Get the Smashwords version of "Attack of the 100 Foot Virgin here!
(On the left we have the Amazon cover, on the right we have the Smashwords cover. We’ll be referencing the cover art shortly, but go ahead and look if you want to.)
“Attack of the 100-Foot Virgin” is the third book in the Jinkie Jenkins Adventures. I’m moving it to Smashwords and in doing so I edited it a bit, finding a few typos and so forth. It’s still the same story, just cleaned up a bit.
However, I did make a few text changes for editorial reasons, and I did that as a direct result of a keyword research I did. I was unhappy with the keywords I used on Amazon and tried to think up a few more. The scene on the cover involves the protagonist being sold at a slave auction in a city square, stark naked and in bondage, of course. To help prospective customers see the merchandise, cambots project a hundred foot tall image of her (hence our title). There are also a lot of other elements to the scene, and though no actual flying saucers, there’s stuff that’s pretty close. And of course there’s a frightened crowd.
Naturally, our virginal heroine finds it exquisitely humiliating to be paraded about naked, her every feature gigantic and clearly visible to the crowd in the square. And yet, I never researched the keyword “humiliation.” So I did, and I hit a goldmine. On Amazon, I got over 20,000 hits on the Kindle Store for books with the keyword “humiliation.” That’s HUGE. But I figured that a lot of hits might come from non-sexy books with that keyword. So I did a search for the phrase “humiliation erotica” and got over 20,000 hits. Which means of course that practically every book that had “humiliation” as a keyword is erotica.
It’s a HUGE niche.
Well I was all over that and tried all sorts of phrases and variations of the “humiliation” keyword. And I also rewrote a few scenes to heighten Jinkie’s humiliations.
I also redid the cover, as you see up top. The old cover was just brain-dead. Zeroing in the scene with giant Jinkie in the square was a no-brainer. And I went to considerable effort to get an image of her looking gigantic in a city, poised to wreak havoc, with a ballgag in her mouth and cuffs on her wrists. Which worked out fine as far as it went, but it didn’t go nearly far enough.
When I looked at the cover for Smashwords, I knew it could be improved, and it was kind of obvious how. The sky, that freaking gray sky was empty and dull. It did nothing. I realized that when I had created the original image, I had been unconsciously (i.e., stupidly) emulating the promo art for “Attack of the 50-foot Woman.” My image is more or less static except for the woman. But in the promo poster, things are happening: cars and trucks are crashing and falling of elevated roadways, people are fleeing in terror, she’s got a car in her hand, it’s got it going on (except, that, like my art, the sky contains nothing but text).
I knew I wanted a pulp kinda cover, so I went in and actioned things up. I put in flying saucers, a dramatic bloody red sky with giant moon/planet, and people running in terror. All of it clip art, mind you, and not particularly UNIFIED clip art in terms of technique. The base art from both cover versions is 3-D virtual world art from Second Life. The people running in the foreground are 2D pen and ink with watercolor comic art. The spaceships are 3D graphics and go fairly nicely with the Second Life art, though their shading is better. And the sky in the background is a photo. I used a filter to give the Second Life art, especially Jinkie, to work better with the cartoon figures in the foreground, but overall, given my limitations (I’m not an artist) I thought I improved it a lot.
(That said, an artist undoubtedly would have done a MUCH better job than I did, starting with giving the image a graphically unified look, and continuing with doing a better job of designing the image, and beyond that doing a better job of implementing the design. A really good artist would come up with a cover concept that would put mine to shame. For example, see the cover to "Adventures of Bondor Woman" which was done by a real artist. When and if my books ever start making decent money – ahem, I mean more decent than the millions they already make – no one will be happier to pay artists to do the covers than me.)
Still, I think the cover is fairly effective at saying, “Here be funny, sexy science fiction.” And I’ve seen pro covers that were … much worse about visually suggesting the book’s contents.
Anyway, that’s enough nattering. Here’s da blurb:
Oh, noes! Interstellar sex reporter Jinkie Jenkins has been kidnapped! What happened to her?
Well we can't tell all, not in this blurb anyway. But in the writhing mass of science fiction adventure, hilarity and kinky sex slave fun that some call “Attack of the 100-Foot Virgin” we DO tell all.
And in this blurb, there are some things we CAN say. We can tell you that on Alderan, Jinkie is now known as “The Riotess of Cyzlyk City” and is wanted by the authorities there on numerous charges. We can tell you that Marty Stu the “non-sentient” glow ball bot becomes a Forest Management Services bot and is eaten a couple of times. That the Mayor of Cyzlyk City comes to believe that a distant city called "France" has declared war on Cyzlyk City, for perfectly good and sufficient Jinkie-related reasons. And we can't tell you why Jinkie HATES being a hundred-foot-tall virgin in the middle of Cyzlyk City square. Wait a minute, we can: it's because she's naked and in bondage, and like, totally humiliated. We just can't tell you why that happens, or why Jinkie is naked. But it's perfectly rational... on Alderan.
We also can't tell you why the Rebellion, the mercs, Grab Ass, John Quill, the Borkistanis and the Cyzlyk City copbots all want to get their hands on Jinkie and hotmeat, or why Marty Stu got defenestrated. We can't tell you hotmeat's former name, or Marty Stu and the Interstellar Inquirer's fates.
You'll just have to read the book to find out, you ridiculously silly human, you.
This novel is over 55,000 words long and we can tell you that it may well be the funniest thing Pat Powers has ever written. Especially that one scene. No, we can't tell you what it is. You'll know.
