Posts Tagged ‘controversy’

5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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?

Twitter Will Murder You While You Sleep

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

If you are vir­tu­ous, you have have lit­tle to fear from Twitter.  But if you screw up, it will cut you, man. It will cut you DEEP.    I will explain how I think this can eas­ily be avoided, but first, let’s talk about Twitter.  I swore I would never make a blog post about the “power of Twitter” but this is too fas­ci­nat­ing to pass up

In the after­math of the #ama­zon­fail  deba­cle, I am only just now com­ing to real­ize the ulti­mate power of Twitter and just how dan­ger­ous it can be to the sta­tus quo and those in posi­tions of power.  That power remains mostly untapped and com­pletely undi­rected, for now.

The scan­dal broke over the week­end.  I won’t go into detail, but let me sum­ma­rize by say­ing, basi­cally, a crap-​​ton of books by gay authors, on GLBT themes, etc  were delisted from search and from sales rank­ings.   I was dri­ving cross coun­try and missed the begin­ning, so when I tuned in on Monday, it was a bit bewil­der­ing.  I imag­ine that’s how Amazon’s man­age­ment felt on Monday morn­ing when they were briefed on the issue.

From my per­spec­tive, the issue was a per­fect storm of  issues– GLBT rights and pub­lish­ing.   As I move in writing/​publishing cir­cles,  the last cou­ple of days on my twit­ter feed have been one long angry, out­raged dis­cus­sion, with links, retweets, the whole deal.  It con­tin­ues as I type this.

Don’t mis­take my detached atti­tude here to be one of con­done­ment.  What hap­pened was bad for writ­ers, bad for pub­lish­ers, and as we have seen, very, very bad for Amazon.  I am how­ever ambivi­lent about ascrib­ing blame or malev­o­lence.  I’ve worked in large orga­ni­za­tions, and it’s very easy for me to believe that this entire prob­lem was the result of a bureau­cratic error.

In the infor­ma­tion void that existed on the week­end, many inten­tions were invented to explain.  Right-​​wingers had col­lab­o­rated to manip­u­late the sys­tem via tags.  Amazon had capit­u­lated to right-​​wingers and dropped the titles.  It was a pro­gram­ming error.  A mas­sive con­spir­acy of inter­net pranksters man­u­fac­tured it so that they could feed on the out­raged tears of  twit­ter users.  And so on.

Much like Nature abhors a vac­cum, the inter­net ahbors an absence of information.

Amazon’s lack of imme­di­ate response allowed the con­tro­versy to build to unprece­dented lev­els.   Rarely have I seen the inter­net move in one angry direc­tion so effec­tively.  It never would have moved this quickly in the time before Twitter.  Email, texts, none of them had the per­fect assem­bly of fea­tures and usabil­ity that Twitter does.

The equa­tion looks some­thing like this:

(Incredibly Easy Link Sharing + Social Networking + Tagging) X Programming Error/​Scandal/​Gaffe  = Internet Shitstorm of Epic Proportions

We’ve been see­ing this with peo­ple los­ing jobs via Twitter as well.  You tend to think, as a twit­ter user, that the world is small, lim­ited to your fol­low­ers.  But they fol­low oth­ers, and oth­ers fol­low them, and it’s easy to resend some­thing you said with a click, and… it’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only instead of being linked to the excel­lent star of such films as Footloose and Wild Things, you get fired and mocked by 30 mil­lion people.

Do some­thing bad, catch the atten­tion of Twitter, and don’t respond for sev­eral days.  This is a recipe for total and utter rep­u­ta­tion ani­hil­i­a­tion.

So how do you avoid this?  Well, nim­ble com­pa­nies should not be threat­ened by Twitter’s awe­some might.  The faster you fill the void of infor­ma­tion, the more quickly Twitter as a whole will move on to some­thing else.   It prob­a­bly doesn’t mat­ter what you say.  All you have to do is acknowl­edge it.  Say, “We see the prob­lem. We don’t know what’s caus­ing it.  We’re on it.  Thank you.” And then keep peo­ple updated.  The lack of response is as impor­tant as the mistake.

Larger com­pa­nies like Amazon face a big­ger prob­lem.  I sus­pect Amazon can’t decide what brand of toi­let paper to put in the employee bath­room with­out six­teen com­mit­tees and mas­sive exec­u­tive over­sight.   The peo­ple in power in these com­pa­nies tend to believe in out-​​dated ideas like “I shouldn’t have to work on the weekends.”

So, two things if you’re Amazon-​​big.  One–your rep­u­ta­tion doesn’t turn off on the week­ends. You need peo­ple mon­i­tor­ing it at all times thanks to the inter­net.  And Two– empower the peo­ple mon­i­tor­ing your rep­u­ta­tion to man­age it.

Sounds risky, huh?  Only Bezos should have that power!  Right?  That’s the kind of think­ing that will get you into an #ama­zon­fail scale mess.  Top-​​down man­age­ment method­olo­gies will not last in today’s cli­mate.   Twitter and the inter­net will eat such com­pa­nies alive.  If your sur­vival depends on the decision-​​making of one or a few wealthy elites who can’t be both­ered to check their email on Sunday, to call an emer­gency meet­ing or some­thing, then you are, roy­ally and truly fucked.

To sum­ma­rize:  pay atten­tion, respond quickly, and for god’s sake, set up an search feed track­ing your com­pany name.  If Comcast can respond to any tweet that men­tions their name, so can Amazon.

Or, ya know, we can all start shop­ping at Barnes & Noble or Powell’s or some other smaller inde­pen­dent chain.  We don’t really care.  Twitter as a whole loves get­ting angry.  Outrage, kit­tens with bad gram­mar, and porn  are the fuels in the engines of the inter­net. And the inter­net makes it just as easy to order a book from Mom & Pop Reseller as it is AmazonCo.  Brand loy­alty doesn’t really count for much, and in the face of con­tro­versy, it evap­o­rates pretty damned quickly.