I find it really interesting that, instead of listening to whom you would like to be your end users, you get extremely defensive and you make a ton of excuses. The bottom line is that you're never going to make any money if you don't take advice on how to improve.

Just like everyone else, I find your videos, not only creepy and inappropriate, but aesthetically offensive. I think you should scrap the project all together, to be honest. Somebody mentioned the forest and trees earlier, and I have to agree: you are not seeing that what you have so far is unprofessional and it's insulting that you would think anyone could take you seriously. The only person you've hired who has done you any good at all is your 2D artist. Your voice over "artist" uses little to no dynamics, rendering Wogglebug's personality pretty much nil, and your automated voices for the other characters are boring and totally amateur. Your 3D graphic "artist" wouldn't even be able to make it in community college, let alone as a professional, and the writing... oh gawds, the writing. NO ONE talks the way any of your characters do, making them totally unrelatable.

Like others, I'm not trying to be mean, although I really do want to shake you in hopes that you would see how utterly hard your project is failing. You obviously don't see it, and even if you've spent only $5 on it, it's too much.

Holy crap I just looked at the Amazon Books.

The most expensive is $40.99 (paperback), for 324 pages. Compare that with the first Harry Potter book, which has 309 pages, but only costs $6.29 in paperback. Now I realize that you probably have more overhead, but are you really asking parents to fork out over $40 for a single children's book???

Your other books are on Amazon for $30.95 and $32.99, which is cheaper, but I presume that's because they are slightly shorter. Weirdly, your Kindle prices are very similar (in the $21-23 range), but that's still ridiculously expensive for a digital eBook which has literally no overhead other than the percentage you give Amazon for hosting it (my wife is an author so I know about Amazon eBook rates...they are not that high).

Honestly, those prices tell me that you are either greedy or desperate, and neither are going to help you out in the long run. Put the prices down, because although you'll get less per book, you are bound to sell more books and make more of a profit overall.

So I watched the about video.....

I'm scared ._.

The voice actor is annoying. The rendering is real glitchy. The character design is creepy, and the character itself is not only not relatable, but irritating and unlikeable. The other voice actors are just awful.

Why does Sylvie have the physique of a young woman in her 20s as a child? ._.

The writing is not in the least believable. Nobody talks like that.

The 2d pictures are better, but the logo looks cheap.

I'm sorry if it's being harsh, but if you want it to take off, there's a lot of work to do. And you being here with the sole purpose of promoting this is kind of annoying. Why here anyway?

Just so you know, the prices of those paperback novels cannot go down anymore than I already made them, it wasn't my fault. I wish I could bring the price of $40.00 one down to at least half as much. It had to do with the trim size I used and the fact the illustrations are in color and the page count. The illustrations were expensive by the way, and this isn't the same artist who illustrates my picture books.

I suppose re-publishing the books in black-and-white might bring the prices down. Except I paid for expensive pictures in color and would prefer for them to be seen as such. And I actually didn't have these novels marketed to children, but to older young readers because of dark moments and mature themes and complexity.

I hadn't expected to hire two illustrators instead on one before I did. It just worked out that way. You can see what I mean by my picture book artist's designs not being appropriate for darker and more mature themes that are reserved for novel length books.


And the three picture books are not in print and will not be unless I can pay my artist what I owe him now and likely more to have the pictures changed. And more than that because I started out in the wrong order of books. I started with books that should be in the middle of the series instead of at the end, and I also need to have the pictures changed from being set in Oz to reflecting his new life in his new land that is very different. But I can't afford to have him do anything at the moment and unless my campaign does well enough it won't be until three years that I have the book's published, and that is provided the artist is willing to still be my illustrator because of that.

If you would rather I have the campaign about the books only and not about the films, I might revert to that. But I am never going to do a video of myself talking live. I have a problem with how my teeth are, and there is no money at all to fix them, either.

I suppose I must have come to the wrong place this time. Because the character is meant to be lovable and his voice is meant to match him perfectly. As in, when the day comes to find a replacement for the current voiceover, I want it as close as possible to this one.

I get the feeling that you're delusional.

(August 1, 2015 at 3:00 pm)ILoveMRHMWogglebugTE Wrote: Just so you know, the prices of those paperback novels cannot go down anymore than I already made them, it wasn't my fault. I wish I could bring the price of $40.00 one down to at least half as much. It had to do with the trim size I used and the fact the illustrations are in color and the page count. The illustrations were expensive by the way, and this isn't the same artist who illustrates my picture books.

Yes, it was your fault. You should have researched how much a full color book would have cost before you decided to go ahead with it. When the price came back at $40, that should have been your red flag, and you should have gone down a different route. You have nobody to blame but yourself; it's not Amazon's fault that printing color books is more expensive. You keep saying it's not your fault, but I don't see how it's anyone else's.

Quote:I suppose re-publishing the books in black-and-white might bring the prices down. Except I paid for expensive pictures in color and would prefer for them to be seen as such. And I actually didn't have these novels marketed to children, but to older young readers because of dark moments and mature themes and complexity.

Again, you should have researched how much the color images would have cost to print. This should have happened in the planning stages. Plenty of books use greyscale images for the inside, and that should really have been your clue. If you can't see how $40 for a paperback book is ridiculous, then I'm not sure how you are ever going to succeed.

This stuff will come up again during your crowdfunding campaign, because people will want to know that the project they are investing in is worth it, and has a reasonable plan for making money. Nobody in their right minds if going to support a project which didn't have the foresight to do some basic cost calculations, and instead thought that charging $40 for a paperback was acceptable.

I tried to think of a nice, oblique, positive way to say this, but I don't think there is such a way. And I mean this completely seriously:

OP... I don't know if this is... entirely healthy, to be this committed to a children's character. It's as though you're obsessed with getting your ideas about this... thing... in front of children, whatever the cost, whatever the amount of time it takes or criticism you have to ignore, and then you can't or won't understand the multitude of reasons it's not going to work.

Consider seeing a psychologist.

That's the last I'll be posting in this thread.

(July 31, 2015 at 7:27 pm)Tiberius Wrote: The other voices, especially the children's voices were quiet and I found them to be distinctly monotone, rather than displaying any kind of emotion.

The first thing I noticed about the children's voices is that they all sound like they were recorded in different environments. It will sound completely different recording someone in a studio without any reverb compared to a bathroom with a bad microphone for example.

As for the children's voices being monotonic, that's probably because they really are voices of children. The OP needs to understand that voice acting takes skill. Something that children don't have much of on account of them being young. I often wish I could have been a voice actor. It sounds like a good job. It's essentially acting.

The difference between a professional and an amateur is that the former will make sure that absolutely every little detail is perfect.

If that means that 8 hours of work produces ten seconds of animation rather than a few minutes then that's what it takes.

This is why you have so many people working on one project, so each person can concentrate on something different. One person does the animation, the other does the editing, there's a different voice actor for each character, a web development company creates the website etc. Each one concentrating solely on their one job.

You're trying to do too much and not achieving anything. You need to look at what your strengths are. You say you can't draw, but you seem to enjoy doing animation, well try stop motion animation instead. It's not hard to create a decent model out of plasticine with an internal skeleton.

(July 31, 2015 at 6:47 pm)ILoveMRHMWogglebugTE Wrote: One reason I didn't work as hard on them as I would certainly if I was releasing a movie to DVD for instance...

Hate to bring this part up, but today's kids are being brought up on tablets and phones that support full HD. Many also live in homes where they already have UHD TVs. DVDs, by today's standards, are "low res", and while their parents may "remember" DVDs, and even VHS, the kids will be the first to point out the low quality of something isn't even DVD resolution.