Creative publicity (Book promotion part 4)

The simplest and easiest way to publicize your novel, whether self-published or traditional, is on the Internet. Everybody knows that, and everybody is doing it. When I said I was posting a series on publicity, I got specific recommendations from every single person I mentioned it to, from my trainer to the checkout person at the grocery. And a lot of them were good suggestions.

The thing is, there are a zillion web sites out there that will tell you how to arrange blog tours, create mailing lists, and generally get readers to give a second look to your adds. A lot of them have great ideas – and at least 90% of the other people who are serious about doing book promotion are out there doing them. Consequently, they don’t have nearly as much impact as they did two to five years ago when hardly anyone was doing Internet marketing. Setting up a mailing list was a great idea five or six years ago when I got maybe on a month. Now I get at least three or four a day, and my in box is so clogged with mailing lists that I have filters set to automatically send them to a special folder, which I look at maybe once every three months…and then decide that I don’t actually need to read all the promos that expired weeks before, so I just delete the whole thing. It’s easier than trying to unsubscribe, especially when half of them are from places I shop regularly which will just put me right back on the list next time I buy something.

Creative publicity has more impact because it is, by definition, not something that everybody else is already doing. The idea is still the same: to create word-of-mouth “buzz” about the book and/or get readers interested in it who would otherwise not know about it. There are three basic approaches I’ve seen people take:

1. They come up with a marketing approach that nobody else in their field is doing, which will reach readers of their type of book who might not run across it otherwise. The first person to make advertising bookmarks did this; likewise the first person who came up with the give-away-contest-on-the-blog. This generally relies on knowing your field and your readership really really well and taking advantage of that inside knowledge that others might not have.

2. They come up with a single event that is tied to the book that is splashy and outrageous and that can be done on a shoestring, and that is a) large and splashy enough to attract a lot of people and b) outrageous and splashy enough that people who hear about it will go “She’s doing WHAT?!?” and talk about it even if they aren’t actually going to be there. The idea is that at least some of the people will remember the author’s name and the title and check out the book, instead of only remembering that some author parachuted out of a hot air balloon into Lake Michigan to dramatize the chase at the end of some crime book they wrote.

3. They find a way of getting in front of a whole lot of people who are not all the usual readers of their genre, in hopes that a) a few of the large group will be genre fans and b) at least a few of the non-genre people will be intrigued enough to pick up the book anyway. This usually draws on the writer’s interests and connections outside of books and writing. A writer who runs marathons, for instance, might do an article for a runner’s newsletter or blog on balancing training for a marathon with getting a manuscript written by deadline, in hopes that a few percent of the newsletter’s subscription base or the blog’s regular readers will decide to check out the writer’s book.

Creative publicity is not something you can get a list of suggestions for from a blog or a publicity website. If it’s on a list somewhere, it was a #1 type of thing that somebody else already did, and even if you are the second or third person to do it, it’s going to be rapidly taken over by all the thousands of other authors who are doing mailing lists and writing blogs and twitter feeds for their main characters. This is not a reason to not do whatever-it-is; it is simply pointing out that the thing has moved into the realm of “regular publicity” rather than creative publicity.

The closest you can come to a what-to-do list is a list of examples of creative #2 and #3-type things other writers have done, none of which will do you any good to copy, because even if Hotshot Writer sold 20,000 copies in one day by dressing up as a clown and passing out leaflets for “My Clown Summer,” your book has nothing to do with clowns. You have to come up with your own gimmicks and tie-ins.

The other difficulty with doing creative publicity is that the #2 and #3 approaches almost always involve the writer “putting him/herself out there” in some way. This goes back to the 80-20 rule I mentioned last post (80% of publicity is useless, but we don’t know which 80%), plus the fact that very few writers have lots of cash to throw around on expensive events. So doing something outrageous and splashy generally means the writer jumps out of a home-made hot-air balloon trailing an advertising banner, not hiring somebody else to do it. And that means that the writer had better already know how to parachute (or be able to learn how in a hurry).

Writers as a group tend to fall into two categories: the total introverts and the periodic extroverts. All of the writers I know who’ve been really successful with creative publicity have fallen into the latter category – they’re as introverted as the rest of us most of the time, especially when they’re writing, but between books they can give regular everyday extroverts a run for their money and then some. They’re good at this kind of publicity because they don’t mind dressing up like clowns or jumping out of balloons or writing articles about their personal struggles in hopes that some tiny percent of the half-million subscribers to The Depressed Gardner’s Weight Loss and Marathon Training Newsletter-Blog will remember their name and buy their book.

Basically, my take on all of this is: if any of the publicity stuff sounds like fun, whether that’s designing your own book plates or dressing up like a clown, go for it. If the idea repels you, either hand the job off to someone (a talented spouse or other relative to begin with, maybe a hired publicist once you have enough stuff in print to make that worth the money), or else make some decisions about how much you are willing to do yourself even though you hate it versus how willing you are to accept whatever sales you will get if you don’t do publicity. If you are self-publishing, that means really minimal readership; if you have a traditional publisher, it means that you’re relying on your publisher to do whatever minimal publicity they do for a first or second (or fourth or fourteenth) novel. It is OK to not do publicity. It is, however, a bit like voting: if you don’t do it, you don’t get to complain about the lack of results. Really, it’s your choice.