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‘A Book of Visual Signalwave’ my first independent success

In December of 2019, I had this idea to take japanese commercials from 1980 to 2001 and turn them into a book. The idea was simple, paint a new story with minimal changes in frame order but sparks a new emotion in a comic book format. A 30 second video might have 720 frames to tell a story. A book of visual signalwave takes a handful to tell a new one.

The initial idea was give this to the Musics the Hang Up Patreon supporters as a thank you for their support. I made the books at a small book printing shop near XiaMeiLing, China. 12 of them and shipped them back to the USA. Christmas came around, I gave away this free book and for another 2 months sat on it.

Then in February, I started getting into the flipping game on ebay but the income wasn’t as fast as I’d like. So it hit me, digital goods are so much easier to maintain, digital goods turned physical without dealing with shipping myself would be even better.

In the vaporwave scene, people love collecting physical media. For example, cassettes and vinyl in the scene are huge. So huge that some people don’t even have the means to play their music but the art and prestige of owning something from a limited release gets everyone off.

I’ve been in the vaporwave scene for over a year trying to figure out my niche as someone who doesn’t exactly produce music. I like the visual side of the scene. I like the smaller sub-genres (signalwave) even more.

So I did what made sense, and signed up with Amazon’s KDP to have them start producing my book. It was a quick process after I figured out all the book conversion stuff and February 28th, I went live with the book.

The first day sales were ok, but on March 4th things exploded. A Japanese blog picked up on the book, wrote a post about it and by the end of the day had over 300 retweets, likes and comments. This would be the first time I’d ever have a new outlet write about anything I’ve created.

The following day, I get an email from Disk Union, a japanese book distributor / store, asking to purchase 100 books. Of course I agreed, made less than 100 USD off the sale, but I was on my way.

Now I write this proudly stating in the first 2 weeks, I’ve sold over 200 copies of the book and a new drive to write more. So I’m starting a new book project I’ve had in the back of my head for a while.

A book on FFMPEG, a video and audio editing terminal software. It’s formatted in a “100 Questions answered” type book. It’ll be a great reference book for anyone interested in taking their social media game up to the next level.

If this is something you’re interested in, please sign up for email alert to start up to date on the progress. The book will be releases in the next month, you’re not going to want to miss it.

Until then, check out my first published book, “A Book of Visual Signalwave” on Amazon: