In college, I took a seminar on current issues in the environment. My classmates and I began calling it “Scare the Shit Out of You Twice A Week” because that’s what it did. Seriously, don’t talk to me about soil erosion. Sometimes, I think that reading industry blogs has a similar effect on me as that class did.
I learned today on the Bookseller Chick blog why it’s important to have a marketing plan in place, even if you’re one of the most famous novelists in the world. And your name rhymes with Even Swing. I found this to be a logical extreme of the old maxim “the best way to market your book is through word of mouth.” Even if you’re Stephen King, each release should have a certain amount of buzz. (Of course, I heard plenty of buzz about the King book, mainly that the marketing tactic was to spam people’s cell phones with a recorded message of him reading the blurb or something. In other words, buzz like a mosquito.) I hear a lot of campfire talk about how bizarre it is that publishers pour money into promoting books that are sure hits. The Harry Potter machine was particularly annoying. But this post made me look at it from another perspective.
All the parties and the decorations and the people flying around on broomsticks — yeah, the book was automatically going to be a bestseller, sure. But if there was anyone considering not taking part in the madness, or perhaps quitting after the miserable fifth installment (hold your tomatoes, folks, a girl’s got a right to her opinion), maybe the fact that you got a goblet of pumpkin juice, your kids’ face painted with a lightning bolt, and a free pointy hat with your purchase of Half-Blood (in other words, you didn’t get a book, but a whole kiddie-carnival) meant that you’d bury the hatchet, fork over the $40 bucks, and contribute to Rowling’s empire at the earliest time possible. Maybe, knowing that this was supposed to be a huge release, an utter lack of hype would resonate like those weekend movie guide announcements that state, “this film was not screened for critics.”
Think about it. The hype for four was huge. the hype for five, tremendous. The hype for six could probably be seen from space. If Harry Potter 7 came out, and the party wasn’t even bigger than the rest of them, wouldn’t you get a little bit nervous? If it wasn’t there at all, would you start wondering if something, somewhere, had gone horribly, horribly wrong? Would you be afraid to pick up the book, or let your children read something that no one wanted to talk about? Would you wonder what the hell Rowling had done to Harry in that book to scare off the pumpkin juice vendors and the juggling house-elves that had been parading around your local Books-a-Million the last time? I sure would.
Anyhoo, thought-provoking post… I still think that there should be something left in the bag for the midlisters, but now I’m not so sure that the biggies don’t need publicity too. (Though I’ve yet to see a good TV spot for a book. Nora Roberts’ “Give me a little time and I’ll tell you a *great* story” commercial was pretty cringe-inducing. Laurel K. Hamilton’s last one looked about as snazzy as the ad for your local car air conditioning repair shop.)
I think it maye be an accident that Bookseller Chick heard nothing about the book pre-release. She might have been a target that somehow slipped through the cracks. I know I read about the cell phone campaign in the Washington Post (to be fair, the people being called apparently “agreed” to it). But the *effect* that the lack of pre-publicity in her store had on the shoppers is a fact. They didn’t buy it. Moreover, they were less likely to buy something they hadn’t heard about from an author they knew, than they were to buy something completely random. Word of mouth never stops. It just keeps getting more important.
Now that’s scary. I don’t even need Stephen King to scare me with that one sitting around, cackling at me like a deranged clown.
Or maybe this is just an anecdote, and it means nothing. I do like to tell myself scary stories. Sometimes, I roast marshmallows and imagine what my worst Amazon reviews will look like. It’s morbid, I know, but what do you expect from a girl who has been thinking about Stephen King?
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