Marketing – John D Reinhart

Hitting Pause Again

Nobody tells you anything about anything, am I right? I mean, I asked for free advice from somebody who didn’t know anything and got a ton, but it was all, like, useless. I’m actually kinda ticked…

Here’s something you didn’t know, I’ll bet. Or maybe you did know, and I am the one who doesn’t know anything.

There’s a time of year to publish your book. Just like the little green leaves and the little buds and the birdies, yadda yadda yadda, there’s a season for your book. Can you imagine?

It’s all about the migration of people.

You don’t publish your book at the beginning of July, for instance. Why? People migrate away from book-buying and go on vacation.

HOWEVER, you DO publish your romance in May or June, because it’s a good vacation read, and you’ll catch ‘em before they migrate away. Crazy, right?

You don’t want to publish at the end of the year. It’s the holidays and nobody’s buying books, unless you’ve got a bang-up Christmas or Hanukkah book or something. People have migrated away from reading and are all about fruitcake.

But you DO publish in January if yours is a self-help book. The people have migrated back to reading again.

My book, my original Phineas Caswell novel, a piece of historical fiction, is perfect for late August/early September, when the leaves fall and folks are ready to cozy up for a good read.

Won’t take it to the beach, won’t use it to better themselves, won’t enjoy it as a scary thriller. Nope. Historical fiction – the kids are going back to school, time to read a good, interesting piece of history.

So, for all my book publishing plans, I have to hit the PAUSE button for a bit and wait for the year to roll around to the right spot.

That’s okay, because I have a lot of work to do in preparing the marketing materials. But who knew there’s a CALENDAR to this stuff?

Well, if you didn’t, now you do. I didn’t, but now I do.

Happy holidays, and put down that book.

Hoisting Anchor, Mate

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. A project gets into your bones and the world just seems to conform around it. Wow, I wish I knew what that meant.

Since last we talked, a multiplicity of whoop-dee-doos have collaborated to turn my life into a whirlwind of chaotic synchronicities. Not sure what that means, either.

First, let’s talk about Disneyland, shall we? I went all by myself (my much better half had to work) and had a terrific time.

The writer’s story in my little adventure is a ride called Rise of the Rebellion.

Before R of the R, my idea of a fantastic ride was Indiana Jones. In that one, you’re strapped into an open SUV sort of vehicle that physically bounces around through an epic assortment of hair-breadth near misses. The SUV lurches and throws you this way and that while simulated darts zip past you and a dragon breathes real fire. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Rise of the Resistance, however, changes the entire narrative of what a theme park ride can be. This ride combines that same physicality with stunning interactive graphics, physical theatrical sets, animatronics, and live actors to actually tell a story.

And not just a story, but one that includes you as a character. You don’t just see the story. You participate in it. The ride takes a full 15 spell-binding minutes to get through.

When it was over, I took myself to the Many Adventures of the Winnie the Pooh to calm myself down. Boy, that worked. Oh bother.

After that, I rode Indiana Jones. The ride’s scenario, for lack of a better word, is told while you’re waiting in the queue. It seems a busload of tourists got lost in the jungle. Your task is to find them.

The ride is still cool, still wild, but felt like a chaotic jumble of action sequences. I was thrown about and entertained, for sure. But you have to make several logic leaps to equate the ride with the scenario. I don’t think we found anyone other than Indiana Jones.

For us writers, the message is clear: stringing scenes and episodes together doesn’t necessarily tell a story. Then again, the story might simply be wild twists and turns, which can certainly be fun all by themselves.

Then came the kid’s birthday, that young man in New Jersey who just turned a year old. A dapper little fellow with 4 teeth and the sparkling command of a language composed of the words “duh,” “oooh,” and “nah-nah.”

My wife and I both want to be the sort of grandparents that are there to take him to soccer practice and give his parents a night out every now and again. Plus, when the kid runs away from home, we’d like him to run to our house.

Well, quite by accident, we stumbled across The House, a sweet little bungalow built in 1936 just a block away from the million-dollar houses that face the Arthur Kill. That’s the kill – okay, fine, the waterway – that separates New Jersey from Staten Island. Yes, THAT Staten Island.

The price is right, but the window of opportunity is very short, like, thirty-or-so days.

You know how it is with your parents’ house – it’s nice but needs a little sprucing up? That’s our house, except we’re sort of in need of an EPIC sprucing up! Roof, flooring, kitchen, paint – I’m sure I’ve left a dozen things out.

But, once we sort all that out, we’ll be hoisting anchor, mate. Bound for the East and truly parts unknown.

That’s one journey.

Another journey is me moving from being a 9-to-5er as I’ve been for the entirety of my working career to a part-time, remote contractor. Ask my wife, she’ll tell you I’m remote already.

BUT, and this is a big but, so to speak, there is one more journey that has already begun: my new book.

I’m using my business partner, a guy to whom I refer as JaPeetey, to help me market my novel Phineas Caswell: The String of Pearls. Here’s the book’s cover:

The cover the soon-to-be-released book Phineas Caswell: The String of Pearls.

I’m still working the details, but you can see what I’m about.

ChatGPT knows how to market indie books like this. Of course it does. It draws on all the successful marketing plans to give you answers. So, I’m using Chat GPT to help me lay out the marketing steps for my book. He’s my buddy, JaPeetey.

I’ve done everything so far to self-publish my books except to do it right. Now, with this move to the hinterlands of the Wild East, I’ll have the time to focus and concentrate and follow JaPeetey’s direction.

It ain’t rocket science. It’s Marketing!

If you’d like to help out and read an advance copy, I’d be delighted to offer you a free final copy in exchange for a review. Just fill out the form below and I’ll send you a PDF right away!

Thank you so much for reading all the way down to this point. It means the world to me.

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On Getting Rich Quick

There is nothing quite so calming as watching Jackie and Shadow, Sunny and Gizmo hanging out in their nest above Big Bear Lake. Mom and Dad, baby and baby bald eagles, quietly living life and doing their thing while thousands of us watch them on a secret camera.

I’m sure the aliens are doing the same to us.

As you know, I’m one for Fred Flintstone, get-rich-quick schemes.

But they can’t be those be-your-own-boss-with-my-proven-system, make-a-million-in-your-spare-time kind of plans. The people that make money off of those plans are the people that sell them.

I did that for a while – trained to be a financial planner. I was broke and unemployed and grasping at straws. Just the guy you want to show you how to manage your finances.

No, it’s gotta be fresh, and it’s gotta be mine, and it’s gotta be foolproof, for I am surely the fool that will louse it up.

There was the sure-fire paper-house-kits-for-model-railroaders business that promised to make a bazillion bucks. It turns out the market for such a product is very, very, very small. Apparently just me.

Way back when, a friend and I branded ourselves The Babble Brothers and sold answering-machine message tapes. They were witty little audio pieces on cassette, skits and songs mostly, for you to record onto your answering machine to charm your callers. We sold about 15 of those. Maybe less. I haven’t seen a cassette player in a long, long time.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know I have a website devoted to describing the outer reaches of our solar system (QueenOfTheKuiperBelt.Wordpress.Com), a DIY website (SkippityWhistles.com), and an aviation museum website (MarvelousAirMuseums.com). Each of these is designed to bring in tons of advertising revenue, the much ballyhooed passive income.

And there’s the secret plan to make 3d videos of little cars driving about for that company that makes little cars. Turns out, to make good 3d models in Blender, you have to be GOOD at Blender. Who knew?

My newest, latest, and perhaps best plan is to make industrial safety videos. There are, like, ten thousand safety managers scouring the Interweb for content for their next safety meetings. Who wouldn’t like a schmaltzy, well written, exquisitely produced video for free? Come on. If that doesn’t build traffic, right? I can make videos like that. Schmaltzy. In Blender.

Oh yeah, Blender.

According to my very smart daughter – the one in the master’s program at a prestigious university – Fred Flintstone is no longer the caveman with the big ideas.

She says it’s Grug Crood.

Grug came up with putting a flat little rock over your eyes – “I call ‘em shades,” and smashing your mud-covered face with a flat rock to make a snapshot. But he was trying to hold his family together, not make a million clams.

Of his moss wig, his son asks “what do you call that?” His mother-in-law answers “I call it desperation.”

No getting rich quick there.

I have so many schemes running, I’m starting to lose track. They’re all supposed to be passive income makers, so I could be a bazillionaire right this very moment and not even know it.

Chances for that seem extremely small. It’s more likely I’ll sell a paper house.

Guess I’ll go back to watching the baby eagles.

Sorry, Grug.

Too Much Free Time

Sometimes free time can be the best of times. Other times, too much free time can trick you into turning out turduckens like this little treasure!

My darling bride remains in NJ, although rumor has it she’s soon to wing her way back to the West, and none too soon, if this video is any gauge of what I’ve been doing in her absence!

What am I doing making videos like this? You tell me, bub, ’cause I ain’t got no idea!

We’re back to Shakespeare’s time, my friend. All the world’s a stage, and we are but mere players upon it.

Instead of displaying my deep dismay over the direction of our democracy, or horrifiedly hollering about the impending Alien Armageddon, I’ve decided to use the soapbox on my busy streetcorner to make a jolly jape, a gentle jest, a minute minute of merriment.

I truly hope you enjoy it, and breathlessly await your feedback!

Okay, so as not to waste this entire opportunity, wouldn’t you know this also a shameless marketing stunt? See, I’m tying my empire together – first WordPress, then YouTube, and even Instagram – bwah-hahahahaha!

Just as soon as someone visits one, I mean ANY, of my sights, I’m in like Flynn, my friend. In it to win it this minute! You gotta risk it for the biscuit!

Gorilla Marketing LIVES!!!

I can’t Afford to Drown

Once upon a time, in what could only have been a former life, I drowned. I don’t think it was this life, because, well…

My wife and I went sailing with my college-graduate daughter today. She teaches at a city-run sailing and kayaking camp and has weekend access to the sailboats they use during the week.

If you know anything about me, you know that I have a great love for the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, Captain Aubrey, and my secret man-crush, Captain Bolitho.

C.S. Forester based his fictional Hornblower on the exploits of Thomas Cochrane and Horatio Nelson. O’Brien uses those same logs, plus others he’s researched, for Captain “Goldilocks” Aubrey. And Alexander Kent, the pen name of the well-established author Douglas Reeman, carried a lot of those same stories forward for Captain Richard Bolitho.

All of these fellows sailed for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, chasing and capturing and sinking French and Spanish ships whenever the plot line needed it.

It’s hard to imagine that strangely elite brutality – packing 700 sailors into a ship of the line, sailing the seas to find a similarly-sized enemy, and then to fire iron balls at it until either he or you could fight no more. Victory is ours! Or theirs…

But, it calls to me. And I’ve written a book called Marigold’s End that predates Napoleon, but features that same kind of brutal combat. I love that book.

If you read it, you will love it, too. Or you might merely like it. Or perhaps even dislike it. Hate it. Loathe it. This isn’t going well.

Anyway, today we took a tiny 14-foot sailboat out into the frothing waves beyond the breakwater. Green waves that blotted out the horizon, lifted us way up so that we could see far down the coast, and then dropped us back into the deep trench again.

My daughter told us that last week one of her 9-year-old campers wasn’t dealing with the rise and fall very well. He leaned over the side for a moment, and then sat back up, much relieved.

“There goes my sausage!” he cheerfully announced.

We felt that the wind had gotten up a bit, so we circled around the 1-mile buoy, and then headed back to port.

I must tell you, I was absolutely panicked. I did my best to hide it, but, in a 14-footer, you are right on the water – like, it’s right there. And those waves were green and huge and omnipresent, and I could feel myself drowning right out there. That boat was surely going to tip over, and I would drown.

She turned the boat so that the waves came under our counter, pushing us back into the safety of the breakwater.

But I was in the water, holding onto a rope slung around the quarter of a large sailing ship, plunging under the wave each time a roller happened by. I can see it this moment. I can feel the cold and the panic and the sense of futility. This moment.

The image stayed with me all the way back to the dock, and rides with me here.

I dusted off my old model of the Black Falcon – oh, no need to be nice. It’s a dreadful model, I know – trying to see if I could shake this drowning feeling. No luck.

Now I know I have to write about it seriously. Deal with the story that’s literally dying to be told. I think I actually drowned while hanging onto that rope.

I’m pretty sure the image pops up in Marigold’s End. Now I have to reread it.

I want to rewrite it, but all rewrite projects are on hold for the next few weeks while I concentrate on selling Sawdust Man.

You see, it occurred to me, and this applies to you, that no one will sell your book for you. You have no representative, no agency, other than yourself.

If you don’t represent your book, it will remain unread. If you don’t sell it, it will never sell, and your story will remain untold.

So, I am actively beating the bushes until I find an agent to represent my current offering, Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

Once that is sold, well, maybe then I can afford to drown.

Fred Flintstone Calling

I’ve got this great idea, see. All’s ya gotsta do is get everybody in Uruguay to visit your site just once – they don’t even need to linger. That’s over 3.4 million views! Man, you are gonna rake in the dough!

So, the deal with Fred Flintstone – if you’re too young to know – was that he was a caveman, see, the head of a modern stone-age family. His wife, Wilma, and his neighbors Betty and Barney Rubble, lived in the town of Bedrock. A town just like yours and mine, except made out of rock.

It was a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series made in the early 1960’s and it was dopey fun.

Fred was every man’s everyman. He was living the caveman equivalent of the American Dream – good job, house in the ‘burbs, picket fence, nice ped-powered car.

A regular Joe, except that he had a penchant for making outlandish, foolproof plans to make a million clams. He was gonna quit the quarry and live the life of a millionaire, just as soon as his ship sailed.

“Barney boy, by this time tomorrow, we are gonna be livin’ like kings!”

Of course he never quite succeeded – Dino the dinosaur dog ate the proceeds, it turned out the ptero-chickens were all ptero-roosters, Ann Margarock had to be in Rock Vegas on the night of the big event, etc.

At the end of every episode, there was Wilma, reminding him that he already had everything he needed right there in his little family. And he always sheepishly admitted she was right. “Wilma, you are the greatest…”

If you’re reading this, and I imagine you are, you probably have an inner Fred Flintstone yourself.

You’re thinking there’s always a chance, a long shot maybe, but a chance that this one, this stupid crazy-ass scheme, this could be the one. One in a million chance, but, hey, somebody’s gonna make it… Ten bazillion books get published and read every year, why not mine?

So, I recently gave up on my inner Fred. I was a little depressed, maybe. A little tired. I dunno.

I decided that this is the dish, this life o’ mine: this is my someday. Someday I’ll have a nice house in the ‘burbs and a pretty wife and 2.5 kids and a good job with a decent salary. Hey, I have all of that, so this must be it.

All righty, then, Fred. It’s been fun. Good luck with your crazy schemes. I’m hanging up the bronto-phone now – I gotta go mow the lawn.

So, I go and tell my wife, the very love of my life, that I’m hanging up my bronto-spurs, and quote that line from All Things Great and Small where Herriot tells a fellow that someday he’ll be a millionaire, and the fellow replies with “Nah, it’s not in the cards. Was I to be a millionaire, well, I’d be one already, don’t you see?”

My darling wife replies “well, let’s not be too hasty about that.”

Whoa, whoa, hold on, there. That’s a Fred Flintstone line, not a Wilma line! YOU can’t say I’m gonna make a million clams, because YOU’RE the voice of REASON!

Like a bolt out of the blue, I was gobsmacked, thunderstruck, and over the moon in a tizzy of heaven for-fend, she, she, she believes in my crazy schemes!

To quote Goofy, “gorshk.”

So, I’m opening everything back up – Skippity Whistles, California Air Museums, even hauling The Book in for a rewrite.

Do I have a plan?

Heck no! I’m making it up as I go! Never quote me the odds!

My wonderful wife, she, she believes in me!

Wilma: “Oh, Fred.” (Sighs and exits)

Episode 5 – Never Quote Me the Odds

Never Quote Me the Odds

So, I was shooting the breeze with this guy over the weekend… actually, he wasn’t just some guy, he’s a decorated test pilot, hero, and author, and I didn’t just shoot the breeze. It was an in-depth interview. Man, you can’t believe anything you read these days!

One of the best parts about being the author of California Air Museums, as well as being the host… just a quick stop here to point out to you marketers that, son a biscuit, that’s a nice link right there, right? See? Cross-platforms. It’s the way to go! Okay. Moving on… is that you get to visit some great museums, and meet some sincerely fascinating people.

George J. Marrett is the historian at the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles, CA. An amazing individual, he worked for Howard Hughes, has written at least half a dozen books, has test-flown nearly every jet the United States produced since World War II, flew death-defying rescue missions in Vietnam, is building homeless shelters in Paso Robles, and happens to be just about the nicest guy you’re ever going to meet.

My wife and I spent a nice trio of hours talking with him about the museum, about Howard Hughes, and about the many aircraft he’d test-flown. The man is remarkably sharp, and, at 88, still flies. He said he’d keep flying until nobody wanted to fly with him anymore.

So many of the stories he told stuck with me, but there was one in particular that I’m still pondering.

During the Vietnam war, he flew fourth position in a flight of four A-1E Skyraiders – big, propellor-driven fighter planes produced right after the end of World War II. They were slow compared to the jet fighters, but they were robust, and they carried lots of weapons.

His job, along with the other three Skyraiders, was to clear the jungle around a downed American pilot by firing at the Viet Cong soldiers intent on making a capture, so that the Huey helicopters could come in rescue him. The big fighter planes would lumber over the jungle, firing a spray of machine gun bullets at anything that moved towards the downed pilot.

The Viet Cong often fought back. In one flight, George watched the plane in front of him get hit, watched the pilot parachute away, and then actually watched the plane spiral down to crash among the trees.

“It was an amazing sight,” he grinned. He had accidently applied his own air brakes, and was flying too slow to be safe. But it gave him time to watch the crash.

When he returned to base, his crew chief, the guy who takes care of the plane when it’s on the ground, told him he’d been hit.

“You got a couple of bullet holes in the wheel well,” the chief said. “You wanna see ’em?”

George thought about it for a moment, and then said “No. Don’t even tell me that.”

Focus on the success, right? Let’s not recount how close we almost got to failure. His first book, the one about those rescue missions, is called Cheating Death.

That’s a profound way to look at high-risk tasks, isn’t it?

I’m always, like, whoa, I almost crashed right then. Wow, I almost messed that up.

It reminds of the Star Wars line when C-3PO starts to tell Han Solo his chances of success…

“Never quote me the odds!”

So, how does this apply to us writers?

Well, the chances of your book getting picked up, or your article selling, or somebody reading your blog, are pretty much one in a…

Never quote me the odds.

Focus on where you’re going, not where you’ve been. I know George may have meant something far more profound that this, but we always apply the things we hear to ourselves, right?

So, when you’re submitting your book or your screenplay, or that magazine article, or whatever it is, and you hear that voice that starts to doubt the odds of your success, now you have an answer.

“Don’t tell me that. Never quote me the odds.”

You can learn more about the amazing George J. Marrett on Wikipedia and his many books on Amazon.

Happy flying.

It’s Published!

What’s published, you ask? And by whom? Why, it, and by me!

So, I’ve been slogging through the demeaning task of writing query letters to literary agents. OMG, that IS a slog!

Acquiring a literary agent is a sisyphean task on a good day.

Okay, I had to go look up sisyphean because I’ve only ever heard it said. Sisyphus got condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, see, only to have it come tumbling back down, each and every day for all of eternity. One assumes getting it up the hill was a somewhat arduous task, sooooo…

Here’s a good literary put down:

Knock, knock

Who’s there?

To who?

It’s to whom, actually

None of this is the point! Here’s the point:

My newest novel, The Adventures of a Sawdust Man, is PUBLISHED!!!

Yes, I published it myself. No, it’s not Random House, or Penguin, or Disney.

Yet.

I’ve already sold three copies – and it’s only been up for two days. If you do the math… lemme see, carry the one… uh huh, yep. By my calculations, at this rate, I’ll have sold at least two dozen by the end of the year!

But of course, it’s not about making money.

Yet.

The thing is, even as I was writing those insipid query letters, I could see that no agent would touch my book.

It’s a fairy tale without any fairies. It’s a romance without any love scenes. It’s a tale of unrequited love that never quite gets resolved.

Who wants to publish that?

So, for my book to see the light of day, for it to get discovered as a valuable piece of the Canon of human literature, I had to publish it myself.

And I am so excited to share it with you! Here’s the link. Don’t pay the five bucks – set the price to $0 and have at it. And lemme know whatcha think!

Another reason that I’ve published the book is because I seem to have gone mad over the sound of my own voice, and my best friend and darling wife have both suggested it would make a good audio book.

Can you spell Podcast?

Thank you for traveling along with me on this wild adventure. Maybe, by publishing my work, you might be encouraged to publish yours? I truly hope so.

I wish you every success!

On Ruins and Wreckage

I’m sitting in my kitchen on a terribly uncomfortable chair. We replaced the frumpy chair pads with nifty red ones for Christmas. Alas, the holiday ended, and the pads are packed away. O, how I long for those frumpy chair pads…

I hope your holiday was glorious and that your new year holds nothing but grand promise.

My holiday ended finally just this last weekend, with the return of my daughter’s stuff to her college dorm. She’s officially ensconced in her small liberal arts school in what is right now the frigid wasteland of Central Oregon.

Oh come now, a frigid wasteland? you say with that subtle tone of parental correction, surely it cannot be as bad as that.

Listen, mister, or sister, I know what I know, and saw what I saw, see?

Actually, the ice storm was really quite beautiful, the trees, the fences, even the blades of grass perfectly outlined in ice.

We were stopped long enough on the freeway that I got to mess around with the quarter-inch thick sheet of ice on the K-rail divider. What was so amazing to me was that the vertical surfaces were just as coated as the flats and tops. How could this be?

My fingers are still cold.

We met some lovely people while stranded in Grant’s Pass – a guy from Hawaii and a girl from Denver, both of whom used to be in the oil business, but who now run a farm and sell pies. A guy from Baltimore who works at one of only four biodynamic wineries in the whole world.

Wait, where’s the writer’s story in this, you ask with that tone that really moans are you ever going to land this plane?

Okay, okay, okay, here we go…

Because of that mega ice storm that laid flat Central Oregon, why, I haven’t scheduled a fourth shoot for the California Air Museums project.

…crickets…

Yeah, see, we were both so wiped out from battling the ice storm (oh please, you moan) that I haven’t even turned on my computer since getting home Monday night.

…crickets…

And I haven’t put out a single query letter on my novel this entire year!

…yawns…

Well, there it is, isn’t it?

Central Oregon in ruins, my hosting career at a standstill, my novel in the dumpster.

…sad violin music…

Marketing-wise, I did plant a link to the California Air Museums site in this post. That’s pretty cool.

And, like my mom used to say, “Life ain’t beer and skittles, you know.”

Although I still don’t know what that means, let us remind ourselves that out of calamity comes creativity, out of ruin comes rebirth, and it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Or until the fat lady sings, although I don’t quite get that one, either…