There are two schools of thought on mar­ket­ing and writ­ing.  Some think that mar­ket­ing can lead to great suc­cess, or that mar­ket­ing alone is respon­si­ble for the suc­cess.   Dan Brown is some­one I hear this accu­sa­tion levied at from time to time.  Others will argue that no amount of mar­ket­ing will make a bad story good.  Bad in this case gen­er­ally being bland and bor­ing. I waf­fle back and forth between these opin­ions depend­ing on the writer and how jeal­ous I feel, but ulti­mately, I ascribe to a syn­the­sis of the two.

Talent and genius are not all that is required to suc­ceed in writ­ing.  Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time.  But there’s a prob­lem that doesn’t have any­thing to do with how good you are.

There are a lot of other tal­ented peo­ple out there doing work just as good, if not bet­ter.  And they’re all vying for the atten­tion of the same peo­ple you are.  Sure, you can seg­ment the mar­ket a bit, and nar­row your niche, but ulti­mately, we’re all look­ing for read­ers, and there are only so many (and appar­ently grow­ing fewer by the year).  Forget the national deficit, we’re run­ning one hell of an atten­tion deficit these days.   Luckily, there’s no short­age of appetite for good sto­ries.  Human being are vora­cious con­sumers of the stuff.  But each per­son is pre­sented with a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good.  It’s  such a big buf­fet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casse­role and the can­died yams.  They may fill up on bread.

Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.

Writers don’t want to be sales­peo­ple.  If we wanted to be sales­peo­ple, we wouldn’t be writ­ing. There are no short­age of jobs for sales­peo­ple.  Maybe you’ll win the pub­lisher jack­pot and get a great mar­ket­ing deal with your three book con­tract.  Or maybe your publisher’s inter­nal process will hic­cup and the book sell­ers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time push­ing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival.   Or, maybe you’ll pub­lish in high qual­ity, but some­what obscure mar­kets that not nearly as many peo­ple read as you might wish.

A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to mar­ket them­selves and their work.  You’ll have help along the way, from the edi­tors and pub­lish­ers who buy your work, but not always.  Then you need to step in, and mar­ket yourself.

It’s a bad word though, isn’t it?  I feel slimy just for even say­ing it.  I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy any more so much as it is a form of mar­ket­ing.  I have the neg­a­tive stigma attached the idea as well.   But I’ve come to know some excel­lent and effort­less self-marketers in the writ­ing world, and it’s con­vinced me of the over­all value.   They had the tal­ent first, but even tal­ent can use some help.

I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/blog to mar­ket your­self.  I’d like to dis­cuss some alter­na­tive meth­ods, or at least tan­gen­tial ones.  So with­out fur­ther wind-up, here are a few more off-the-wall mar­ket­ing ideas for writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  Use at your own risk.

1. Get Em Young

   Volunteer as a speaker for your local school sys­tem.  This will prob­a­bly go over best when you’ve got some cred­its to your name that you can show to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion.  Offer your ser­vices, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writ­ing.  Bring along age-appropriate free sam­ples (ARCs, mag­a­zine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids.    Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing your­self a bit of a favor, and help­ing kids, you’re also increas­ing the expo­sure of the genre as a whole.   So it’s good mar­ket­ing and it’s just good karma too.

2. Twitter Away

   You already know about Twitter, right?  I’ve blath­ered on about it enough.  Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-marketeers, mar­ket­ing gurus, and all man­ner of social snake-oil sales­folk.  The Twitterati can smell a mar­keter from a mil­lion miles away.  I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basi­cally cre­ated a Twitter account to blare about their work, or prod­uct, or what­ever.  They’re not sub­tle.  You need to be sub­tle, and you do this by not being an ass­hole. Twitter’s for social­iz­ing.  This means you talk to other peo­ple, you lis­ten, you par­tic­i­pate.  You don’t use it as a broad­cast medium.   It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really.  But retweet stuff too.  Answer replies.  Tell peo­ple how cool they are.  Be a gen­uine human being. And stay the hell away from any­one telling you that they have the sure-fire method of gain­ing you 16,000 fol­low­ers in 24 hours.  That stuff has to be bogus.

3. Become an Expert (or share your exist­ing expertise)

   This goes back to some­thing I wrote about yes­ter­day, which is that I believe writ­ers should have pas­sions out­side of writ­ing itself.  Few of us make a liv­ing at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like.  So, make your­self an expert on your pas­sion, and share it with oth­ers through online media.  An audi­ence mem­ber is an audi­ence mem­ber, and no, I don’t have any hard fig­ures to sup­port the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less per­son who has never heard of you.

   Call it becom­ing an expert, or estab­lish­ing author­ity.  Either way,  you do so by offer­ing some­thing of use­ful­ness to other peo­ple.  Like I have been so des­per­ately attempt­ing to do with this blog for the past sev­eral weeks.  You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-an-expert sites.  Join a com­mu­nity around the sub­ject and be help­ful to oth­ers.  Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.

4. Manufacture a Controversy

   Tension sells in fic­tion and it sells in real life too.   And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actu­ally work some­times.  Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity.  Manufacturing a con­tro­versy, even if your out­rage is true and heart­felt, can back­fire.  Controversies inher­ently bring emo­tions to the table, and dis­cus­sions can turn into flame wars in a sec­ond when emo­tions are at the table.    I’ll be hon­est.  I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some peo­ple would take excep­tion to them, to the degree that they would be com­pelled to write a reac­tion.  That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time.  But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writ­ing was that some peo­ple would dis­agree with me.

   In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blog­ging tech­nique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my posi­tion.  Nick took me down yes­ter­day in about fif­teen min­utes, and gave me trou­ble, right­fully so, for not research­ing before I wrote.    So if you want to man­u­fac­ture a con­tro­versy, keep that in mind.  Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.

5. Forget Everything I Just Said

   Sometimes, the best mar­ket­ing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, help­ful, gen­uinely inter­est­ing per­son.  Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meet­ing and talk­ing things over with new peo­ple.  Those peo­ple do well because they earn it.

   I’m try­ing to be that kind of per­son, but I’m also twit­ter­ing, shar­ing my exper­tise (what lit­tle there is), and some­times, not nec­es­sar­ily by acci­dent, man­u­fac­tur­ing a con­tro­versy or two.  To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writ­ing done out­side of the blog.

   I hon­estly write these posts out of a desire to be help­ful, and to feel like I am engag­ing in the com­mu­nity around me.  If I’m try­ing to mar­ket any­thing, it’s my ser­vices as a free­lancer.  I don’t have a book and my short sto­ries are rare lately.  Maybe the best pol­icy for a writer regard­ing mar­ket­ing is hon­esty and authenticity.

So what do you think?

Tagged as: controversy, expert, marketing, My Writing, twitter