Category: marketing

Update on My Blog & #Marketing Strategy. 

If you keep up with my website and social media posts, note that I have changed my website on most from this WordPress site to my author’s page at Amazon.  This is simply so that readers have a direct link to where they can purchase my works. I will still blog from here and my posts will show up on the Author’s page.  

Operation #WholePerson Update

My #marketing experiment, Operation Whole Person, is doing quite well and becoming ever more fascinating. I have also learned a couple of tricks to collecting followers on Twitter, which seem to be effective. For example,  I created #JasonBrody yesterday and he already has 270 followers, the vast majority of which probably do not know that he is fictional. Jason is commenting on others’ posts, as are other characters, while another character, yet to be disclosed, was engaged in a Twitter conversation last night with people who believed him to be real. 

Yesterday, I also created #JackThurston (whom I will describe in a separate post).  Jack’s Twitter handle is @jthurston666.  

A few more characters are on their way. 

I encourage you to follow all my characters on Twitter and hold on for what should be an interesting ride. 

#Marketing a book

I have been in deep contemplation today about how a novice like me can best sell my works in this age of social media. I have come up with a rough idea for a complex strategy based upon the theory that you don’t sell the book.  You sell the characters in the book. This is akin to the old salesman’s adage that you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.  

I have been sitting on my sofa the last few hours trying to develop a plan to market my books. I was contemplating that successful books are character-driven, when I glanced at my nearby DVD collection and realized that most are named for a main character, e.g. Hannibal, King Rat (an old movie), MacBeth, Blade Runner, etc. or they have such (a) powerful main character(s) that people remember the characters first and the movie title is almost an afterthought: V for Vendetta, Breaking Bad, Silence of the Lambs, Angel Heart, and so forth. Therefore, to sell my books I must sell the characters in them.  This may seem patently obvious to the old, successful hands at writing, but to me this basic truth seemed to hit exceptionally hard today. 

So, without going into the details and risking ridicule should my plan fail dismally, I will attempt to simply make my characters as real as possible to my readers in my new PR campaign and make them so vivid as to almost be alive. 

Of course, suspense will hopefully keep bringing readers back, which is another reason for not divulging the plan. 

By the way, I did spend some time reading up on hashtag strategies today, which explains the hashtag in the title. I’m testing out a hashtag tactic.