Myth, the Universe, and Everything

Here is something I've learned about myself. When I am doing marketing (viral or otherwise) for someone other than myself, I have no problem bringing the topic into conversation and gushing about it. The example of the day: I am less comfortable promoting a class that I teach than a class I enjoyed taking. In the latter case, I'm recommending something to people because I think it will enhance their life experience. In the former case, I'm promoting myself, even if I am teaching the same class I'd recommend when taught by another teacher. I do the same thing with books: I, of course, love it when people read my stuff. I'm happy to tell people about what I write and what my books (now hard to find) are about. Other writers, especially folks that I know (like a certain friend whose debut novel is coming out from Tor this fall), I will plug rampantly with no shame.

Given how much my professions (teaching and writing) require me bringing the audience to my work, this realization is somewhat troubling. It is probably a good thing that I didn't go into sales.

So, the WGA has organized something brilliant for the fans to do. Some of you may have heard about how fans sent nuts to producers to keep Jericho on television. The folks at United Hollywood developed a similar plan: send pencils to the producers in support of the strike. Joss wrote about it here, and you can get your pencils from United Hollywood here. They're environmentally friendly pencils, no less, and these folks are coordinating the effort to have an overflow of pencils (much like the potatoes that Murphy Brown dumped on Dan Quayle's lawn, if you remember that far back in TV history).

In other news, Tokyopop is doing some brilliant marketing: they're running a contest to advertise their Tokyopop TV, which puts some of their manga into flash. In this contest, they're asking all of their readers to post certain clips of episodes on their blogs, MySpace pages--anywhere that it can be seen by the public. So they're enlisting the fans (much like the WGA above) to get the word out. The clips look like this:







Now, there are two ways to read the fact that I, too, am posting one of these clips. One is that I have been taken in by Tokyopop's clever marketing (which isn't entirely untrue: they are offering a Wii as a top prize, and I'd love one of those machines). But it's also true that I'm fascinated by viral marketing, and thus must blog about it. And with that, I'm back to work.

shanna_s recently posted about a new contest over on her blog--something she's calling a blog campaign. Here are the basics:

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If you want to participate and want to interview me, have me write a guest blog, interview a character, have a character do a guest blog, or otherwise come up with an entry that requires my input, please e-mail your requests to me at shanna@shannaswendson.com. Put something specific in your subject line so I can recognize it right away. My spam filter sometimes goes hypervigilant, and when I skim through the spam folder I look for subject lines that look real. If I don't recognize your name and the subject is blank or something generic like "hello," the message may get deleted. I will work on these throughout the next couple of months and send them all back just before it's time to start posting. Deadline to send me questions or other requests is April 23, but I will be dealing with these in the order I receive them, so if you wait until the last minute and I get crazy, there's always a chance that I'll spend less time and effort on yours. If there's a question I don't want to answer or don't feel comfortable dealing with, I'll let you know and give you a chance to come up with something else.

Remember that you don't have to use me. To be eligible for prizes, you just have to mention the book name and my name (and it would be nice to mention the first two books, for new readers to find). These should all be posted the week of April 30-May 7. Our goal is to get enough awareness and sell enough books that first couple of weeks that my publisher gets excited (going into a second printing really fast would be cool, too).

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This seems like brilliant viral marketing to me, and I'm eager to see how it works.

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As a note, I am officially caught up with livejournal. I may now go about my day.

I won't print this one in full, as I assume it's a few years old by now. This is an editorial by Sue Corbett, a children's writer and reviewer, on how to do your own book tour to promote your book. She has some fun ideas, but one about marketing struck me particularly:

"The first thing I did was unconscious. When I needed names for minor characters in my book, I used friends' names.... I named my main character's friends after colleagues. Each of these people, after complaining that they should have gotten more lines and a bigger role (one wondered why he didn't have a romantic interest) not only bought the book, but told their parents and friends, bought copies as gifts, etc."

I'm entirely amused by this, if only because I've used this technique myself, though not quite so blatantly. One of my main characters is named after a writer friend of mine who blogs about strong women, feminism, and other issues, so when I needed a strong female character, I borrowed her name. (Nevermind that this character ended up to be much different from the character I first imagined.) Another character is named after my sister, with the letters switched around so that it's not obvious, but she and I both know it. One of the minor characters is vaguely named after my sister-in-law. I named two minor characters after my chiropractor's daughters on a whim, because I needed two girls about their age. I was mortified to find out that I'd spelled one of their names incorrectly, and the character, forever after, will have a misspelled name. Other things I use when I need names for minor characters: actors or writers I particularly admire. That, likely, does not help me sell books as much as using colleagues would.

I'd love to hear if other people do this, since it wasn't something I'd even done intentionally, and certainly not as a marketing technique.

The full article is at the Lee and Low Web site.