Buzz - Media Moguls
by John Wolf
The marketing gig is so unpredictable. I think the only ones making any money are the ones selling marketing books. It's clear from the vast number of books with that theme. I am convinced there are only two ways for a fiction novelist to make money on books. One, be famous in the first place. It could happen! And second, use the Internet voraciously.
I dug a white board an easel out of the garage and starting listing ideas to get the website to “speak” so people will listen. I had a few good ideas come out of this for fictional writers to pump up their websites. I'm in the throes of modifying my own site to test the ideas.
Basically, the scheme involves making the website interactive with your book. The website is the only thing you have control of. Everything else is at the mercy of other people that charge you a fortune for their services. In fact, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't ever print a book. It would be eBook and audio. First of all, the editing nightmares would go away. Second, the cost of publishing would be minimized. Third, you wouldn't have to buy a bunch of pulp that's hard to sell later. If you play it right, the electronic media can be nothing but profit.
You can upload your book for free into the Kindle system. You can record your own voice reading your manuscript to get an audio file. Everything else I've done with my books has been cheap anyway, why change my style now. At least you would have product - CDs - that you can burn yourself. There is a company called Disc Makers that can duplicate 1,000 CDs for $1,090 with a nice printed jacket, if you really start selling in volume. All of this is without the publisher taking 35%, the distributor taking 55% or more, and the media is several times cheaper than paper. Like all things commercial, the big problem is cover art for the CD jackets, but that can be done on the cheap by photocopying the cover of the original book. This assumes you publish to get the ISBN and the artwork established and have a few books on hand, but the emphasis of your marketing is audio and eBooks in nature.
This concept led to this idea of referencing your website in your book in a powerful way. This link will provide you with a way to show super looking maps, character profiles, and any other aspects of the story that are difficult and expensive to put in the book itself and can't be part of an audio product. This also gives you a way to bring the story to life by providing visual cues.
I plan to have my characters have their own blogs, talk about their part in the book. This can really bring readers into the characters lives and start a following for the book and its story. This leads to video of segments of the book, mini plays that open up the story to be “seen” and not just read or heard as audio. Interviews with the author about what he was thinking when he created the characters and plot. It, in affect, creates a good book trailer. It can also open up comedy parody or variation on a theme - “What if Clarence fell for Julie’s brother instead of Julie?”
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Of course, you could easily destroy your book as well, so it has to be limited to those ideas that promote the story and not distract from it. But, if you do this right, it can draw visitors by the millions, where your book only draws one reader. If he or she doesn’t talk about the book, your marketing potential is static. If someone is motivated to place a video clip from you book site on YouTube or MySpace - you will have a million book sales campaign in the bag. That's the ultimate test of your success in using this approach.
Placing a reference to a webpage in the book adds no appreciable cost. On the title page or dedication page, add a simple note: "Maps of places described in this story and character profiles can be seen at http://BestBookEver.com/DevilsPit" assuming here the book is titled Devil's Pit.
The site can simply be maps or house layout, etc., for a murder mystery. The character profiles can be simplified to describe what makes the character tick. In my case, the map idea is essential, not so much in Orphan Records, but Dark Knight goes all over England and Scotland. Those Scottish town names are the devil. Harmonics is about Mars, so artwork showing scenes in the book would be very cool. The new book Of Beryl and Alabaster is set in India, but includes the whole Silk Road into China. A map here is essential too. Maps in a book costs a lot of money and the book format is too small anyway.
Where this could get very interesting is having someone develop an interactive game on your site to take you through the story. The car companies, many manufacturing companies in industry, and most of the fashion sites do this all the time. The Porsche site is very cool - a video opens with a guy going to lookout hill in LA that overlooks the city at night and races his cool Porsche engine. In response, all the other Porsches in the valley growl out their engines. Then the ad cuts to the individual car models, you select one, and the ad for that car comes up where by clicking your mouse races the unique engine sound for that model and a tachometer needle jumps up in sync. You are definitely hooked on the site and your attention stays long enough to realized, jeez, I can't afford one of these things.
What do you think of the concept?
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John Wolf keeps the kennels clean at the Fox&Quill Hunting Club |
