At eighty miles an hour, hauling bananas down the freeway, the steering wheel of your new Yugo pops off the column and into your lap. Turns out the factory hadn’t quite gotten around to tightening the steering-wheel bolt. First, it’s a miracle your Yugo can go that fast, but, most important, you rather expect the thing to be complete when you find it in the showroom.
So, bringing the book to market.
Instead of guerrilla marketing, which takes advantage of evolving market circumstances and opportunities to quickly and effectively advertise a product, I’m using a technique called gorilla marketing, which takes advantage of overall laziness and general inaction with a grudging commitment to minimal effort. The gorilla marketing maxim: how much can you get done without doing anything.
Gorilla marketing is certainly affordable, both financially and time-wise, although it may not be as effective as that guerrilla thing in getting a book to market.
But, guerrilla or gorilla, you gotta do one thing: finish the darned book. Finish. It. Cross all of the T’s, dot the I’s, and get it done beyond done. Spell check it. Grammar check it. Re-re-re-read it once more.
I am happy to have an utterly brilliant editor very close by. My wife has a master’s degree in Russian literature, is an avid reader, and, most important, a mother of three terrific kids.
In the best gorilla marketing tradition, I didn’t even bother to print the thing out, but simply emailed a copy of MARIGOLD’S END to her. I just hear the boop as it arrived on her cell phone. That’s really close to doing nothing about marketing my book.
Jackity-crackers, kids, we’re working now. Although she is perhaps the slowest dignity-danged editor on the planet, she’s really good at it. And the price is unbeatable!
She will clean my clock on just about every sentence in this thing, and will make me rewrite the stuff that just doesn’t make sense to her, and we’ll have approximately 27 arguments over why Phineas says this and not that.
But, at the end of it, the MARIGOLD’S END that comes out will be the cat’s underwear.
So before I sent it to my editor, and in order to bring the number of soon-to-be-coming snarky comments to a bare minimum, I had to spell- and grammar-check it one more time. Found a couple of things I’d missed – who knew? The grammar-checker challenged my sentence structures – fie on thee, grammar-checker! Anyway, it’s done, and the missus has already said she regrets taking on the task. Cool!
Now, how to fix the steering wheel in my Yugo…
John D Reinhart 