Resident Explainer
Nothing says nautical mayhem like the word “avast,” doncha think?
Right out of the box you know the words that follow are coming from some seafaring devil, a maritime monster, a nautical ne’er do well. This is because good guy pirates and Navy types don’t use the word.
Continue reading “Avast, Ye Readers!”You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You think up an idea, you jot some notes, you toss it into a drawer somewhere…a drawer labeled whenever. If you’re like me, things go into the drawer, but never seem to come back out.
I have a huge, mondo-sized, drawer overflowing with ideas, all labeled “whenever.”
Continue reading “No Step, No Journey”This is a very simple post. Not because we are simple people, my writer friend (although there is an argument in my household about my side of that equation), but because what you and I do is NOT simple. Not by any stretch of the imagination. As they say in France, it’s very difficult.
Continue reading “No Errands for Fools”Remember when you were a kid, and you had to do chin-ups at school? OMG, that was the worst thing ever! I always cheated and took a little jump up, so I always got a count of at least one. That second one was murder. And the third? Forget it. Same with push-ups. To this day, when I think of push-ups, I see the unmoving gym floor swim before my eyes…
And so it is with marketing your own novel, as I am marketing mine. Which novel(s) do we speak of? Why, Droppington Place and Marigold’s End, of course. You’re a writer. You know how it goes.
Marketing is all about getting people to pay attention to you. You could make YouTube videos – tried that. You could make your own website – mine is right here: PhineasCaswell.com. You could make podcasts or something.
Whatever you do, you have to somehow drive traffic to it. That’s the key, the thing, the line over which you must cross to become the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.
So, I’ve been posting oodles of posts about the famous pirate Blackbeard on my site (see the shameless marketing plug above). In particular, I’ve focused on his most notorious ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge. Beyond that cool name, there’s just not much information available about her, which I take as a personal challenge. Why?
Okay, sit down – you’re not gonna believe this. My next novel deeply involves Blackbeard. Whoa! Huh? Did not see that coming, right? Blackbeard was born in 1680. My character Phineas Caswell, hero of Marigold’s End, a Phineas Caswell Adventure, was born in 1694. Both were sailing around the Caribbean at the same time, 1706… See? Those gears are a’turnin’,right? Blackbeard was 26 – in command of privateers or something, right? And Phineas… well, I leave it to your imagination to link those guys together. Or, actually, to MY imagination…
Anyway, I just ran a Google search on the phrase Queen Anne’s Revenge. My website didn’t show up on the first page, or the third, or the seventh. I gave up on Page 15, certain that I’m just not out there in the world. In fact, my site would appear, if I could find it, after “great snacks for the kiddos” and “cool dog names.”
Sigh.
Just like in middle school, in gym class, it’s all a question of keeping one’s chin up. Someday. Someday I’ll cross some magical line and come up on the first page of a Google search. And then the angels will sing, and the heavens will open up, and somebody will click through, visit my site, and buy my books.
Or, I could win the Powerball. The odds seem to be about the same.
You’re a writer, you know how it is. You write your book. You push it to agents. Nobody wants to represent it because, well, maybe it’s not that good of a book. Maybe it IS good, but not marketable. That’s what Disney told me.
I had an agent tell me “you should publish this yourself.”
Did so. Well, published this book instead: Droppington Place. But then I sat down and rewrote the book in question, which I have yet to push out to the agently world. That book is this book: Marigold’s End.
Boom – did you see how I did that, there? You notice that here, in the top quarter of my post, I’ve already pitched two products. Boom. Huh? You, my friend, have already been marketed to. Zimzam, what was that? What did it take?
That’s Gorilla Marketing at its best.
Okay, so, contrary to the Gorilla Marketing tenet of “do no work,” I did a little bit of work, and now have something to show you: PhineasCaswell.com.
“Wha… what’s happening?” you exclaim, your mind a whirl of sudden marketing impact. Boom, two books, zimzam, a website, just like that. Whoa. Sit down, my friend, lest you explode or something.
All right, all seriousness aside, if you have a minute, click on the PhineasCaswell.com link – there it is again. Open it in a new window so that you don’t miss any of my glorious words here.
Why is this a big deal? Because, if you publish your own book, you are responsible for marketing it. You need a website to give yourself some bottom – make yourself available for your readers. And, unless you yourself are a web designer, this can be a challenge.
I gave up trying to be a web designer as well as a marketer, an author, a technical writer/illustrator, a videographer, all in addition to being a loving husband and father.
First was Open Element, which gives you free, open-source web design software, with templates that seem to be “responsive” – you know, works well on cell phones as well as desktops. But the software is so so so so so very hard to navigate, and the stuff it seems like you really need? Well, that’s in French, you see…
Next came, Serif, a British company that makes a terrific web design suite. It’s quite inexpensive, but not yet quite up to the challenge of responsive web design.
Then came Google Web Design, which worked for a minute, but I couldn’t figure out the language to navigate their templates… OMG, my website looked ghastly! Like a commercial for Google!
However, GoDaddy, who carries my hosting, has a nifty WordPress plug-in. As above, boom, zimzam, etc, now PhineasCaswell.com is a nice, responsive website, looking equally cool on desktops, tablets and phones (marketers take note: that was yet another link).
Brag about the site though I should, I’m passing on to you, my valued reader, that WordPress seems to be really good at making a responsive website. That means that you don’t have to be.
One little nasty surprise does seem to come with a WordPress plug-in: the SSL certificate. If you haven’t got one of these, your WordPress site actually scares viewers away with a big warning that your site is not safe. I paid $75 to get my certificate. If you don’t pay the $75, you appear to the world as a creepy underworld scum, out to steal passwords. Seems as if there’s a piratical side to fighting pirates that just might be worse…
But you, my marketing self-publishing writer friend, that’s the big news for you, should you be looking for an easy way to build a backend for your authorial effort.
To those who were paying attention, I dropped Phineas Caswell as my nom de plume, and have published both novels under my own name. Not such a big deal for you, but a whopper for me!
You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You settle on a project, or maybe two, and you burn the midnight candle until it’s just a smoldering stub, and you tell everybody what your project is and how it’s your end-all-be-all raison d’etre and stuff…
But it isn’t. You fight the words and wrangle them into place. You beat yourself silly trying to find that structure, that style that sets you apart.You work until your mind bleeds to find the description that’s never been made.
But it doesn’t come.
It’s all the same hack.
I know. I’ve been hacking at the same project for, like, ever…
What to do, oh what to do.
Here’s something terrible that I shouldn’t tell you, but maybe you’ll see it.
I invented a producer, my writing boss. I gave her, (she’s a she) the complete and total task of managing my writing.
With Sydney (her name’s Sydney) in charge, I can mentally offload the task of managing my production to her. It sounds crazy, and I’m certain that is, but it has made my writing much easier.
Sydney’s a breeze to work for, because she doesn’t really exist, which means she hardly ever yells at me!
Yes, it’s nice to have a boss in the writing biz, even though, and I know you’ll agree, it’s crazier than a bag of wieners.
Now I just have to figure out to hit her up for a raise!
Responsive websites? I always thought your website was responsive if you just answered your emails.
You’re a writer – you know how it is. You toil and slave over your book, you publish it yourself, you get your website, your Facebook page, your logo… and then, who knew, it’s useless if your website isn’t responsive. Useless. Who knew?
While, the standard, desktop, not-so-responsive website still has value if you’re a corporation that sells oodles of things that deserve their own big pictures and stuff, the little screen, however, is clearly the road ahead.
So, what does it mean to “go responsive?” It simply means that you scale your website to look good on mobile devices. That’s it.
Sort of. Once you scale your whole website down to that itty-bitty size, you realize that your whole outlook about your website changes. Gone are the stacked images, the carefully layered pages that had a certain snap to them. Gone are the cool, zoomy galleries of your favorite pictures.
Those big, splashy pages have been replaced with simple, easy-to-read, direct-to-the-point, cell-phone sized articles and galleries and images.
It’s great news if you’re a writer, which you are. All you have to do is write! You don’t have to be a web designer? You just write – that’s really what you and I do best anyway!
PhineasCaswell.com has been a desktop site for quite a while. I built it with Open Element software – free!!! But, Open Element doesn’t support responsive websites yet. Rats.
For around $30 USD, I found Serif’s WebPlus – I’m running x7, whatever that means. It has a set of really simple templates for making a responsive website. It was seriously easy to make the conversion.
I’m trying to sell my novel, Droppington Place. It’s aimed at the young adult market, which is comprised mainly of mobile device users. Market? Meet website. Website. Market.
As you know, I’m a big proponent of Gorilla Marketing – do nothing and hope for the best. I did a little something by going responsive, and now I don’t have to do anything else. My site is ready for the world to beat a path to my door.
Ah, success.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my other Gorilla Marketing project – you’ll like this. It’s called Soon to be a Major Motion Picture. All you have to do is download Droppington Place – do it for free, if you’d like. Encourage your friends to do the same. If your friends tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell…you get the idea… why, we’ll be way over a gazillion reads, which is more than enough for any savvy movie studio or book publisher to jump on the bandwagon and make Droppington Place into a major motion picture. Brilliant!
So, download Droppington Place, and go tell all your friends.
This is gonna be great!
If you’re sick, don’t read this post. There’s a stupid wordplay about viruses that is, well, so bad that we’re just going to skip it.
When you have just under two minutes free, watch this video: Build the San Salvador 4. How about now?
You know how people eat up those “dude, you had one job” videos? That was the thinking behind this little gem. Have to tell you, it still cracks me up, and I had a hand in making it.
So, why make a movie – especially one as dumb as this?
Three little words, my friend. No, not I love you. Or hands up, suckah. No, no, no… and no, not no, no, no either. Magic, she gasped. Ah, yes, our mantra/manta/bantha.
It’s a tight circle, my friend, this marketing thing. At the end of the video, which is calculated to be just funny enough to appeal to a certain age – the very age I’m hoping will read Droppington Place – is my new little logo, and the whispered word “magic.”
So you, you’re so fascinated by the video, you type in PhineasCaswell.Com, just like you see it in the image at the end of the hilarious video, and there is a link to Droppington Place. You click on the link – blink – why, here’s a nifty book for you to read!
Like a spider’s web, one slimy tendril at a time, you have no choice but to be roped into reading at least the free sample. Bwahahahahahaha.
It didn’t take a great deal of effort to make the motion picture. Sort of like, really? And all this linking is sort of sleep-inducing. And, at the end of the day, YOU have to do all the clicking and reading and stuff.
NOW you can see how Gorilla Marketing works… or doesn’t work, because I’m not doing much work… oy, this get’s confusing.
So, click on the link (HERE it is again in case you can’t find it up there), and repeat after me:
“Magic,” she gasped.
If you’d like to read all of Droppington Place for free, go HERE, and tell ’em you’re not paying a dime today, thank you. Boom. Freebie!
“Magic,” she gasped.
Say it again: “Magic,” she gasped.
Tell your friends to say it: “Magic,” she gasped.
It’s a mantra, unless that’s the bat-shaped fish. Whisper it in your sleep.
“Magic,” she gasped.
What is it? What does it mean? Why should you care?
What makes a Subaru a Subaru? Actually, Subaru puts a comma in their statement – a comma with which I have never agreed. Love, it’s what makes a Subaru, a Subaru. What does that second comma do? It makes a clause out of “it’s what makes a Subaru,” which isn’t a clause at all. It equally makes a clause out of “Love a Subaru,” which is a clause, but is so widely separated by the non-clause that you have to remove the non-clause to see it, by which time you’ve simply beaten the whole darned thing to death…and doesn’t make me what to buy the car because they have trouble with punctuation.
“Magic,” she gasped. It’s a mantra, or manta. Or Banta if you’re into Star Wars.
I was trying to come up with a way to sell my book, and the only catchphrase I could think of was “buy my book.”
Hmmm, lacks a little something.
Hailey, one of the characters in my novel, Droppington Place, has a fascination with magic – just to point out that there, right in that sentence, is the proper use of commas to separate a clause – which causes her to utter the mantra/manta/banta phrase. Several times throughout the story she gasps the word “magic,” in what I sincerely hope is a running joke.
So, you see, sometimes your characters can give you a hint on what’s special in your work.
But, here’s the dealio, the thing, the bomb, the cat’s pajamas: What happens if you Google search “murder, she gasped”? Well, probably nothing yet, because I just loaded the tags.
But eventually, my impatient friend, you’ll go to either Phineas Caswell’s home page at PhineasCaswell.com, or to his Smashwords Droppington Place page.
If you simply Google Phineas Caswell, whose name appears beneath the logo, brings you all manner of Droppington Placey options.
Is this marketing genius? Does Procter and Gamble sell soap?
Or is it simply some degree of self-delusion that I’m making progress in marketing my book? Self-delusional like a fox!!!
Already, the pieces are falling into place…bwahahahahah.
You, because you’re a friend, can actually skip all the marketing hype and get Droppington Place by simply clicking HERE. When you get there, type in this Coupon Code: NJ38D, and you can get the book for free!!!
Why, that seems almost like…
“Magic,” she gasped.
Let’s be clear: I don’t like castanets. Those clickity-clackety chips of annoyance can only be played by Spanish ladies with fingers like hummingbirds. I can play a bunch of things: flute, guitar, piano, Pandora – but, those nasty little wooden clackers of doom must be powered by voodoo or something. Hate ‘em. Even that clattery little noise they make sets my nerves on edge… sounds like somebody playing a skeleton. However, they do pave the way for a lame pun. If you know me, you know I love those.
Anybody’ll tell you that it never all comes in one package. Instead of wishing for a ship to come in, wish for a procession of small boats… a flotilla of good-news-bearing yachts.
If a ship comes in, that’s only because you won the lotto, or Raspy Crackers won the third race at Del Mar. It doesn’t happen. If you think that your ship’s gonna come in… well, my friend, I hope it does.
In marketing, you don’t want your ship to come in. Stay out there, my seafaring friend, cruise around, spread the word.
Think of all the one-hit-wonders you’ve ever heard of – folks who made a killer splash all at once, but then were gone. Pet rocks. A dozen rock ’n’ roll bands that you can’t even name, but their song was pretty cool.
One ship. One big hit. A ton of cash today, but, tomorrow?
The fisherman that drops the hook is planning on bringing in a big fish. I’m gonna make a killer pile of dough on this baby. If the fish goes vegan, or saw what happened to cousin Wally in these very waters just yesterday, the line comes up empty.
The fisherman with the nets routinely feeds his family because he brings in many small fish over time. His plan is to score many, many small hits. The aggregate effect is the same, if not better, than his single-hit brother. Sure, the brother makes the occasional big buck, and laughs at the net-gathering sibling. But the folks at the bank smile at net boy, because he is constantly in there, making his deposits.
It’s not unknown for a tuna to wander into a small fishing net. At first the fisherman thinks it’s the score of a lifetime…we’ll eat for a year! But then the reality sets in: the net is torn, and the ability to gather tiny fish is lost.
You’ve read about those companies that make a nifty niche product, and one day find themselves approached by the likes of Costco or Walmart. Their production model changes, their business model changes, their focus changes, as they ramp up to meet the incredible demand of the super retailers. The dollars are nearly huge – our ship came in!
But next year, the big retailers turn away to another supplier, and the customer base, the loyalty, the little fish, are gone. Filing for Chapter 11 is seldom pleasant.
Your marketing, then, might do well if you consider casting nets… oh, there it is: castanets! My humble apologies.
In the writing business… that is, the business end of the writer’s business, although the writer’s business isn’t business at all, but art – this gets so confusing – not the business of writing art, the business of selling the art, which is a business unto itself, but we’re not talking about that. Actually we are, sort of… you’re a writer, you know how it is…
Restart.
If you are a writer, and you don’t have an agent, you need one. Yes, you can self-publish your novel, but who is going to sell your book for you? You? You’re a writer. You need an agent.
Finding an agent, well that’s the business end of writing. But agents don’t seem to drop out of trees, even if you’re absolutely, fantastically talented. I know this from personal experience. That dog don’t hunt. That ship has sailed. You can’t handle the truth.
So, you advertise, in a million different ways. You blog. You join writer’s circles and clubs and chats, and comment your brains out on other people’s stuff. You work like a monkey to get your name at the top of an agent’s mystical list, the agent’s short list, the who’s who of writers in the agent’s Rolodex. Rolodex – boy, that’s a piece of history, huh? Raise your hand if you know what a Rolodex is… uh huh, as I thought. Paltry, paltry.
At the end of the day, you have to face it: you’re marketing – advertising – in the hopes of getting an agent to look at you and say “wow, now THERE’s a talent!”
In the world of Gorilla Marketing, all this effort, all this subtle, almost not work at all, is aimed at just one person. Millions of readers, or in my case, half-dozens of readers, see your blog and comments, read your name… and move on to something else.
It’s like being a daisy in the middle of the tall grass – oh please, Ms. Cow, pick me, pick me! You stand up tall, doing your flowery best to grab a little bit of bovine attention… oh, puleeze…. Of course, nobody wins in the cow analogy. Literary agents are insulted, and you get eaten if you win. But, you get the point.
The point is that if Toyota gets you to run down to your local dealership and buy a car because you saw a good ad on TV, it doesn’t matter if they wasted the time of 30 million other viewers, so long as you buy the car. No, you don’t suffer from incontinence, but some poor sap does, and those commercials might just be the ticket… say, I didn’t know they made underpants like that!
The point is this: you market your keester off, in the hope that one, just one, single set of eyeballs, sees your stuff and says a quiet “bingo.” And when that one sees your stuff and mutters and magic phrase, all your Gorilla Marketing effort pays off, and the future is yours to pave.
Well, here’s to you, my marketing friend. May you hear a whispered “bingo” soon!
Now, if you’re an agent, you can find the first two chapters of my book here: PhineasCaswell.com.
Thank you.
If you’ve read earlier posts here, you’ll know I’m developing a theory called “gorilla marketing.”
It’s really quite simple: you don’t do anything, and people beat a path to your door. Usually they bring loads of cash, and things turn out great.
Well, you don’t do nothing, actually. You do some stuff – you know, little marketing things that get people reading you and believing in you and eventually giving you the oodles of cash.
So, here, without any ballyhoo or marketing phrasing, is my pitch: the second chapter of my novel, Droppington Place, is posted on the web, here. It’s totally free.
Read it now, as the price is sure to go up.
Take out your marketing pencils, kids, and let’s just do a little analysis.
Interesting proposal – check.
Product offering – check.
Call to action – check.
Free offer – check.
Dude, it’s all there, and we haven’t really done any work. See how easy this was?
Now, for you to do your part. This involves oodles of cash, so you might want to take some notes…
Just to recap: Chapter 2 of Droppington Place is now ready to read, and you got a nice, healthy sampling of Gorilla Marketing in action.
Wow. What a great day!
Pass me a banana, would you?
Well, my friend, we’ve sailed over the horizon, haven’t we? I mean you, and me, and my novel, MARIGOLD’S END, the final chapter of which is now posted on this site, right here.
Yes, the final chapter, the au reservoir to our friend Phineas, and the Kathryn B, and all those cool nautical cats. If you’ve been keeping up, and I know you have, you’ll know we left young Phineas leaping for his life from a stricken ship, the crack of a pistol ringing out behind him. This book literally ends with a bang.
If you been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that this book writing business is a twofold affair: there’s the art of writing the book, and the science of getting someone to buy it. That’s probably art, too, because, in science, you’re supposed to be able to repeat experiments and get the same results. Good luck with that in marketing!
So, you ask, what’s next?
Well, I can tell you that gorilla marketing, for all its flashy allure and exciting verbiage, is a rather slow-and-go proposition, with lots of slow and very little of anything else. The line of people lined up around the block to read my book is sort of a line of one, and my feet are complaining about standing here.
In Field of Dreams the guy says “if you build it, they will come,” which is very catchy and enigmatic. He left out the time component: they will come tomorrow, or next week, or when the moon shines bright on my old Kentucky home. Or, and this is the one we all dread, they will come one at a time, quietly, unannounced, and go away. I’m a major sucker for jingoism, but I might just have to let this one go.
If you build it, and your work your keester off to grab their attention and you give them something in return for their visit, then they will come. Writing your book and telling the world about your book isn’t enough.
You got to get up every morning with a smile on your face and BELLOW to the world about your book. If you’re a good bellower, you can convince the world to bellow on your behalf, but you have to be bellower number 1.
I’m bellowing over here, with yet another of my sneaky, hey, are you trying to confuse me?, get-rich-quick, zero effort marketing schemes. It’s a site called Phineas Caswell.com – and has an interesting premise: Phineas Caswell is the author. Well, interesting to me, perhaps. You’re a writer, you now how it goes.
What if there was this curious site to which the curious reader could travel?
I agree, the site is snoresville today, but it will change, my friend. Ohhhh, yessss, changes, they are a comin’.
So, to accommodate the change in authorship, Phineas Caswell, the nautical hero in MARIGOLD’S END, has generously agreed to change his name to Benjamin Dilbeck. Not Ben, not Benny, Benjamin. Whaaaat? You cry, aghast. Trust me, Obi Wan, you’re the only one who can… it will work.
Say, this is quite the post, eh what? A chapter released over here, a new website over there… goodness, will it ever end?
If you’ve been reading the chapters of my book, MARIGOLD’S END, you’d know that I’m releasing it one chapter at a time onto this site. You could figure it out by reading my posts, of course, including this one, but I’m trying to make you thing “dude, I should be reading that book instead of playing Candy Crush Saga.”
Not that I have anything against Candy Crush Saga – in fact, I’ve given up all on-phone video games for Lent – or your reading habits. None of my business. Nope. Nosiree Bob.
So, there it is. Where is this going, you wonder. And well you should, for I do, too.
Here’s where: Chapter 5 is now on the site. My boy Phineas, 12 years old in 1706, is taken to sea against his will by his seafaring Uncle Neville. He’s had a narrow escape with murder (committing it), nearly been drowned, suffered through near-terminal seasickness, and now has learned about the superstition surrounding a “Jonah.” Ah, but the deep blue sea holds more adventure for our young man – he’s about to meet Taylor, a slightly older, terribly well educated sprout of a fellow, and Louise, the granddaughter of the King of France.
If you aren’t reading along, you’re missing out.
And don’t be expecting me to come on here and tell you the whole darned story – not going to happen, mate. Nope. There’s a big ending, but I can only hint about that.
Here’s the hint: it’s big. Another hint: it’s at the end.
You’re a writer. You know how it goes. The world doesn’t necessarily come looking for your book. You have to coax it, wheedle a little here and there, to generate interest and talk. Buzz. You gotta build the buzz. Sounds like a bumper sticker.
Your publicity should be gentle, but persistent. Nobody likes a showoff, and most people don’t appreciate self-aggrandizing fanfare. So you have to be nice, and, like me, terrifically humble. Okay, brilliant is in there, too. Did I mention brilliant?
You don’t have to read my chapter, but take a page from this forum (as you know, only the humbly brilliant refer to their soapboxes as forums) and think about being nicely, humbly persistent in publicizing your work.
Notice that the word ‘marketing’ hasn’t shown up anywhere in this…oops, there it is… because you and I, we no longer market our work. We publicize it.
Good luck in your publicizing efforts, enjoy the chapter, and be nice.
First, let me thank you for reading this.
I know, that seems like a really cheesy ploy to get you to read on, because now you’re guilted into it. And it would be (I wish I’d thought of it first), except that I really mean it: thank you. Now, is this “thank you” sincere, or an even cheesier ploy to guilt you into reading this post, which is really insidious (I don’t suppose it’s true that farmers live in the country, city folk live insidious. Equally not so is it that mackerels are facetious).
Sadly, this is a sincere thank you for an interest in my post. Without you, well, all my work comes to naught. So, once more, thank you.
Okay, so, now for the gorilla marketing part – are you ready? Gorilla marketing: do very little, expect very much. Make somebody else do the work. And today, YOU are that somebody else!
Chapter 4 of my novel, MARIGOLD’S END, is now on this site. Yes! Can you believe it?
Now, don’t click over there and start reading it yet…hey, you! Click back over here!
See, here’s where you do the work and I reap the marketing rewards. You read the chapter, and its predecessors, and realize that you really like this story. “Heavens,” you say to yourself, “I wonder where it will go next?”
Got that? Write it down if you have to.
Then, and this is the tricky part, you tell all your friends about how great this book is. See? I haven’t done a thing, but now MARIGOLD’S END is practically a household name in your social circle.
Ook. Ook. Pass me a banana. I’ll be lounging in the hammock if anybody needs me.
All seriousness aside, thank you for reading.
Oook.
You just gotta love a sequel, huh? What better way to follow up a mega blockbuster hit than with another blockbuster? Boom, looka that, folks, something even better!
Well, in the spirit of gorilla marketing, I’ll go you one better than a sequel.
Howzabout this; Chapter 2 of DROPPINGTON PLACE? Oh, yeah, uh-huh, fist-bumps all ‘round.
Wha-aa-aat? Sonny Jim, you’re just plain givin’ away the whole dignity-danged store!
No I aint, Pa. I swear it. It’s a new market thing program about monkeys. All the cool folks ‘r doing it.
In today’s hurly-burly, gotta-make-a-buck world, you have to stand out of the crowd. You have to be the one. The one. You. If you don’t, the world will run right over you.
Think about this Internet. Right this instant, you can look up, like, a gazillion books for free. Books on just about anything, and fiction, and graphic novels, and whatever you want.
When you put your hard-earned words into that maelstrom, unless you just happen to be a Hemingway, or a Rowling, or a King, or another author more current whose name I should know but don’t because I’m actually an uncultured boob, you get lost in that rush of online pieces, just another salmon in the dash upstream.
So, you have to stand out. You have to be different. You have to be the one sought out by your readers.
Enter the gorilla wearing a tie.
GO: “I say, old bean, why not publish your work in a blog first, eh?”
JR: “But, jeepers, Mr. Rilla…”
GO: “Go, please.”
JR: “Oh, okay. Goodbye.”
GO: “No, don’t leave, you ninny. Simply call me Go. No need to be formal.”
JR: “Oh. Anyway, Go, nobody reads my blog.”
GO: “Surely someone does.”
JR: “Well, I guess there are quite a few…”
GO: “There you are. Publish your book, one chapter at a time, to your readers. They’ll read it, talk amongst themselves, and before long, why, they’ll be clamoring to… “
JR: “To buy my books?”
GO: “No, to have you hanged. I’ve read your stuff. You should be ashamed.”
So, in the spirit of Go Rilla, the marketing monkey…
GO: “Ape, if you please. Great ape, in fact.”
DROPPINGTON PLACE, Chapter 2, is now released on my Droppington Place blog, here. You can also follow the link at the bottom of this page to the Droppington Place site.
Enjoy!
Are you ready for the next installment of MARIGOLD’S END? I’ll bet you are – you there, my writer friend, sitting on the edge of your seat wondering, wondering, wondering whatever happens to Phineas next.
At least, I hope it’s you. Nobody else in the room, that I can see. Yep. It’s you. Try to form a line there, would you please? A line of one rather resembles a dot, doesn’t it? Well, please form an orderly dot.
Writing is a lonely business. Your garret, or office, or room, or swimming pool deck, wherever you do your writing, fills up with characters, talking, laughing, fighting, sleeping, doing whatever it is that they do. Then you turn off the word processor, and, voila, it is only you.
No one is very much interested in you while you write, because, frankly, you are uninteresting when you write. Not as a person, mind you, but as company, because you’re in the room filled with all those interesting characters. The real people around you just sort of hang in limbo until you snap off the word processor. Oh, THERE you are!
So you, my dotted friend – dotted by virtue of being a line of one – are the witness to the publicity and hoorah surrounding the release of Chapter 4. Hoorah!
Chapter 4 introduces us to the life of a sailor. Chapter 1 introduced us to Phineas, Chapter 2 to the perils of traveling by boat in the early 1700’s, and Chapter 3 to the indescribable job of seasickness. Now we’re past all that and exploring the Kathryn B, and what it means to be a sailor.
In MARIGOLD’S END, you learn about the new world into which Phineas is thrust only through his eyes – a challenge to write, but hopefully not to read. Like you, Phineas’ learning comes through total immersion. It be sink or swim in the briny deep. You’ll find it over there, on the left, under MARIGOLD’S END, the Novel. See, it sort of drops down, ready for reading’!
So you, dear dot of a writer-friend, are in for a treat.
Let me know what you think. Drop me a line, leave me a comment, send me a mental note.
If you are a new dot, please be so kind as to stand next to the other dot, thereby forming a line.
A line! They’re lining up to read my work!
I KNEW this day would come!
Now, if I can just get ‘em to pay!
Please disregard the provocative headline… nobody here is taking off their clothes. Probably.
So, whatever does one mean by bare naked marketing? Unlike guerilla marketing, which takes advantage of life’s nooks and crannies to broadcast one’s message, and unlike gorilla marketing, which is naked by default… seriously, how many gorillas look good in yoga pants… bare naked marketing is a new concept, proposed by yours truly.
BNM… the rule for technical writers goes like this: bare naked marketing (BNM), but that’s tedious… is organic marketing. As nobody reads this blog, I’ve decided to expose myself – all right, just my artistic soul – on my current project, DROPPINGTON PLACE.
We’ve already discussed designing the story, and I may have posted a chapter. We have therefore already explored part of my new marketing ploy… I mean, plan.
BNM: starting tomorrow, you will get to see the writing process that goes into this book. The outline will be posted here, along with changes as they occur. Chapters, as they are finished, will be here, too.
Why BNM? You’re a writer, right? Well, so am I. Does it not make sense to share our thoughts and processes? I mean, it’s not like some great big secret? Should it be? I think not!
So, starting tomorrow, visit here for the much ballyhooed Bare Naked MARKETING. Clothing on your part is entirely optional.
When we left our heroes, Norman, Jake, and Wanda dangled over the boiling lava pit, suspended in the air by a single strand of dental floss.
“I believe it’s beginning to stretch…” Jake gasped.
The cliffhanger, the white-knuckler squeaker of a nasty dilemma that makes you just want to, makes you just have to, makes you just DIE to start the next chapter and see what happens, is an old, old way to sell stories.
Scheherazade used them to keep herself alive in the One Thousand and One Nights, remember? The king was going to lop off her head when she reached the end of her story, so she spun out cliffhangers, night after night, until he finally said “dude, like, cut it out!” That may be a loose translation.
The upside of cliffhangers is that you bring the audience back for the next chapter. It’s rather a component of gorilla marketing, wherein you don’t do anything, and let the story do all the work.
The downside is that your story becomes lurchy, if that’s a word, and rather roller coastery, if that’s a word. Your sensitive love story about a girl and her pet dragon must necessarily take a turn for the violent, or for extreme emotions: I HATE you, Nogard bellowed. The end.
Another downside is that cliffhangers become rather tedious. For goodness sake, can’t he AVOID the traps once in a while? The old Batman TV show had just 22 minutes to get out of a cliffhanger, tell some story, and get into a new one, making the Caped Crusader seem, I don’t know, rather cartoonish?
So, it is with a blend of cliffhangery, if that’s a word, and gorilla marketing, that you now find Chapter Two of MARIGOLD’S END here on this very site.
Taa Daa!
As you’ll recall from Chapter One, our troubled twelve-year-old, Phineas Caswell, points the loaded pistol, trigger-finger itchery (if that’s a word), squarely at the running-away back of Alfred Townsend, the unarmed bully that has made his life a living hell. Will he pull the trigger and end his woes? Will He? WILL HE???
Well, now you can find out. The second chapter, cleverly titled Chapter Two, now has it’s own page. Oh, and you’ll be surprised at the turn of events. I hope.
Now you can read the chapters, build up steam, get rolling in MARIGOLD’S END, and wait breathlessly for Chapter Three. Oops – I gave away the title!
Before you get all wormy-squirmy and palm-sweaty like you do in the seat across the car dealer sales manager (How am I going to get you into that car today, friend?), I must remind you: this is gorilla marketing. Don’t buy the book – you can’t!
But, let me know what you think, would you? Liked it? Hated it? Mondo disregardo? Your feedback, my independent writer friend, is most needed.
Now, I’m not desperate – I know that’s what you’re thinking. But, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. My darling editor is moooviiiing soooo slooooowly, think of this as Plan B.
Your input, spread out over the number of weeks over which I plan to release a chapter…let’s see, here, 18 chapters, take away the 2 I’ve already released…let’s see, carry the 1…should coincide with her completion of her editorial chore.
Badda boom, badda bing, and all I have to do is NOTHING! Now THAT, my reader friend, is gorilla marketing!
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…
Nothing beats a good hissy-fit. You know the kind, where you pull your hair and stomp your feet and get so red in the face people think you’re a thermometer? That’s a really effective way to scare off bears and stray pussycats. I tried it at the office… not so effective there. I guess I can sort of kiss that raise goodbye.
But a wild hissy-fit might just be the thing that puts your book over the top. What would happen if, like, you started getting into the world’s grille about something – racism, climate change, dirty diapers, you get the drift – and made some sort of a big hissy-fit. Your fit gets on YouTube, you go viral, and, oh, hey, you also wrote a novel that now we all have to read because, goodness, what a vibrant person you are!
It could work.
Sadly, if you threw a hissy-fit over something really nice, like the West African success against ebola, you wouldn’t get any coverage at all because the world doesn’t work that way.
Sadly, if you threw a hissy-fit over the nastygram items listed above, you might get branded as a tantrummy sort of bozo, because that is the way the world works. Seriously, who wants to read a book written by a bozo, unless you are the REAL Bozo, and then, hey, that might be kind of cool. A book on clowns by the master clown himself – you could make it really scary…
Step One in the Gorilla Marketing Plan is to avoid Hissy-Fit Marketing (HFM), because it only garners negative attention. I get enough of that at work.
Step Two is to make things big, which is sort of a parallel to HFM. Make things big – broadcast yourself. Spread yourself out. Do LOTS of stuff, and tie it all together. Yes, it takes a little effort, which is anti-gorilla, but it simply has to pay off.
You are publishing your book online, right? What’s the magic word there? Nope, not bozo. It’s online, bozo. Search engines and crawlers and robots troll the WWW every single second, making links between this and that, him and her, it and, well, it. The more connections you have, the bigger you are.
You don’t stop dancing with the 600 pound gorilla when you’re tired – you stop when he’s tired. Dolly Parton wears those outrageous wigs to make her short little self not so much. Say what you will about the other parts of her, at least the wigs make her look taller.
So, no on the hissy-fit, yes on the broadcasting yourself all over the WWW.
If that doesn’t work, well, then, ding-dang it! What THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE??? WHATSA MATTER WITH THE DING-DANG STINKING WORLD…
Marketing your work is kind of like having kids – there’s a fun ton of work to be done before the happy bundle of joy… sort of … well I guess it’s really just a lot of work. But, like raising kids, it can be totally nerve-wracking. You’ve got decisions to make, and, most often, no one off of whom to bounce them.
Guerrilla marketing is smart, slick, creative marketing that takes advantage of niches and opportunities that present themselves. It takes a quick and agile mind to spot the chances to promote your product, and a lot of time and focus to jump on them when they pop up.
Gorilla marketing, on the other hand, doesn’t take a lot of time, or energy, and probably doesn’t even work…it’s my own theory. It involves trundling your product out before a lackluster audience – rather like the folks that visited PT Barnum’s circus for the free beer – and hoping that they will somehow generate a degree of interest that will result in million dollar sales. It’s rather like armchair quarterbacking – you don’t do anything and expect amazing results. So far it’s worked for me, in that I’ve done very little and have no results. At all.
But there IS a way to make gorilla marketing work. There is a way to spread your net, ah, yes, the spreading of the net theory, that will open the magic door for you.
Just for the record, the magic door is the one that pops open with a publishing contract for this book plus the next 300 novels and a movie deal for each. Kinda like the Muppets “Standard Rich and Famous Contract”. You might want to practice your signature for that one.
In my effort to act just like a gorilla and market my book, I have enlisted the help of a master ground-roots marketer. And when I say enlisted, I mean pled on bent knee and have yet to receive an answer. Puleeeeze help with my book. Puleeeeeeeeeeeeze….
The plan is secret, but, like a secret you tell a gorilla, soon to be out.
Okay, I’ll spill: if I can get the master marketer on board, he will be the linchpin that makes the whole shebang fire off like fourth of July mint juleps.
The net continues to spread, not from just this blog, but with other avenues that I’ve yet to exploit – oh, it’s coming my friend.
How does it work for you? Developing a growing cadre of readers, albeit only vaguely interested, builds the background for your book. Publish yourself all over the place, and don’t forget to mention your book. Then, find yourself a marketing guru to turn the key, so to speak. They are out there.
If my marketing master turns out to be a guru, I’ll let you know ASAP. And, you probably won’t even have to buy my book, or act like a gorilla.
