His anthem.

The hymn of those he’s ushered into the afterlife over the millennia of human existence. The tune he promised would signal his return.

No more delays. He comes for me now.

I got the concert job. The treatments stopped working. The orchestra chose this song on this day, all as he promised.

My knees shake as I straddle the sides of the very thing that will alert him to my presence. The wood is so cold, the lights are so bright, my hands are so numb and sweaty.

The conductor gives me a look that is equally scolding and reassuring. It’s my day to perform a solo for an unforgiving audience.

The room goes silent. My hands perform the motions as I consider running away. If I don’t play it he won’t come for me.

The blinding lights dim, and I see him. Only him. No audience, no orchestra, just an empty concert hall lit from below. His hood absorbs all light, but from the empty darkness of his being I can sense his gaze. His attention is fixed on me.

“What awaits me?”

No response. My spine crawls as he approaches.

“Can I have more time? I need more time.”

He’s close enough now for me to see into the vast abyss of his being. His darkness consumes me.

My performance has ended.

Half an hour until the indicator light on my regulator flips the fuck out, leaving me strangled under three miles of ocean.

My hopes of being back aboard were dashed when I got a muddled transmission telling me that the sea was too rough and they would return in an hour. That was three hours ago.

The Sea Walker articulated submersibles are capable of producing eighteen hours of air, but the last ten percent of the battery is dedicated to preserving the equipment. You can get a new pilot, after all.

A controlled emergency ascent could get me to the surface in time. I’d be out of power and subject to whatever this robot wants to do with me. I’d be able to breathe though. Not drowning so far under the ocean that the pressure could turn me into a gemstone.

The low pitched rumble could be written off as volcanic activity. The high pitched squeak could be the exoskeleton. It’s the midtones that give away the intent of the giant toothed whale. The titanic tune is unmistakable to those trained to listen for it.

I initiate the emergency ascent, hoping that the leg motors can outpace a prehistoric predator ten times my size. The dust kicks up around me and I take off in a hurry. The coral rushes past me as I exit the trench.

I make good progress until the crunch.

Maybe I’ll be a lapis lazuli.

250-word short story. Genre: Horror. Action: Rescheduling. Word: Tune

It was so fun and different to bring my visual eye to an auditory art. I’ve spent years learning how to communicate what I see and how I want someone to feel when they look at something, but, describing sound and the emotion that sound evokes was an entirely different art. I can hear the characters in my head, but I’m still developing the skills needed to be able to describe those voices to others. Luckily, I wasn’t alone for this.

I was lucky to have Nick Plaisance, and his many talented voices, narrate the audiobook. He brought so much inflection and emotion to the piece; he took it to a level I didn’t expect. He really did make the whole book sound like story time by a campfire, and I love it. He also fulfilled the roles of engineer and producer, so I could upload files directly to the Zon and they were a perfect fit.

At Nick’s request, I gave him a pronunciation guide for all the fictional names and short descriptions of the personality and voice for each character. Nick brought great skills and talent, so I really just directed him until he found something that matched each story - no small feat for a book with 80 characters! We focused on a small main cast for each story, not worrying too much about background characters.

Nick handled the editing of pops and loud breathing, leaving me to focus on the higher level view of building a world through sound. We avoided real-world accents, but otherwise Nick was free to really push the characters’ voices. That left me with the task of listening and giving notes. None of my years of checking CG renders for artifacts prepared me for creative listening.

I honestly have a hard time with audiobooks and podcasts, so it was a struggle to get myself to focus long enough to give good notes. Nick’s work was wonderful, but without something for my eyes to focus on I got distracted easily. I had some luck going to bookstores, like Vroman’s, and sitting outside with headphones on while I listened. The fresh air helped me calm my thoughts and I could stare at a single object that wasn’t any of the same objects I always stare at in my home office.

Overall, it was a very different experience but I enjoyed it and can’t wait to write a new book so Nick can narrate it!

I’m really excited for folks to check out the book! It’s available on Amazon and Audible, or check my website for more formats. Go check out Nick’s work as well!

This post may be helpful to all folks looking into SEO, or search engine optimization, but I’m going to gear it towards folks with a visual eye who write books. For me, “visual eye” means people who are better at gauging progress based on what they see rather than reading charts or metadata. Please replace “book” with your product.

I decided to write this after realizing that my goal with SEO was to control what people see when they encounter my books out in the wild. What images are there? What does the description for my book or the text about me say? Is everything consistent? I then realized that I thought this way because of all the years spent focusing on how the audience will view a film.

It’s my opinion that while SEO is a deterministic process, the sheer billions of websites and daily search results add a layer of chaos that makes this hard to predict. Because of that, some info about SEO is super vague in an effort to sell products or services and other sites provide documentation that takes a lot of context and brain power to process. Some sites are genuinely helpful, but just can’t teach all of this in a short post.

As with all art, try something and see how it looks then adapt and try something else.

Note: This post assumes you have control over the <head/> data on your website. I write my own html, so I'm not sure if the WYSIWYG sites provide all these piece under their Custom Code features. You may need to translate my terminology into what your site offers.

Gauging the outcome

The outcome here is search results, right? Google yourself (with personalization disabled so that you see something closer to what others see) or your book and look at the results. Do I see the results I want to see, including my website? Do the sites I own look how I want them to look? The favicon is on the left and the og:image is on the right, but I’ll go into more detail below. Are you missing a link you want to see, or is the result showing you an old image? Irrelevant links are only fixable by upping the “SEO authority” of your own data, which I take to mean how relevant your links are to the search terms.

Remember that updating the index can take days-weeks, but there is also a chance you didn’t update the image properly. It’s like crossing your fingers after you submit weekend renders during the last week of production, except that the deadlines here are your own.

For those interested in direct documentation, you can find info about text links here and website names here. Below, I’ll show a screenshot from Google’s site and go into details of how I’ve kinda directed the results. Again, the docs I’ve shared are the ground truth here, but not everyone likes reading through that much info.

I also use the Google Search Console as a way to validate my updates to the metadata. Remember that your site is important to you, but it exists among a literal billion other sites that need to be indexed. Request indexing, wait, they index it, wait, then their site shows you the results of the indexing.

Steps to take

The first thing you can do today is to upload all your eBooks to Google Play Partner Center. (If your product isn’t a book, find a way to inform Google about the product in a way that shows it is sellable and allows you to control the metadata). I haven't sold a single book there, but it hooked up a Google Knowledge Graph that I can claim and suggest edits on. The personal website SEO steps I list below may make this unnecessary, but it can’t hurt and it’s helpful for folks with no website.

When it comes to deciding which links you want to see when entering your search terms, you can't really control the order of the results, but you can try to show Google what the top link is (your other internal sites should still link back to the one canonical URL or homepage). You can't remove valid links for unrelated stuff, and be kind to folks that are adjacent to your stuff - you just need to make more things to steer Google. It’s like steering a battleship with a single oar, but sometimes it works.

Google polices SEO heavily, data is their job. There are standards to conform to in order to get the reward of high searchability, which are well documented in a very vast documentation site. It is what it is. The Google Search Console site helps you track SEO on domains you own - you can't check other URL’s even if they link to yours.

I’ll go into more detail below, but I’ll leave with one last thought before that. This isn’t a “do these 4 tricks to get SEO” page or anything like that. I expect it to be hard work that needs consistent maintenance as my business grows and as Google adds or changes features. Look at the AI info snippets, they’re so important now but didn’t exist a few years ago. I’m only here to share what I’ve learned in the first few months of dealing with this stuff. Enjoy!

Search Results Breakdown

Image from Google Developer Portal

HTML experts may have valid suggestions about the code below, but it works for me!

• Favicon - <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href=”/favicon.ico” />

• Sitename - <title>Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator</title>

  • Can be bolstered by <meta name="title" content="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">

  • Can be further bolstered by the <"application/ld+json">/WebSite/name data listed below.

• Domain - determined by Google

  • Can be bolstered by <link rel="canonical" href="https://garrettsbroussard.com/">

• Breadcrumb & Visible URL - determined by Google

• Text Result Image - I use <meta property="og:image" content=”/image.png” /> and <"application/ld+json">/WebSite/image data

  • Google picks what it thinks is best, which is why a cat shows up as the image for my book’s GoodReads page. Beautiful cat, but not my cat. It’s just the current avatar of someone who reviewed my book. Cats > book covers, I guess.

  • I sometimes see an image on my phone but not on desktop, or vice versa. Not sure why yet, but I suspect it has to do with image formats and HTML <meta> tags.

  • Not seeing what you want for this may be a combination of slow indexing, improperly formatting data, and Google overriding your suggestions.

• Rich Attributes - Things like review stars can show up here.

  • Best driven by <"application/ld+json"> data. Needs to be approved by Google, so this may need a feedback loop to get correct.

  • Everything has to be factually accurate, even if it's embellished. Don’t add a Review item claiming to have 5 stars and 1000 ratings, you’ll get caught eventually.

Meta, Twitter and OpenGraph tags

It may seem like a lot of work, but I’ve seen a lot of value in making multiple pages with tags for each page. That allows me to focus keywords and metadata towards just a book, or just a blog post, or just about me. I use twitter, og tags, and also json+ld data (via schema.org). Also look at the page title and description. The tags, json+ld data, title, and description are the only 4 things you can change. The rest is up to how Google scrapes your site. Make sure you provide a valid sitemap.xml file also!

It’s all about making it easy for Google to find your stuff in the way you want it found. You’ll notice a lot of repetition below, I believe that’s necessary to feed all the different consumers and has led me to drive most of my site from JSON files that are shared across pages. My thought is that building an internal knowledge graph actually helps Google realize that your stuff is connected in the way you claim it to be.

Debug your metadata with sites like this. No one needs to authenticate to view your site, so you shouldn’t need to log into a site just to inspect or debug your metadata. Note that the GSC is an exception because you do need to authenticate to edit your metadata.

<!-- Primary Meta Tags -->
<title>Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator</title>
<meta name="title" content="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">
<meta name="description" content="Home page for Garrett S. Broussard. Author of Cacophony of Crowns">
<meta name="author" content="Garrett S. Broussard">
<!-- Open Graph / Facebook -->
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:title" content="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://garrettsbroussard.com/">
<meta property="og:description" content="Home page for Garrett S. Broussard. Author of Cacophony of Crowns">
<meta property="og:image">
content="https://garrettsbroussard.com/professor_smize_crop.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">
<!-- Twitter -->
<meta property="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta property="twitter:url" content="https://garrettsbroussard.com/">
<meta property="twitter:title" content="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">
<meta property="twitter:description" content="Home page for Garrett S. Broussard. Author of Cacophony of Crowns">
<meta property="twitter:image" content="/professor_smize_crop.jpg">
<meta property="twitter:image:alt" content="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">
<!-- The title of a google search result -->
<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/opensearch.xml" title="Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator">

JSON Linked Data

JSON Linked Data, or <"application/ld+json"> is a way to feed the search engines and AI without letting the AI crawl your site - I blocked AI bots via my robots.txt.

This homepage data has an entry for a WebSite, which lists the author as a Person entry. I also list Book entries on each book page. Most of this is either mandatory or self-explanatory, but I’ve added little tricks like “sameAs” where I list all sites that talk about myself or my books - depending whether the site is about me or my books.

I update this frequently and have chosen to be overly verbose with it. Like seriously, any social media or blog post from someone else that mentions me or my books gets put into the list for that section of the site. Telling Google “hey hey, someone mentioned me! I’m important!” is much easier to do than getting other sites to link back to yours. That said, take advantage of any profiles or bios you do control on other sites and make sure they link back to somewhere on your site. Somehow typing the same data on a different site increases your “SEO Authority”.

For my books, I also add keywords and one review from a reputable source - multiple reviews requires an “aggregateReview” entry, which means star counts and I don’t wanna be in the business of updating those things. I also think those stars imply that the reviews happened on my site, which they didn’t.

Homepage:

<script type="application/ld+json">{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "WebSite",
    "name": {
        "title": "Garrett S. Broussard, Over-thinker and Under-enunciator"
    },
    "author": {
        "@context": "https://schema.org",
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Garrett S. Broussard",
        "url": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/",
        "description": "Over-thinker and Under-enunciator. Author of Cacophony of Crowns and software developer for Animation and VFX.",
        "image": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/professor_smize_crop.jpg",
        "sameAs": [
            "https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CZPDBP3H/about",
            "https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CZPDBP3H/allbooks",
            "https://bsky.app/profile/garrettsbroussard.bsky.social",
            "https://instagram.com/garrettsbroussard",
            "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/47378683.Garrett_S_Broussard",
            "https://garrettsbroussard.substack.com/",
            "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557777294641&mibextid=ZbWKwL",
          "https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettsbroussard",
            "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5594163/",
            "https://bookshop.org/shop/garrett_s_broussard",
            "https://booklife.com/profile/garrett-broussard-106303",
            "https://linktr.ee/cacophonyofcrowns"
        ]
    },
    "url": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/",
    "image": "/professor_smize_crop.jpg"
}</script>

Book (Note how Author is copied here as well):

<script type="application/ld+json">{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Book",
    "name": "Cacophony of Crowns",
    "author": {
        "@context": "https://schema.org",
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Garrett S. Broussard",
        "url": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/",
        "description": "Over-thinker and Under-enunciator. Author of Cacophony of Crowns and software developer for Animation and VFX.",
        "image": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/professor_smize_crop.jpg",
        "sameAs": [
            "https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CZPDBP3H/about",
            "https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0CZPDBP3H/allbooks",
            "https://bsky.app/profile/garrettsbroussard.bsky.social",
            "https://instagram.com/garrettsbroussard",
            "https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/47378683.Garrett_S_Broussard",
            "https://garrettsbroussard.substack.com/",
            "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557777294641&mibextid=ZbWKwL",
            "https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettsbroussard",
            "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5594163/",
            "https://bookshop.org/shop/garrett_s_broussard",
            "https://booklife.com/profile/garrett-broussard-106303",
            "https://linktr.ee/cacophonyofcrowns",
            "http://shoutoutla.com/meet-garrett-s-broussard-author-filmmaker/",
            "https://www.facebook.com/countdowncitygeekcast/videos/from-vfx-artists-to-authors/1805251123536285/",
            "https://sdccblog.com/authors-and-publishers-autograph-signing-schedule-sdcc-2025/",
            "https://comiccrusaders.com/comic-books/visual-effects-legends-bring-stories-to-the-page-at-san-diego-comic-con/",
            "https://geektherapy.org/from-screen-to-page-vfx-legends-share-their-stories-at-san-diego-comic-con-2025/",
            "https://comiccon2025.sched.com/event/26wh3/worldbuilders-visual-effects-meets-speculative-fiction#:~:text=Comic%2DCon%202025:%20Worldbuilders:,Room%2029CD"
        ]
    },
    "isbn": "979-8-218-32934-1",
    "image": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/cover_coc_vol1.jpg",
    "description": "From gods to monarchs to commoners, power always claims its price in this genre-spanning short story collection.",
    "numberOfPages": "174",
    "genre": [
        "Fantasy",
        "Sword and Sorcery",
        "Epic Fantasy",
        "Dark Fantasy",
        "Psychological Fantasy"
    ],
    "url": "https://garrettsbroussard.com/books/cacophony-of-crowns/",
    "datePublished": "2024-03-23",
    "publisher": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Garrett S. Broussard"
    },
    "keywords": [
        "fantasy",
        "writing",
        "books",
        "sci-fi",
        "scifi",
        "SFF",
        "genre-bending",
        "Atansha",
        "Yuudil",
        "Erphin",
        "Sea Witch",
        "magic",
        "magick",
        "occult",
        "fantasy",
        "dark fantasy",
        "epic fantasy",
        "psychological",
        "adventure",
        "dragons"
    ],
    "sameAs": [
        "https://www.instagram.com/garrettsbroussard/p/DONGd-ZkTO7/",
        "https://www.instagram.com/garrettsbroussard/p/C509bQTLGmW/",
        "https://bsky.app/profile/garrettsbroussard.bsky.social/post/3lbqnb7mmvs2f",
        "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210198108-cacophony-of-crowns",
        "https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/garrett-s-broussard/cacophony-of-crowns/",
        "https://booklife.com/project/cacophony-of-crowns-92376",
        "https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/cacophony-of-crowns",
        "https://amazon.com/dp/B0CYM2457S",
        "https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cacophony-of-crowns-garrett-broussard/1145044954?ean=9798218329341",
        "https://www.vromansbookstore.com/book/9798218329341",
        "https://shop.villagewell.com/item/rwszZkqo5QzBoQxZ5jE39g",
        "https://www.booksoup.com/book/9798218329341",
        "https://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9798218329341",
        "https://www.powells.com/book/cacophony-of-crowns-9798218329341",
        "https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?keyword=Cacophony+of+Crowns+&mtype=B&hs=Search",
        "https://bookshop.org/p/books/cacophony-of-crowns-garrett-broussard/21297853?ean=9798218329341",
        "https://amazon.com/dp/B0CYLDW3CL",
        "https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cacophony-of-crowns-garrett-broussard/1145044954?ean=9798218381011",
        "https://share.libbyapp.com/title/10591207",
        "https://www.hoopladigital.com/ebook/cacophony-of-crowns-garrett-broussard/16717672",
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        "https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/cacophony-of-crowns",
        "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?pcampaignid=books_read_action&id=sb0DEQAAQBAJ&pli=1",
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        "https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0FPJGLL39",
        "https://www.audible.com/pd/B0FPJRS1NT/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-467390&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_467390_rh_us",
        "https://www.beardyp.com"
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            "name": "Kirkus Reviews",
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            "@type": "Organization",
            "name": "Kirkus Reviews"
        },
        "url": "https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/garrett-s-broussard/cacophony-of-crowns/",
        "datePublished": "2025-02-19",
        "reviewBody": "Endlessly entertaining short fiction in a medley of genres… The stories showcase Broussard's pithy writing—readers will want to keep their eyes out for his future releases..."
    }
}</script>

Audible Link

Read more about the book here:

https://garrettsbroussard.com/books/cacophony-of-crowns/

https://garrettsbroussard.com/

I eventually started writing my own stories as early as high school, but never got over my fear enough to share them. I did keep a running document of all my one-line ideas, however.

As an adult, I visited New Zealand for the first time and found myself in Waimangu Volcanic Valley, a tropical forest just south of Rotorua. I was in awe of a place that looked like Jurassic Park but had winter temperatures cold enough to need a coat. I was mining ideas for what I thought would be Dungeons&Dragons campaigns, and instead found the beginnings of what would become the Dark Forest. The ideas rattled around in my head endlessly, but I wasn’t sure how to record them—I was still trying my hand at visual art and animation at the time. Fast forward to global lockdown, nothing to do other than avoid the grief I’d spent the previous year befriending, where I was introduced to Jung’s theory of archetypes and the introspection they bring. I’d grown in my ability to hear a symphony among the chaos of Los Angeles, what I would eventually rebrand as a cacophony, and began trying to understand more about myself using these new tools.

My employer shut down in late 2022, the same week we had to put down our beloved dog. This left me with free time, even more grief, and a bold idea. I had read various collections of short stories, science fiction and gothic horror, as well as The Silmarillion. I really enjoyed the chaos and power of the First Age; the epic battles and the introduction of a pantheon of gods. I wanted more, but there was no more.

I decided it was time to write my own stories instead of changing someone else’s. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I can’t wait to do it again.

I present to you my first book.

Read more about Cacophony of Crowns here: https://garrettsbroussard.com/books/cacophony-of-crowns/

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