Marketing Time.

I've been thinking about self-promotion and marketing, trying to figure out what works best. What I've come up with is that, whatever it is, it's time-consuming.

There's the Twitter thing. I haven't built up the number of followers on Twitter that I'd like, but honestly, I don't think it's difficult to do, just time consuming. I know of someone who, in addition to random Twittery things (My dog looks so cute in her Easter outfit) just posts random motivational sayings directly out of a book of random motivational sayings - and has over 1000 followers - but she posts a few times a day. I hardly ever remember to even go to Twitter... but if I did, if I posted every single day, even just random bits of stuff, I might be able to get a bit of a following, and then I could post things to promote myself... could work.

Also, the repeatedly-googling-my-book-title-thing. At one time, Aigai-- autocompleted into Aigaion Girl because I spent a lot of time repeatedly googling my book title. Now, even if you type in all of Aigaion the software comes up before my book - because I just don't have the time to type my book title into a Google search bar 200 times a day. But it would be nice. I could definitely do with my book being at the top of the results page.

Reviews would be great. A lot of reviews. But I'm still not sure how to get them. A huge part of me is tempted to mail random copies of my book to completely random people - just pick names out of a phone book or something like that - because people who blog are likely to post something about it anyway. "I got this random book in the mail today, WTF?" would probably generate a fair bit of googling, if nothing else... but then that's kind of creepy, isn't it? Just mailing things to random people.

Also, contests. I think contests that are free to enter do well. They're certainly my favourite kind.

I'm mostly just thinking out loud and I really should get back to work. This is my last night at my day(night) job, and I want to make sure everything is done properly.

A Review

So, by now, you're probably well aware who Alison Strobel is (she's the author of The Weight of Shadows, which I reviewed on here, as well as several other novels). Alison recently reviewed my book and gave me the most flattering review I could hope for. She actually compared me to Terry Pratchett, which has to be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about my writing. You can read the review here.

The Weight of Shadows

The Weight of Shadows

Author: Alison Strobel

Publisher: Zondervan

Publication Date: May 7, 2010

Paperback, 320 pages

ISBN: 978-0310289456


I don't generally read a lot of Christian fiction. To put that more accurately, until recently I hadn't picked up a work of Christian fiction since I was still babysitting my cousins at their house (the youngest of these cousins has just finished grade 9, the oldest, her first year of university). I don't have anything against religious fiction as a rule; it's just that I rarely have occasion to read it. With Alison Strobel's The Weight of Shadows, the occasion found me - and I'm glad that it did.

The first thing that struck me about this book was how quickly I found myself caring about the characters. Not because they're the most amazing, wonderful, likeable people in the world, but, actually, because they're not. The characters in this book are, really, just people. They struggle. They make mistakes, like everyone else, some huge and life-altering and others mundane and inconsequential, but all of them mistakes that real people would make. Throughout the book, and especially toward the end, I found myself silently cheering them on or telling them off and willing them to make what seemed so obviously to be the right choices.

By the second chapter, the importance of the author's faith to her, and the roll it plays in her writing, is evident. Regardless of my own beliefs, I found myself awed by her expressions of that faith, from the inner thoughts and feelings of her three main characters to the little (but heartfelt) prayers that they utter throughout the entire novel. Before the three seemingly insular story lines start to intersect, they're held together by these thoughts, feelings and prayers.

I can only imagine the painstaking research that must have gone into making The Weight of Shadows the book that it is. Strobel offers readers a detailed look into the life and motivations of a battered woman, the workings of a shelter and the emotions of people trying to cope with long-standing guilt.

The Weight of Shadows is an interesting study in faith, love and the interdependence of people, thoroughly researched and uniquely executed. I'm glad I had the opportunity to read it.

About the author:

Alison inherited the writing gene from her father, Lee, and grew up composing stories on everything from napkins to typewriters. Her talent earned her awards throughout school, a two page spread featuring her work in her senior yearbook, and even saved her from failing college chemistry. But it wasn't until she moved to California after college that she wrote her first full-length novel, and that's when God made Alison's oldest dream come true.

--From Alison's website, www.alisonstrobel.com



For more information about the book, the author or the tour, check out Alison's Blog.

A Quick Reminder...

Just wanted to remind everyone that Saturday is Devereaux Court's stop on the blog tour for Alison Strobel's The Weight of Shadows, and that everyone who comments on the post will be eligible to win a copy of the book.

Also, on July 18, one week after the close of the tour, the author will choose one commenter from a randomly selected blog to receive either autographed copies of her first three books or a gift card to his/her favourite bookstore.

This is a pretty sweet offer, so, let everyone you know know.

Ps, while I'm reminding you about things, another reminder that inviting other writers to join our merry gang is both allowed and encouraged.

Introducing...

Marco, the marketing gorilla! I kinda felt like DevCo could use a mascot (not that I don't love the fish!). What do you guys think?

Also, on a total aside, I'm trying to find a way to a) put our profile pictures with our names at the bottom of each post and b) rotate the scribes list, so my name isn't always at the top. If anyone has any ideas on how to do either of these things, please let me know.

And now for the actual reason for the post, which wasn't really going to be about Marco, but was going to be about marketing. I want to know what you think of this idea for marketing on less than a shoestring:

My thought is this: I want to do a book tour, but without the author, the signings or the book stores. Not a blog tour (although I do plan on having one in the mid-to-late summer), but an actual physical tour. What I want to do is send a single copy of my book to someone who has agreed to read it, review it (this may be optional, not 100% decided) and pass it on to someone else who has agreed to read it (possibly review it) and pass it on to someone else, etc., etc.) Each person who receives it will write their name (full, first or last), approximate location (as long as they give province/state and country, they don't have to give a city if they don't want to) on the inside cover, along with, if they want, the date they received it. They'll also be encouraged to include small stickers/business cards/lightweight, flat tokens of their location (ie small canadian flag stickers, or whatever) next to their names or on the inside back cover of the book. For my specific purpose, I plan to include a little paper doll of Moloch which will fold flat and make the journey with the book, so that participants can post pictures on the Facebook fan page/blog that I'm going to create for the purpose of Moloch in their town/ wherever he ends up. I kind of want to make it an interactive sort of deal, where the page (wherever it is) would track the book's progress (and Moloch's adventure) as it travels around to various places.

So, that's my plan. Thoughts?

Press Releases and Gorilla Marketing

No matter how much a book may write itself, I've come to realize that no book is going to sell itself. So, a couple of random tips on how to get your book (/product/whatever) noticed and (hopefully) selling.

First off, the press release. I didn't know this, but apparently, you need one. Any time a company launches a new product, or an author (or publishing house) launches a new book, someone writes a press release and sends it to every relevant media outlet they can think of. A lot of the people who receive it won't care, but some will, and it just might mean your name in a paper, in a blog entry or on the radio. Prefferably, you want to send your press release out just as your book (or whatever) is available. You might even want to send one out before it is available, telling them it is going to be available and offering a review copy, because many reviewers won't review a book that's already been released. I've sent the one for Aigaion Girl to our very own Jam to look over (Jam is the new Editor in Chief of The Muse - Congrats Jam!), and I don't know exactly how effective it will be, but from the tonne and a half of research I've done on it, this is how a press release (actually now called a Media release, because they're sent to everyone, not just papers) should look:

For Immediate Release:

Contact
(contact name)
(contact phone number)
(contact fax)
(contact email)

(Headline)

(City), (Province/State), (Date)

(First Paragraph)*

(Second Paragraph)**

### OR - End -

* The first paragraph should contain the basic info (who, what, where, why, why we care)

**The second paragraph should contain the more detailed info.

Always refer to yourself in the third person and try to write the press release as if you are an uninterested third party. I wish I had more info to share, but first we'll have to see if I've done mine properly.

As for the Gorilla Marketing, this is something I'm quickly learning about. The Internet has made marketing a million times easier, but in so doing, has made it a lot less relevant. There are a tonne of ads on almost every site you visit, so I'm not really rushing to add mine to the throng and hope it gets noticed somehow.

My theory is that the best way to get noticed is through search results. If someone types your (pen)name into Google, you want you to be the first person on the list. The same with your book/story/poem title. There are a couple of ways to achieve this. One, link everything. Link to your website from your other website, link your blogs together, include your website(s) in profile on every forum you belong to... and the second, which is kind of a pain in the ass, use your own links. When I have to get to my website, AthenaMcCormick.com (see what I did there?), I don't just type in the url and hit enter. No, I search
"Athena McCormick" on google, then I click the link that pops up for my website. I have the unfair advantage of a really unusual name (there is another one in Colorado), but my site is now at the top of the list, where it wasn't before.

Spiders are the best thing ever for marketing, especially for us poor, starving artist types, because they're relatively easy (albeit time consuming) to use and manipulating them doesn't cost any money. Six days ago, when I approved Aigaion Girl for sale, I got a little automated message telling me I could expect to wait 15 business days (or three weeks) before it would be available on amazon. That seemed a little long, so ten or twenty times a day, I went to Amazon and typed "Aigaion Girl" into the search bar a whole bunch of times. When I got tired of that, I typed my name. Aigaion Girl showed up on Amazon yesterday. Go see for yourself (and boost my spiderness) here.

The one other thing (and the final one for the purposes of this article) I wanted to mention was email signatures. They don't have to be overly complex or witty; they just have to have some basic information and link to whatever you want linked - and once you've written them, they're always there an easy to use. I discovered today that not all mail clients will interpret the links correctly, however, so I suggest instead of saying "click here", you say something like, "visit my profile at www.profile.com" and link the url, so if the link goes dead, your recipient still has your url.

Okay, I think that's it for me. Hope this helps someone, somehow.

A Review of Sorts: To Find A Wishing Well

A few years back, I spent the best $0.25 ever at the library's discarded book sale, and bought Hylda Lee's To Find A Wishing Well.

I'm really glad I did. I've never seen another copy of it, and everyone that I or Bean have ever mentioned it to gives us a funny look. It's obscure, which is too bad, because I think it's one of the best children's novels ever.

It's about Lila, the 11th child of a King and Queen who have nothing but sons, and how a well intentioned fairy gives her the gift of always wanting something...which of course, backfires. When she's sixteen, she sets out on a quest to solve this by finding a Wishing Well on her brown and yellow striped horse Zeb. Along the way, she meets Ethelbert the Owl, Mitch the Otter, an enchanter, Caesar the dog and Prince Sorin, a host of other talking animals, gets a magic bag that is always filled with milk and cheese and apples and honeycomb, and gets her happily ever after.

I know there are some who would criticize the fact that everyone gets their wishes granted (Zeb wants a horn like a unicorn, Mitch wants to be able to fly etc), and that everything's happy and there's next to no hardship, but the book is still full of good morals: Like, 'help your friends when they're in trouble', and, 'get the whole story from the dragon because maybe he didn't actually mean to torch your kingdom'. Lila gets most of her wishes answered, but finds out that having everything you want, when you want it, isn't as much fun as wanting it. It's fluff, but it's the right sort of fluff, and I wish it was more well known.

As it is, I can't even find an example of the cover to add to this. I'm actually going to have to scan it. Google came up with nothing, if you can imagine it. The book is really that obscure. But if ever you do come across it, you should read it. It's adorable.

The Gargoyle - A Review. Of Sorts

My boyfriend bought this book the other day, because it had been recommended to him by someone at work. With very little urging, he returned it the next day. Because it was awful.

Now, a true reviewer would actually read the whole book, to give as objective a review as humanly possible - or, at the very least - to get ammunition. I didn't, and neither did my boyfriend, because phrases like "unholy yoga" made our collective brains dribble out our ears. Whatever - I am not ashamed.

The premise of the book is really interesting: a horribly disfigured man living in a burn ward starts getting talked at by someone from the psych ward upstairs, who is convinced they knew each other a few hundred years ago. I gather the whole point is to figure out whether or not Burn Ward Victim is being harassed by Crazy Girl From Upstairs, or whether or not she's actually telling the truth. I don't know. I didn't get that far.

The author is in love with colourful sentences. This, by itself, is not a bad thing. Sentences should be colourful. They should bring out images in the readers' heads and those images should be vivid and real, even if what you're talking about is riding a dragon through an ancient castle, or living at the bottom of the sea, or - getting into a car crash. But not every sentence needs to be this way.

For the author of The Gargoyle, every sentence is a 'colourful' one, packed full of metaphors and similies - even when he doesn't need them. His constant over-use of descriptive imagery is too much.

Plus, it became clear in the first five pages (as far as I got before I had to put it down)...well, a car flipping through the air as it careens off a mountain road and down into a ravine does not do yoga, no matter how unholy, and even if it did, it wouldn't be screeching as it did it. Scraping the old barrel bottom before the end of the first chapter...I'd hate to see what he'd come up with later.

Now, tastes being hard to account for and all that, I'm not going to suggest that no one read it. You might just like it, which is just fine. Whatever. Personally, I prefer subtlety when it comes to...well, everything. I don't need to know every detail about what it felt like to have your toes cut off, thank you very much, nor do I need a page-long instructional paragraph about deliberately charring my flesh on a stove element so I would know what it felt like to almost die by immolation. I'll pass. But if that's your thing...then whatever.

We returned the book to its shelf, and my boyfriend got his $21 back - a win/win all around.

Pride and Prejudice. Now with Zombies.

I discovered a book today. It's called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and - yes. It's Pride and Prejudice, only they have to fight the legions of the Walking Dead. Lady Catherine has ninjas. It's awesome.

The whole book is succinctly summarized on the back: "Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read."

Now, I absolutely love the original Pride and Prejudice. In fact, of all of the Jane Austen books that I've read, I love it the most. I made the minor mistake of reading it before I tried Sense and Sensibility, and now can't read S&S, because there's no Mr. Darcy. So I console myself by reading P&P a couple of times a year and wallowing in my girlish squees, even though I know what's going to happen next. I also own two copies of the 2005 movie with Matthew McFayden as Mr. Darcy (who, in my own opinion, is a MUCH better Mr. Darcy than Colin Firth. But that's me).

Seth Grahame-Smith, who did all the zombie bits, actually made it work. He's managed to turn Elizabeth Bennett into a skilled fighting machine who, while being kind and witty and lively and all that, can also slaughter zombies with the best of them. And, it's funny. It's got zombies, and ninjas. About the only thing it doesn't have is pirates.

Of course, the whole thing makes one think.* How much can one get away with, with stories that are in Public Domain?

Because, really...zombies? In Hertfordshire? And there's ninjas involved?

Does this mean that, if I went and took, oh...the Arthurian Legends, and decided that as punishment for their adulterous ways, Lancelot and Guinevere were made into Zombies who then attacked and ate Sir Percival while he was mucking out his stable,** I could get away with that? Really? It's not...irreverent?

It's a tad worrying, because it also means that, if I ever have anything published, and my work were to fall into Public Domain, the new book with the amusing zombified book cover could be The Story That Rainbow Brite Spawned - And Zombies and people would buy it. Assuming, of course, that the original story was popular enough.

And, I think that's the rub. I don't think anyone would want to read War and Peace and Zombies, unless it was the abridged version. Hardly anyone wants to read the original of that now, and I'm fairly certain Whatshisname's already dead and that the book has long since been available in the Public Domain.

Duuuuuuude: I'm going to leave instructions with my kids for when J.K Rowling finally croaks, to tell my grandkids to write this down: Zombie Harry Potter. No really. Screw the Golden Snitch: they're playing for bodyparts, and the prized Jellied Brain, which, depending on who eats it, might just taste like bile. Or something. And there will be ninjas.

You know what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is, though, right? It's fanfiction.*** 100%, pure, fanfiction. For nerds, who think zombies and ninjas make any story better. The fangirl in me wants to jump up and down and yell "See? See? It is a legitimate form of writing!" while the rest of me wants to hide in the shrubbery (with my book) until people stop looking.

I could, from here, segue into a rambling discussion of fanfiction and intellectual pornography, but I think I shall leave that for another day, considering the purpose of this was to point out that I found an awesome book. Seriously. It's actually good.

~~~

*It also makes me watch myself; I often catch myself, when I've been reading P&P, writing in Austenian prose. This can be rather annoying when writing something that doesn't fit in that sort of language.

** And by 'mucking out' I mean, 'having intimate relations with Bill the Stable Hand. Hur hur hur.

*** Actually, in the case of the Arthurian Legends, most of what's currently thought of as being part of the cycle (like Lancelot) was added in after, and is, therefore, fanfiction. Oddly enough, the same can be said about a great deal of what ended up in the cannonized version of the Bible. It's all fanfiction.