that you can’t really get in the novels and comics.

Now, we can finally start looking at the questions

Whoop

What value do the comics fulfil that the game doesn’t?

One of the unique things about the comics is that each book in the series is narrated by one of the main characters; ‘The Silent Grove’ by Alistair, ‘Those who Speak’ by Isabela and ‘Until we Sleep’ by Varric.

This adds a nice personal touch to each book and gives the reader a chance to get to know the characters better. The internal thoughts let the characters sense of humour and personal motivations shine through.

For example, in ‘Those who Speak’, Isabela’s compares the current situation of being in the country Tevinter to her time under the city Kirkwall, in the game Dragon Age 2. Not only does this add a feeling of dread to this new country from her chilling description of her time there, but this also gives those who have played the game a better idea of how to feel about this new place. A nice connection from the game to the comic is made and the current events are given a personal meaning to the character.

A pretty cool thing about the Library edition is that the writers and artists sometimes add comments on the side of the pages. These comments can be from the writers about the characters and how they are to written. From the artists about how parts of artwork were drawn and what they mean to the artist. And even about their views on the canonicity and previous actions of the characters.

For instance, in chapter 4 of ‘The Silent Grove’ writer David Gaider commend saying ‘In my mind, this Alistair is the one who did the Dark Ritual in Dragon Age: Origins’. The dark ritual is another important, story changing decisions that you don’t get see the full effects of till Dragon Age: Inquisition.

One thing the comics could do that the games could not, was show the characters backstories properly. The games are told from the point of view of your character, so if you as the player want to know more about a particular companion, example Isabela, you need to go up to her and ask; whether or not she tells you the truth can depend on your dialogue options, your current level of friendship or if that’s something she simply just doesn’t want to share. In the seconded comic ‘Those Who Speak’ we learn a great deal about the character Isabela and her past, more so in this comic then in the games all together I would say. The comics do an amazing job of showing Isabela’s past and how she became the woman she is currently. If the games had tried to do this, I’m very sure it would have failed or at least not felt the same.

They would of either had to get Isabela to example what happen to the player character through dialogue or the player character would have needed to be there living it with her, and then you kinda lose the point.

Let’s move on the next question.

Do the comic’s stand on their own?

The comic’s go out of their way to inform the viewer of any information they need to know, information that they would have known if they’d played the games.

Any important information about the characters that cannot be shown in flash backs is explained through dialogue:

For instants the character Sten shows up in the second comic, previous comrade of Alistair, he is a character from the first game. The comic explains these details by having Varric who doesn’t know this info about Alistair and Sten, ask them how they know each other. There by, the writers use Varric to educate the views through natural dialogue. Old fans get a nice cameo from a cool character and new fans get the needed information to continue following the story happily.

Another way to give the viewer necessary information about the characters is through their narration.

This page has Alistair explaining a bit about Isabela and Varric, and through this narration, we find out the Isabela is an old acquaintance of Alistair, Isabela is a pirate, thief and knows Antiva. Varric is a Dwarf, a Merchant, Barkeep/Spymaster and is a travelling companion of Isabela. All this information you would have been known if you’d of played the seconded game.

Finally, on the first page of the first comic, there is a brief explanation of where in the Dragon Age timeline this story is taking place. The brief also tells the reader a bit about Alistair’s role as the newly crowned king of Ferelden.

On one hand, the comic’s do make an effort to explain details and keep a distance from the games; however, on the other hand, there are lots of referents to the other games and little details that would go over the head of viewers who hasn’t played them. They reuse well-known characters from the games so I feel that to fully appreciate these comics; you should at least play one of the games.

In conclusion to the main question on my part, I think the Dragon Age comics nicely add the Dragon Age universe, they allow the reader to see this massive game franchise from a different POV to their own and we learn new background details about characters we won’t know if we just played the games. I still think that the comics would be enjoyable to read without the playing games; heck maybe even reading the comics first would encourage readers to play the games afterwards, but to have the full experience; I would recommend playing the games.

2 notes · View notes

zenonaa · 8 years

Note

2,3,4,7,8,9,19,22,28,29,32 (i already know the answer tho, lol), 37!

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

i’ve done this before once but i would love to write a fic where the POV either can’t see or hear. it’d be a fun challenge.

3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

ones where my otp cheat on each other. >_>

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

@polafuka asked me to write a tofu-focused one shot based on And I Would Do It Again and she said she would write it herself with some fuka/hina added in if i didn’t. :O though i said i’d add some of that in for her

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

ok i’m going to cut to a readmore bc the next snippet is LONG

Dark Grey Eyes (nsfw)

Part of him had hoped what he felt was a phase. Part of him still hoped what he felt was a phase despite however much time had elapsed. Or that it was a symptom of some illness. Or anything else because no one in the Togami family ever actually felt about another person what he might have felt at that moment - a strange stirring in his chest he always thought to be nausea, supplemented by those dark grey eyes. Not just those eyes but the body they belonged to.

Then again, the rest of the Togami family was dead.

Without him noticing, that nausea - that disgust - had developed into something else... or he finally learned to recognise it for what it was. But he regarded it as weakness nonetheless, even now. It was illogical. Irrational. Wrong. Feeling attachment to someone. It was wrong. Caring. Wanting. Bonding. It was wrong because feeling that way was a distraction and a liability.

Well. So he assumed until the final trial, where Makoto personified hope and brought the remaining students together into a powerful force that overcame the mastermind’s despair. On top of that, the growing closeness of Makoto and Kyouko Kirigiri suggested his view on these sorts of relationships may have been too harsh and hastily made. May have been.

Byakuya balled his fists.

No matter how often he tried to convince himself that he jumped to an incorrect conclusion about what he felt, or that he was above such things, he had still willingly slept with Touko Fukawa and he thought about her more than he should. In that he thought about her at all, like now - he thought about her persistence and loyalty and determination and strength, for she had made it through the mutual killings and the ordeal with Komaru Naegi and everything else. In fact, her love for him had made her stronger, it seemed, and he was beginning to think that love didn't make people weaker after all. Then there was her lewdness and her self-satisfied smiles that nearly always grated on his nerves, but there also existed what lay behind her stuttering and fidgeting that up to now he only glimpsed, and he almost thought he saw a bit of himself in there, and there was her intelligence as well, and her-!

He stopped himself there.

... i like it because i wrote this way back in late 2014 and as more details on dr/ae came out, all i had to do was edit in examples. the characterisation stayed the same. and it’s just.... i love.

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Pink Candy (nsfw)

“What were you expecting?” he eventually asked. He turned his face away, pouting. “A box of chocolates?”

“It’s-! B-B-Byakuya-sama’s-!” She peeked, pupils dilated. “It’s so... did I do th-that?” He refused to dignify her question with a response. “I g-get to t-touch it?”

they’re such nerds tbh and togami’s second question is so funny to me.

9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?

hm... elusive is/was actually pretty hard to write at times. i remember wanting to give it up after the first few chapters and if i wasn’t writing it for maddie, i would have. i’m glad i didn’t give it up though.

19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?

I STILL DON'T KNOW. but if i see tofu stuffs, then i do generally get more inspired to write. even if it's not tofu-related.

22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions).

She inhaled but then remembering his last remark, she squeaked and slapped her palm over her mouth. In a muffled voice, she said, “I was wondering whether," she lowered her hand, “maybe,” she fidgeted, “I could possibly,” she gulped, “sleep wi… with,” she blushed, “with y-you?”

“No,” he said right away. The bed creaked as he lay down. “Now begone. Find a bit of floor to curl up on.”

Touko twitched. “B-But it’s dirty!”

“I don't see the problem. It’s a match made in heaven, surely.”

“I m-might cut myself! A-And bleed!” Touko clamped her eyes shut, buried her fingers in her hair and shook her head wildly. “A-And when I see it in the morning… the bl-blood… I’ll-! I’ll-!”

Another pause. Longer than before. Could pauses be longer than other pauses? Like how some laters seemed laterer than other laters, and some laters ended up being so late they turned into nevers? Did those warped laters even qualify as laters?

This later remained a later, and the pause just a pause. Byakuya didn't turn around to face her but said, “If you stay on the other side of the bed and shut up, you may… join me.”

28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

this will be three OF them, because i probably have more. there's @die-einzelganger who like... writes so well and english isn't her first language. emotions show in her writing, her characterisation is great and she is full of great descriptions and phrases and i aspire to be as good as her one day. also ikuzonos who writes such spot on togafuka and they're still pretty young yet so talented too?? i love their ikuzono fics too and their fics got me into that ship tbh. finally, there's maddie!!! she is really creative and working on a pandora hearts au for dangan ronpa and she puts so much thought into her works and i love them.

29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

someone was writing a non-despair fic and they seemed to just be getting to the tofu when they discontinued it. 3 i remember that hina accidentally got caught indecently dressed and then everyone decided to wear their underwear to make her feel better and hagakure tried to make it even by exposing himself. asahina was going to give togami secret swimming lessons too.

32. How do you feel about smut?

i love it as long as it isn't over the top or have gross kinks. even badly written ones for my otp make me smile.

37. Talk about your current wips.

i really need to start the next chapter of elusive... also i'm 300 words into a request where naeg/iri and togafuka double date.

PHEW!!! if you got to the end, well done!! and thank you!

3 notes · View notes

sempiternalsandpitturtle · 6 years

Text

What do copywriters do, and why do businesses need them?

Yikes, gotta get this one right.

So, you want to know what us writers do all day? Well, when we’re not out fighting crime, solving rubix cubes blindfolded or providing the office eye candy, I’d like to to think we’re quite a useful bunch for a business to have around.

This article will focus on a copywriter’s core responsibilities, and what value they bring to the company table. It will also clarify, once and for all, the difference between copywriters and content writers.

Let’s just hope it reads well.

Copywriters play a vital role in your digital marketing efforts….I promise

The difference between copywriters and content writers

Two roles, both alike in dignity, in your digital marketing team, where we lay our scene.

While quoting Shakespeare is the most cliche thing you can do in an article about writing, this new and improved opener from Romeo and Juliet has two important takeaways:

Copywriters and content writers are not the same thing.

Their contributions are equally important to your digital marketing efforts.

Let’s unpack these ideas a bit further.

While the terms ‘copywriter’ and ‘content writer’ are often used interchangeably, the types of writing they produce perform different functions:

Copywriters: These folk are primed to pitch your brand directly to your target audience. They’re experts in finding that killer verbal jingle that will sell your service, product or idea. As well as traditional advertising media such as billboards and TV commercials, these are the people behind your social media ads and marketing emails.

Content writers: Content writers generally sit much further up the sales funnel. Their content emphasises thought leadership – positioning your brand as an industry authority and drawing prospects to the next stage of the buyer journey.

Thus far I’ve spoken about the roles as if they’re performed by different people. While for some businesses this may be true, in reality it’s likely one writer wearing different hats (varied headwear is another copywriter role prerequisite).

This article is about copywriters, so we’ll take the job description above and leave content writing for another day.

Readers are more discerning about the #content they consume than ever. With that in mind, here are the top Australian #marketing #blogs that can help in 2019. https://t.co/zZPurwuUZY pic.twitter.com/ciqOXHe3M5

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 10 March 2019

What do copywriters do?

Consumers only see the fruits of a copywriter’s labour – powerful, promotional content that seeks to prompt the reader into taking an action.

However, there’s a lot more to this than simply putting digital pen to paper. A good piece of writing is likely to have gone through the following steps before it appears before your eyeballs:

1. Strategic brainstorming

In order to create a message that resonates with your target audience, a copywriter needs to know who this is. Ideally, your content strategists will have created user personas that provide crucial targeting info such as ages, genders, interests and pain points.

Equally important is your brand style guide. This is a copywriter’s instruction manual, detailing essential editorial building blocks such as tone, style and reliable citation sources.

As we’ll see a little later, this isn’t a one-way street – the process comes full circle, meaning that copywriters can play an important part in informing future strategic decisions.

2. Subject research

At first glance, research may seem to be more the domain of your two-ebooks-a-week content writers. However, the ability to amass and distill relevant source information is equally important for copywriters.

This is especially true if your business offering is complex. In this instance, getting to grips with new products or services is likely to involve a lot of reading, and perhaps even interviews.

Some copywriters take this a step further and move into the realms of technical writing. These expert wordsmiths specialise in taking particularly jargon-heavy or technical subjects, and making them accessible to all.

The days of quantity over quality in terms of #socialmedia posting are over. Today, your content needs to hit the mark every time. Here’s why. https://t.co/qwxWMfziox pic.twitter.com/2J1lHjIPcw

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 25 February 2019

3. Copy editing

A great way to sort the sheep from the goats when recruiting a copywriter is to ask what editing experience they have.

This is important for two reasons:

Self-editing – Your copy needs to be flawless. Grammatical gaffes, myriad misspellings and clunky constructions distract from your message, preventing it hitting home. If your copywriter has editing experience, they’re likely to be more critical of their own work, making for higher quality output.

Peer editing – Importantly, editing experience doesn’t mean experience as ‘an editor’. Not all businesses can justify having one senior editor, but having writers who can reliably check each other’s output is invaluable when it comes to efficient production.

4. Sourcing imagery

Depending on your departmental setup, your writers may have responsibility for sourcing on brief imagery to accompany their scribblings.

Why does your business need a copywriter?

So, what material difference will someone with these skills make to your business. There are a number of reasons why a copywriter can be a real asset to just about any company:

1. Creating a powerful brand image

The way your brand presents itself can have a huge impact on your bottom line. In fact, one-third of consumers say that trust in brand influences their choice of retailers, according to PwC.

Your copywriters have a huge part to play here. Trusty style guide in hand, their writing should speak the language of your consumers, both in terms of the words they choose, and the topics they address.

The term ‘brand style guide’ is bandied around a lot in #marketing circles, but what do they contain, and why does your company need one? https://t.co/yFxVohBM8Z pic.twitter.com/k5X5m9JHCZ

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 8 March 2019

2. SEO wizardry

While pleasing your target audience is goal number one, your copywriter will always have one eye on impressing the internet’s master of ceremonies – Google.

Why does this matter? Well, according to the Australian Postal Corporation, Aussies spent $213 billion on online goods in 2017, an increase of 18.7 per cent from the previous year. However, with so many companies vying for the top slots on search engine results pages (SERPs), good writing alone won’t cut it. A seasoned copywriter will possess a number of tricks to rub the algorithm the right way, and help your business cut through the noise.

When it comes to SEO, a copywriter help can by:

Stress testing keywords: While your strategy team will have defined priority keywords using tools such as Google Console, your copywriter can take these insights a step further. They can analyse competition on keywords for individual pieces by examining SERPs and seeing where the best balance between relevance and competition lies.

Including the necessary HTML tags: As intelligent as Google’s crawlers are, they’re not human. Take images and videos as examples – without the appropriate tags a bot can tell that these elements are present, but that’s about it. A copywriter can signpost these features to Google so that they contribute value to your content from an SEO perspective.

Optimising your formatting: Your writers can glean information from existing SERPs that will help your content rank. For example, taking information from Google’s ‘People Also Asked’ box and building it into your subtitles will increase the value from a user perspective, and therefore in SEO terms as well.

Keywords may sound like an SEO blast from the past, but used in the right way they can still be effective. Let’s deep dive into keywords in 2019. https://t.co/8nNlk6uUPl pic.twitter.com/vFsoQ5iQ11

— Castleford Media (@castlefordmedia) 8 December 2018

3. Helping to build out strategy

As mentioned, copywriters play more of a role in digital planning than simply following advice from content strategists.

They can help influence the direction of future campaign strategies as a result of one of their core responsibilities – research.

Those hours spent picking through endless SERPs mean that we writers have a deep understanding of digital marketing trends within a given industry. Crucially from a strategic standpoint, this means we know:

How our content is doing: If we’re continually searching industry related terms and our own work is never popping up, something is wrong. This could indicate that keyword research is off the mark, or that a change in style is needed to capture imaginations.

Where the gaps are: By looking at our work next to that of industry competition, writers are perfectly positioned to find gaps in the available content. Exploiting these value vacuums is the stuff of strategy dreams, helping to build the idea of your brand as an authority voice that consumers can trust.

Phew, that was stressful. How did I do?

from http://bit.ly/2HxnLOd

#content marketing

0 notes

mbaljeetsingh · 6 years

Text

API Development and Routing with Node.js and Express

This article will be looking at how we can handle API routes inside of a Node.js and Express project. As always, we’ll start with a brand new Express project and progressively enhance it from the ground up.

🐊 Alligator.io recommends �

Learn Node, a video course by Wes Bos

ⓘ About this affiliate link

What exactly are routes?

Routes are ways that we can handle user navigation to various URLs throughout our application. For example, if we wanted to greet a user with a Hello, World! message on the home page, we may do something like this:

const express = require('express') const app = express() app.get('/', function (req, res) { res.send('Hello, World!') })

Without jumping into too much detail at this point, it’s important to understand that we’re not just limited to get responses. We can use other HTTP request methods such as post, put, delete, merge, patch and various others. You can see a full list of potential routing methods here: Express routing methods

So, you could imagine if we wanted to give a different response to the /about page of our application, we’d do something extremely similar:

const express = require('express') const app = express() app.get('/', function (req, res) { res.send('Hello, World!') }) app.get('/about', function (req, res) { res.send('About, World!') })

Project setup

Now that you understand the basics, let’s start to investigate these concepts further as we create our own Express application that involves multiple routes.

Ensure you have Node.js installed from Node.js prior to following the next steps. Run the following in your terminal:

# Create a new folder for our project # here we call it node-express-routing, # but you can give it any name you'd like $ mkdir node-express-routing # Change directory $ cd node-express-routing # Initialise a new Node project with defaults $ npm init -y # Create our entry file $ touch index.js # Install Express $ npm install express --save # nodemon will also come in handy $ npm install -D nodemon

I like to use nodemon to continually restart the Node.js project whenever our index.js or other JavaScript file(s) change. It’s usually a good idea to create a script that runs this inside of your project like so:

{ "name": "node-express-routing", "version": "1.0.0", "description": "", "main": "index.js", "scripts": { "start": "nodemon" }, "keywords": [], "author": "Paul Halliday", "license": "MIT" }

We can now run npm start or yarn start and our project will be up and running inside of the terminal.

Routes Within Express

We can now create our Express application and have it run on a port that we specify:

index.js

const express = require('express'); const app = express(); const PORT = 3000; app.listen(PORT, () => console.log(`Express server currently running on port ${PORT}`));

Our application is loaded on http://localhost:3000. If we navigate to that inside of your browser, you’ll notice that we get the following error:

Your first route

That’s because we haven’t specified a default GET route for /, the home page. Let’s do that:

app.get(`/`, (request, response) => { response.send('Hello, /'); });

We’re using app.get('/') to specify that we’d like to create a route handler for the / route. At this point, we have access to the request and response variables.

The request variable contains information about the request, for example, if we log out the request.url we’ll see / in the console:

app.get(`/`, (request, response) => { console.log(request.url); response.send('Hello, /'); });

We can do much more with request and I advise you to look into the documentation on this for further information: Request documentation

We’re able to respond back to the HTTP request with response. Although we’re simply sending plain text back to the browser at this stage, we can also modify this to send HTML instead:

app.get(`/`, (request, response) => { response.send(` <div> <h1>Todo List</h1> <ul> <li style="text-decoration:line-through">Learn about Express routing</li> <li style="text-decoration:line-through">Create my own routes</li> </ul> </div> `); });

This works because response.send() can take in either a Buffer object, a String, a JavaScript object, or an Array. Express handles these inputs differently and changes the Content-Type header to match, as ours is a String type, it’s set to text/html. If you’d like more information on this, check out the documentation here: response.send documentation

Working with Endpoints Using Postman

How do we investigate our route in detail? Well, we could use curl to interface with our API at the command line:

$ curl http://localhost:3000 <div> <h1>Todo List</h1> <ul> <li style="text-decoration:line-through">Learn about Express routing</li> <li style="text-decoration:line-through">Create my own routes</li> </ul> </div>

curl is absolutely a great way to work with our API, but I prefer using Postman. It’s a graphical tool that provides us with powerful features related to API development and design.

Download Postman for your environment by navigating to Postman downloads. You should then be able to test our application by pointing it to our URLs:

We’re making a new request at http://localhost:3000 and can see the response Body, Headers, Cookies and so on. We’ll be using this to test this and other HTTP verbs throughout the rest of the article.

GET, POST, PUT and DELETE with data

We now have a basic understanding of how to create a new route using the HTTP GET verb. Let’s look at how we can take advantage of the various route types with local data. We’ll start with route parameters:

Route parameters

Create a new route at app.get('/accounts') and app.get('/accounts/:id') with some mock data:

We’re now able to use our API to filter for /accounts/:id. When we describe a route that has a :parameterName, Express will consider this as a user inputted parameter and match for that.

As a result of this, if we query for http://localhost:3000/accounts we get all of the accounts in our array:

[ { "id": 1, "username": "paulhal", "role": "admin" }, { "id": 2, "username": "johndoe", "role": "guest" }, { "id": 3, "username": "sarahjane", "role": "guest" } ]

If we instead request http://localhost:3000/accounts/3, we only get one account that matches the id parameter:

{ "id": 3, "username": "sarahjane", "role": "guest" }

Adding the bodyParser Middleware

Let’s add a new route using app.post which uses the request body to add new items to our array. In order to parse the incoming body content, we’ll need to install and set up the body-parser middleware:

$ npm install --save body-parser

Next, tell Express we want to use bodyParser:

const bodyParser = require('body-parser'); const app = express(); app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: false })); app.use(bodyParser.json());

POST

If we define the app.post('/accounts') route, we’ll be able to push the incoming body content into our accounts array and return the set:

app.post(`/accounts`, (request, response) => { const incomingAccount = request.body; accounts.push(incomingAccount); response.json(accounts); })

We can use Postman to send a POST request to http://localhost/3000/accounts with the following JSON body content:

{ "id": 4, "username": "davesmith", "role": "admin" }

As we’re returning the new accounts with response.json(accounts) the returned body is:

[ { "id": 1, "username": "paulhal", "role": "admin" }, { "id": 2, "username": "johndoe", "role": "guest" }, { "id": 3, "username": "sarahjane", "role": "guest" }, { "id": 4, "username": "davesmith", "role": "admin" } ]

PUT

We can edit/update a particular account by defining a put route. This is similar to what we have done with other routes thus far:

app.put(`/accounts/:id`, (request, response) => { const accountId = Number(request.params.id); const body = request.body; const account = accounts.find((account) => account.id === accountId); const index = accounts.indexOf(account); if (!account) { response.status(500).send('Account not found.'); } else { const updatedAccount = { ...account, ...body }; accounts[index] = updatedAccount; response.send(updatedAccount); } });

We’re now able to change items inside of the accounts array. It’s a simple implementation that just combines / overwrites the initial object with the new addition.

If we set the request URL to http://localhost:3000/accounts/1 and JSON request body to:

{ "role": "guest" }

We can see both by the response body and making a GET request to http://localhost:3000/accounts that the role has been updated to guest from admin:

{ "id": 1, "username": "paulhal", "role": "guest" }

DELETE

Items can be deleted using app.delete. Let’s take a look at how we can implement this inside of our application:

app.delete(`/accounts/:id`, (request, response) => { const accountId = Number(request.params.id); const newAccounts = accounts.filter((account) => account.id != accountId); if (!newAccounts) { response.status(500).send('Account not found.'); } else { accounts = newAccounts; response.send(accounts); } });

Once again, if we send a DELETE request to http://localhost:3000/accounts/1 this will remove the account with the id of 1 from the accounts array.

We can confirm that this works as intended by making a GET request to http://localhost:3000/accounts.

Summary

Phew! This article looked at how we can use Express to create common API routes using HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.

Further improvements to this would be to include more data validation, security, and the use of a remote database instead of local state. Stay tuned for future articles where we tackle that!

via Alligator.io https://ift.tt/2T309lT

#IFTTT #Feedly

0 notes

rastagong-tearoom · 7 years

Text

Serving of Tea #3: What’s an epistolary VN anyway?

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the tearoom again! Please enjoy today’s serving, I hope it will warm you up in this cold time!

This serving should have been offered several weeks ago already, but current real-life circumstances haven’t left me with much time to do VN related work. (Well, in truth, I could have found the time somehow, but… Sometimes it’s wiser to actually relax during free time, instead of spending it on more side work.)

Anyway, here are the latest developments, even though they’re almost a month old now!

I’ve done a small share of scripting on Sylvan Disappearance. The end is not any near yet, but I would say it is in sight? And that’s very uplifting to me.

Though scripting is becoming easier and easier, I’m still trying to pace myself, and not to rush through the process. I'm paying more and more attention to the general atmosphere and coherence of the story, since I’ve got to a point where it all starts to come together. This mostly means that I constantly worry that no scene is any good in the end. It’s not the final editing pass yet, but I feel like the moment to start polishing the edges has come!

It is not on scripting that I spent most of my time, though, but rather on the UI and on the epistolary phase of the story!

I had put off working on both for a long, long while.

The user interface

The UI is usually held to be to be a key part of the presentation of a VN. It can easily set the mood from the very title screen. There’s only one problem: I’m not convinced by the utility of polishing the user interface.

I obviously appreciate beautiful and expressive interfaces as much as anyone, and certain key screens like the textbox, the game menu and the title screen do need to be expressive. However, I worry about the fact that highly polished UIs are becoming a minimum requirement for all visual novels, even free ones. More broadly, I think the increasingly high production values of indie VNs and the drive to “polish” can restrict the range of creative expression in the medium. (You may have seen me ranting about this on another social network. I think I’ll just write another blog post focused on this topic next time.)

But anyway, as of now, customising the UI of a VN matters a great deal, so I finally took some time to improve the UI, and I’m reasonably satisfied with the end result!

I particularly spent time on reworking the splashscreen (not pictured here), and I think you’ll like it!

The title screen and the game menu were already pretty much done, but I'm finally satisfied with them.

The epistolary component

The epistolary component of the story is, well, very much at the core of Sylvan Disappearance. “This is going to be an epistolary visual novel” was among the first things I thought of for this project. When I started to draft the story, I had probably conceived more details about the way the epistolary component would work than specific storyline developments.

As the synopsis explains, Sylvan Disappearance is in part an epistolary novel, because Mirabelle receives letters, and replies to them. A good half of the narrative is contained within those letters, though there are also segments external to them.

Usually, epistolary novels frame the narration as a succession of letters or documents presented linearly. You read the letters from a character to another (Goethe’s Werther), the entire correspondence between a few characters (Les liaisons dangereuses), or even a succession of loosely-related documents (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Call of Cthulhu to a certain extent). When writers reuse this framing in interactive fiction and games, it becomes much more dynamic. Indeed, through interactivity, the player can virtually embody the narrator who explores a set of documents or letters within the setting.

There’s a loosely-defined subgenre of interactive fiction which relies on this framing, because it offers very interesting possibilities to present a narrative, especially mysteries. In the visual novel format, Christine Love's Hateful Days series relies on a virtual databases of letters, diary entries and logs from a futuristic society that the player explores to understand the reasons of its demise. Her work has been hugely influential on a number of other works, like A Normal Lost Phone, where the player navigates around the virtual interface of a lost mobile phone to find its owner, or Her Story, where the players watches hours of recorded interrogation by the police to solve a crime. (Other iterations of a slightly different kind, like Mystic Messenger or Bury Me my Love, put the framing of narrative documents in the present tense through instant messaging, making the player respond to messages in real time.)

All these stories present their set of documents, logs and letters with the same device, a virtual interactive screen, itself contained within the game. This device can be compared to the framing layer of epistolary novels, where the letters are themselves read by characters within the storyline. In the same way, these interactive works have the player explore documents through databases, computers and interfaces which are contained within the setting of the game.

Sylvan Disappearance uses a virtual screen too, but more artificially: the screen is a mere substitute for a more manual process, that of reading and replying to hand-written letters. The goal of this epistolary screen, as I call it, is to embody the process as seamlessly as possible, for the narrative to proceed smoothly.

I had already programmed a functional mockup before starting scripting, but it was not graphically polished yet, and offered no kind of explanation for the player.

I have taken some time to polish it, and it is finally complete! Without waiting any further, here are a few previews:

As you can see, letters are represented by coloured sheets of paper. The colour indicates the status: red letters are still unread, orange letters await a reply, blue letters have been read and replied to. In the end, it looks like a basic webmail interface…

As for the way it works: The story follows Mirabelle through snippets of her life in a seaside city, at work, with her friends, and so on. At the end of any such day, Mirabelle comes home, picks her mail and finds one or several new letters on her desk. This is the epistolary phase. She must then read the letters, and reply (replying being automatically done). It is possible to re-read any previous letter at any time, which will probably come useful at certain points.

I’m honestly very satisfied of the epistolary screen from a technical standpoint! It took…… a lot of time to get it right. Not so much for the screen itself, but rather to organise the way it works within the script in a clean, coherent and readable manner.

Here are a few of the challenges I encountered, if you do not mind technical discussion:

Organising letter data. Each letter has both immutable metadata, which never change, like “who sent it” and “when”, but also a number of status flags like “unread” or “awaiting a reply” which do change in the course of the story. They had to be cleanly separated so that the status flags would be saved by Ren’Py, while the metadata would just be available as constants at any given time. In the end, letters have their own custom class with attributes for the status flags, while metadata are represented by Python namedtuples generated at initialisation, and added as attributes as well.

Compartmenting the narration of each letter into independent Ren’Py labels so that any letter could be re-read. Replies also required independent labels. Smoothly transitioning from the epistolary screen to the narration of a letter and back, handling the status flags, the music… it all required a surprising amount of code.

I had to write a number of short tutorials to introduce certain features of the screen, and to script a hook which could trigger them at the right moment. Also, a help menu to replay the tutorials.

Dealing with rollback and saving during the epistolary phase was hell and I do not believe I could summarise the matter at all in less than 500 words. But now it works as smoothly as intended, phew.

It was not as bad as it sounds! I really enjoyed working on this whole system.

I won’t be writing more in-depth descriptions of it, but I do hope it can be useful to other VN devs. The code of the game will probably be open sourced at release, and I’ve tried to put comments everywhere in the code to make everything readable. I could also make a standalone tutorial detailing everything about the entire screen? Feel free to ask if you would be interested in such a thing!

Thanks for reading this long and technical update. I’m not sure of when I’ll be able to get back to VN dev properly… but the end is getting closer and closer. See you next time!

#Sylvan Disappearance #vn development #vn dev #visual novels

0 notes

mindthump · 7 years

Photo

The Million Dollar Case Study: Europe – Session #2: Advanced Product Research http://ift.tt/2x7sUns

Our favorite time of the week is Million Dollar Case Study time – and this week we kicked off the second session of the Europe edition of the case study, with some advanced product research tactics to find private label product ideas.

Phew! Since last week it's been a whirlwind of doing my product research that I had some great guidance from Greg for in last week's session, as well as putting together all of my thoughts to share with you guys.

I spent about three hours poring over the Web App and browsing Amazon.co.uk to find a list of product ideas (which I will share with you shortly). The main thing that stood out to me was that, although it is time consuming, it's definitely something you can do alongside your full-time job or other commitments. If you just dedicate 1 hour a day every other day, you will have a list of up to 50 ideas within a week! How cool is that?

In this weeks session we cover:

How to critically assess your list of product ideas and narrow them down to a shorter list of viable products

Advanced product research tactics to define market depth and trends, product details and the competitor landscape

Your homework: to follow in our footsteps and reduce your own list of ideas to the top 3-5 for next weeks session

Here's the full replay: VIDEO And this weeks slides:

What We're All Here For

Greg started the Million Dollar Case Study primarily to help people unlock their potential and build their own lifestyle by documenting a proven blueprint to building your own business and growing it successfully. Additionally, we are donating all of the profits of this case study to Pencils of Promise and are aiming to help build 5 schools around the world with the donations!

You have a chance to get involved too – first of all by participating each week, asking us questions and most importantly, following along in real-time to launch your own successful product on Amazon.

But other than that, you can also enter our giveaway every single week at http://ift.tt/2x6Y0vv. We are gifting 1 Jungle Scout Lite Extension and 2 Jungle Scout T-shirts each week throughout 2017.

Here's an inspirational story from our recent giveaway winner, Keoki:

That's all the motivation I need to inspire me to dive into my advanced product research! Let's begin…

I have a list of product ideas… what's next?

Last week we ran through the “basic” (read: super important) product research criteria. This was the top level stuff that you need to be thinking about constantly when building a larger list of product ideas. These criteria were:

Must have:

Existing Solid Demand

Low Competition

Good Margins

No Legal Issues

Nice to have:

Small/lightweight

Easy to source and ship

Able to improve

Low Seasonality

Depending on which marketplace you are researching, the level of demand and competition you are looking at will vary. If you need to recap, we have covered this for the US marketplace here and Europe here!

My List Of Private Label Product Ideas For The UK

With Greg's words of wisdom, I went and did my own research using these criteria alone, and curated a list of 43 product ideas for Amazon UK. Here's a list of those ideas, all of which have varying levels of demand and competition:

Main Keyword Category Dog Rocks Pet Supplies ABS Hard Shell Suitcase Cabin Luggage Luggage Strong Cardboard Boxes DIY & Tools Clothing Rails Home & Kitchen Full Face Snorkel Sports & Outdoors Double Skin Dome Tents Sports & Outdoors Milk Steamer Home & Kitchen Kids Scooters Toys & Games Wireless Meat Thermometer Home & Kitchen Automatic Pet Feeders Pet Supplies Sleep White Noise Machine Health & Personal Care Foldable Travel Cot Mattress Baby Products BBQ cover Garden & Outdoor Jam Jars (bundle) Home & Kitchen Giant Pool Floats Toys & Games Glass Water Bottle Home & Kitchen Vacuum Water Bottle Home & Kitchen Baby Sling Wrap Baby Products Maternity Pillow Baby Products Cotton Crib Sheets Baby Products Baby Cutlery Baby Products Garage storage shelving Home & Kitchen / DIY Tools Metallic Plastic Cutlery Home & Kitchen Abs Trainer Sports & Outdoors Garden Waste Bags Garden & Outdoor Giant Tumble Tower (Jenga) Toys & Games Glass Food Storage Home & Kitchen Oil Diffuser Home & Kitchen Inflatable Lounger Sports & Outdoors LED spa light Garden & Outdoor Key Safe Box DIY & Tools Sleeping Bags Sports & Outdoors Shower Organiser Home & Kitchen Bathtub Caddy Home & Kitchen or Beauty Silicone Cooking Utensil Set Home & Kitchen Folding Camping Bed Sports & Outdoors Cotton Baby Muslins Baby Products Travel Pillow Home & Kitchen Bath Pillow Beauty Solar Garden Lights Home & Garden Waterproof Picnic Blanket Garden & Outdoor Yoga Mat Sports & Outdoors Badminton Nets Sports & Outdoors

Hopefully, if you tuned in last week, you did the same and have a similar list of ideas? I would love to hear more about what you found in the comments!

Picking Out Your Top Ideas

Prior to this weeks session, I started to narrow this list down to my top five product ideas, which I wanted to bring to the table this week to discuss with Greg and get his expert opinions.

The top 5 I picked out are highlighted in the list above, and this was very strongly based on the level of existing demand and the top-level view of how competitive these products may be.

Other things I was already thinking about include:

Will it have low seasonality

Is it easy to manufacture

Will it be profitable

Now, a lot of this boils down to my own intuition and from listening to Greg's advice in the last session. I don't actually know for sure how much these products would cost to manufacture and I need to find out more about the seasonality.

This is exactly where the advanced product research comes in. We need to take a much deeper look at our top products. I am using 5 as an example, but if you wanted to spend more time and investigate more than 5 products in more detail, that's cool too.

Advanced Product Research Tactics

There are a whole host of things to consider to weigh in on which product would be the best one to launch! Greg went over some of these in the slides before he took a look at my top 5 products. Here's the advanced criteria that you need to be investigating for your top product ideas:

Here's a breakdown of this and how you can start researching each topic:

Keyword relevancy

do a quick search on Amazon for your top keywords. If the first couple of pages have products that aren't the product you are looking to sell then this can be a good sign and indicate lower competition

PPC ad spots used?

it's a good sign of demand if the top keywords are bringing up the product idea that you are looking to sell. Plus you can also gauge the competition levels by doing this quick check.

Legal Issues

If a product looks like it might be a unique design, or even if it doesn't, it's always worth double and triple checking you won't infringe on any intellectual property by launching this product. I found a few useful UK websites when doing my research, including a European IPO search website and the UK government website for information about patents.

Of course, at this point, you just want to do as much research as you can. Later on, you might need to seek legal advice if you are unsure if a product would have any legal issues.

How strong are competitor listings?

The Jungle Scout Web App database shows a listing quality score out of 100 (LQS) which is our own proprietary scoring system. Although this is a quick way to assess the competitor product listings, you can do this manually really easily. Here's what you need to look out for in a poor listing:

Only 1 to 3 images on the listing

A title that is not explanatory and does not contain main keywords

Less than 5 features (bullet points)

A short, poorly written and unformatted product description

Number of reviews

If you find that there are a few sellers with poor listings, and especially if those sellers are still making sales each month, then you know you have something that you can improve on right away (because we are going to cover how to create the best listing ever, of course!). If you see a lot of high quality listings, then you might find that the competition is a little higher, or that you need to find other ways to differentiate… see next point.

Can the product be improved?

A really simple way to find out if you could source and manufacture a better version of a product is to read customer reviews for all other sellers of this product. Take a look at what people are unhappy about and figure out if you can improve that. We did this with Jungle Snugs, by sourcing the thickest and snuggliest baby hooded towel, and we also made it larger in size so that it would be suitable for a longer period of the child's growth.

Don't forget to also take a look at the positive reviews to see what people like about a product to make sure you don't miss any unique selling points!

Can you bundle it?

This is a really easy way to improve a product. Take a look to see if other sellers are already doing this. If not, get creative. What could you add? Using Jungle Snugs as an example again, we added a free bonus washcloth using the off cut material. So it didn't cost us any more and it makes our customers really happy. Win win!

There's an endless list of things you could bundle with a product, whether it's a free case, a low cost item that makes for a nice addition, or even a free guide that becomes a lifestyle addition

Is seasonality low?

You can usually guess which products are going to have high seasonality. By this I mean products that only sell well at certain times of the year. Even though your gut instinct is probably right, make sure you head to Google Trends (you can access this directly from the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension), and double check. Trends will show you when people are searching for keywords related to your product idea, so you can quickly assess if there are huge spikes at certain times, like the holiday season.

Are there plenty of suppliers on Alibaba?

Especially if you are a new seller, you may not have any experience of sourcing and manufacturing capabilities in China. The quickest way to ease your fears is to head to Alibaba and search for your product idea. You will very quickly be able to see at a top level if there are plenty of suppliers that specialize in your product, or the components that make a product.

Is it profitable?

Saving the best until last here. Once you have been through all of the above and you still think “yep, this is a kick-butt product idea”, you need to start investigating if it is going to be profitable. Being as you have just been searching for suppliers on Alibaba, you will also notice that you can see some estimated cost prices right on the search results:

Greg advised me to take this with a very fine grain of salt, but it is a good top-level indicator of how much the product would cost to manufacture. From there you can take a look at your Net (price minus FBA fees) and calculate some rough profit margins.

For example, if a product cost $10 to manufacture per unit, and your Net was $20, then you would have $10 profit.

Real Life Examples: Greg Reviews My Product Ideas

Although all of those things above seem like a lot, it really is worth spending the time assessing all of the products you are considering investing in. This ensures you are exploring all avenues and making sure your final decision is one that you are confident in, and that suits you and your future business.

Greg shared his thoughts on my top 5 products as follows.

Cardboard boxes – Greg thought this was an interesting idea and liked the high demand but was unsure about whether this would be a good item to get manufactured in China. He mentioned that you may actually be able to source this type of product in the country you want to sell it in, but that's not something he has experience with. Therefore, this is one idea where research into suppliers and shipping would be very important. (I was making notes for my homework, your homework is coming up very soon).

Full face snorkel – This is a really hot product right now, and they are pretty unique. Greg liked this and the fact that the demand was high. His two initial thoughts were: would there be any legal issues and is their seasonality. In terms of legal issues, because it's such a unique product, there may be an existing patent or even a patent pending. However, Greg felt some comfort in the fact that there were lots of other FBA sellers making money from this product. So legal issues, definitely one to look into.In terms of seasonality, it looked like there were two spikes, one around the December holiday period and one in July. Greg didn't seem too worried about this, though. This would be a medium level of seasonality and it's not a total deal breaker.

Baby sling – This product is essentially a large piece of fabric that sells for quite a high price (£20 and over). Greg mentioned that this would mean high-profit margins which is great news. The demand wasn't as high for this product as the others but it seemed like it would be a good product to market. Greg's views were that price is not always about the cost of manufacture. In this example, it may be that a parent would be willing to pay more money for a baby sling that is stronger and guaranteed to keep their baby safe, whilst also making them look good wearing it. Wise words on product marketing!

Sleeping bag – This product has high demand and quite high competition, but when Greg took a look, he could see that the sales were spread out across the top 10 sellers and beyond. Therefore the depth of market is sufficient. Though this is quite a competitive product, for the purposes of this case study we would feel comfortable launching this product. Greg mentions that if you were a new seller and this was your first investment, then you may pick a less competitive item to start out with! I had a concern in that I could see a fairly well known UK brick-and-mortar retailer selling sleeping bags in the top 10. Again, for Greg this was not a deal breaker. The thing that he would look out for is “do the consumers care?”. Because of the depth of market with this product, it seems that consumers aren't brand aware when purchasing sleeping bags on Amazon.Conversely, if you see a product where one seller is killing it and everyone else is trailing behind, then you should be seeing red flags.

Travel pillow – Again this item has strong demand and mid-level competition, but Greg liked it because it is one that could easily be bundled. Think eye masks, ear plugs, free carry case. Another fabric product too, so we should be able to see strong profit margins from this. Greg also took a look at some of the existing sellers and saw some poorly put together product listings, so that looked promising too.

Session #2 Homework

You knew it was coming – it's time to do your homework alongside me. Together we can use Greg's advice and ideas that he shared in this session to do further research covering all of these advanced criteria. I've put together a template that you can use to keep a note of your findings for your top products which you can download here!

Remember, the point of this case study is to help guide to find your own opportunities, not just use exactly what we are doing. So just add your own list of ideas into this spreadsheet, and all of the relevant information for your product:

You can also use these tactics and this same spreadsheet to find product ideas in any Amazon marketplace, not just the UK. Make it work for you 👌

Conclusion

It's going to be a tough call, I really like all five of my product ideas. But I need to let my research, and most importantly the data, determine my final decision.

Spending your time on product research is wise because it's going to be your investment in your future. Following these guidelines helps to minimize risk and maximize the chances of success!

Next week…

Before we decide on our product, we are going to do some supplier outreach to double check that we can find a reliable supplier and pick a product that is going to be most profitable. Join us to find out how to start your supplier outreach and also find out which product I decide to launch next Wednesday!

When she's not being an SEO geek or crafting content, Kym can be found making friends with cats, taking photographs, cycling and traveling.