Sky writing

I apologize for not getting this out yesterday, but I'm sick and have the same bedtime as my kids until I feel better.

I did some brainstorming on marketing. Skywriting is my favorite. How I would love to look up at the beach and see my first scene written in one mile high letters (that's the size of the letters, not the altitude. Really.) It's almost dramatic enough for this writer's ego. Perhaps if the entire throng of beachgoers were taking notes, slack-jawed and/or teary-eyed…Oh. Hello. I forgot you were here. Ahem. Sorry about that.

I said last time that the average person is exposed to 30,000 advertisements a day (according to marketing guru Steve Whigham). How do you get your book to stand out among all of those? And WHAT has to stand out? Do you need a bright yellow cover? An Oprah's book club sticker? (Yes. Give her your soul. She will sell a lot of books and your soul will get time with Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, so your soul will be self-embracing and in a happy place, surrounded by Oprah's favorite things.)

Let's talk about Oprah's book club. Love it or hate it, a recommendation from Oprah sells. Why?

Steve claims that 95% of decisions are emotional (based on brain-imaging studies- more below on this.) So how does Oprah make us feel? I notice four basic responses.

1. Loyal Oprahites- want to be able to send her emails about the book, detailing how the book changed their lives, their children's lives, their neighbor's life. These people consider Oprah a close personal friend and REALLY want to meet her. They take her recommendation as seriously as if she were their priest/minister/best friend/psychiatrist/medical doctor rolled into one. They have learned how to read because Oprah suggested it.

2. Casual Oprahphiles- tune in every once in a while, maybe thumb through her magazine in the checkout. She says some interesting things and most of it is pretty good. These people have read at least one of her other book picks- possibly because their book club picked it- and they're willing to give her recommendation a chance. They like how they feel after watching Oprah- grateful that their life isn't so messed up, hopeful and ready to put their life in order, serious about fixing the ills in the world, etc.

3. Oprah Indifferents- Think, "Crap. She recommended another book. Everybody is going to read it and be talking about it, so I should, too." A lot of 'book people' may fall into this group. (In a parallel example, the buzz around Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" has made some people read it, just so they could weigh in) This is, as are the rest of my Oprah categories, merely conjecture.

4. Oprah Reactionaries- WILL NOT read a book because she recommended it-but they won't be buying the books, so I only mention them. But they exist, as evidenced here.

Notice that these categories are related to identity (If I read these books, I am a good, caring person. Oprah said so.) Reactionaries have an opposite though equally strong emotion, which I will call non-identity. (I will not become a sheep in Oprah's herd.)

So you can send Oprah emails every day until she asks you on the show, you can drop leaflets from planes (think propaganda drops during WWII), stick flyers on people's windshields, tables at cultural events like fairs,tattoos, blogging, spamming, become best friends with the indie (independent) bookstores within a twelve-hour drive of your home, etc. Lots of people spend a lot of money looking at what motivates people to buy.

Did you know supermarkets use video of customers to measure time spend in a store, time standing in the aisle waffling about what to buy, observing what products people go straight for (and thus should be advertised outside, since by the time they get inside the decision is already made)?

I've wondered why they stick books like "Coffees of the World" and "The Ultimate Tulip Guide" in the entry way at Barnes and Nobles. Marketing people call it "decompression", and the purpose is to ease us into the shopping experience, to let our brains adjust. I think they use those books to give us some easy decisions. To give us confidence that we are in control. It reminds me a bit of a lobster trap. Here's another trap-

"Often a customer struggling to decide which of two items is best ends up not buying either. A third "decoy" item, which is not quite as good as the other two, can make the choice easier and more pleasurable, according to a new study using fMRI carried out by Akshay Rao, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. Happier customers are more likely to buy. Dr Rao believes the deliberate use of irrelevant alternatives should work in selling all sorts of goods and services, from cable TV to holidays." (From this article in "The Economist")

So, the ideal situation would be to have a table with your book, the bestseller comp book, and a decoy book, like "Famous Quidditch Matches in Hogwarts History" or "The Life and Times of Dr. Carlisle Cullen". You'll have some fans that will pick the decoy, but most people want to relive the emotion of a golden book. They've already read the golden book, the decoy is out, and that leaves your book. Which looks pretty interesting, actually. In his email newsletter, "Daily Kick in the Pants", David Farland says this:

"In fact, most purchases that most active readers make are based upon the fact that the book resonates with other works that they have enjoyed. The readers almost never make a conscious connection, but it is there.

"As I mentioned the other day, we choose the category of fiction that we do because we are looking for a certain type of controlling emotion in our work. The word "genre" doesn't really explain what we're doing when we choose our fiction. Instead, the sections in the bookstore ought to be titled "Wonder, Romance, Drama, Intrigue, and so on...

"Sometimes the resonance that induces us to buy a book comes from the cover. My own fantasy novels have covers by Darrel Sweet. Sweet of course is famous for doing the covers for Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan, two of our best-sellers of all time. So when readers look at my novels, they are immediately reminded of books by those authors."

I can see what he means. The publishers are very aware of cover art and what it conveys- hence the recovering of Wuthering Heights to look more like Twilight. More on this Tuesday, including how to make a living as a bum. Really. It's a good gig.

What emotion do you read for? Some possibilities- Adventure (like Dan Brown), romance (Stephenie Meyer), humor(Dave Barry), wonder(J.R.R. Tolkien), drama(Jodi Picoult)? Does it change?

What did one book say to the other one?
I just wanted to see if we are on the same page
Can't get enough?

A Girl Can Dream

I pull out my slim, purse-sized, indestructable (even if I drop it in a sink full of dish water or slam it in the trunk of my car. Yes, I destroyed phones in those ways.) reading device. Sweet. It’s fully charged after only half an hour. Or perhaps it charges itself without being plugged in...

I browse a list of books (similar to the one I just finished) on my NetBoox account (only $19.99 a month. Awesome dream!)

Still browsing. Nah. I'm tired of reading space opera and wizards. I want something romantical.

Something paranormal. In ‘Books I’ve Previously Enjoyed’, I find one that I actually enjoyed. I tap “Something Like This, But Different”.

This one’s about Lara, a girl who is kidnapped and taken back to the Garden of Eden. When she runs away and is detained by FBI agent David Hatton, she finds love and the strength to endure the pain of mortality.

Hey…that’s my book! Wow. My first novel. It did pretty well, too. It sure is nice that it will be in eprint until the end of time. Ahh, nostalgia.

I'll check out "People You Know Have Read". My sister recommends this one, and it’s rated PG-13. For nudity…that could mean anything. Let’s look-there’s a scene where she is in an accident and the doctors cut her clothes off to save her life. That’s sounds fine. Only 200 people have read it, but they’ve rated it four and a half worms, too. I wonder if they've all read the book. I wish somebody would figure out how to stop inflated reviews (hint, hint. I don't have a clue about how you'd do that, though.)

I’ll preview the first chapter. Hmm. Why is she doing that? Ahh, now I see…but what about her father and the ostrich farm? This is interesting and well-written, thus far. I’ll take it.

A Day Later…

Wow. That was a great book. I’d like to own that. I’ll just click here, pay the $3.99 to get my hard copy sent and then I can read it whenever I want.

And I’m putting a star next to it so my other sister and my friends will see that I read it and loved it. Add a few lines to recommend it, and I'm done.

*Fog clears. Kelly blinks in bright sunlight*

It was only a dream?

That sounds pretty easy, doesn't it, Sony/Amazon/Netflix/Barnes and Noble?

Heck, if Google could give me this experience, I might not mind them taking over the world.

What's your techno-dream?

This article from "Backspace" (retelling the 1996 cut of book supply drivers intimately familiar with their routes and the resulting drops in sales and pressure on the remaining books) is what prompted my dream. The great thing is that people will be their own market specialists in the near future- if Amazon hasn't done that already.

Can't get enough?

Daddy Daughter Date

I'm visiting the folks down in Tampa and today went out with my Dad to lunch. We had the soup and salad at Olive Garden, and we agreed that the interior tiled roof would be the perfect touch in the mansion we could live in if every known member of our family wanted to live in the same house with us so we could afford it.

When we were done with our breadsticks and all(and I don't know why every restaurant doesn't give out an Andes mint. Those are so nice.) we headed over to the mall, and passed by the $5 massage chairs sitting in the middle of everything. Instead we chatted with a very informative Brookstone salesperson (did you know that there is a SALE this week on massaging chairs? $150 OFF! I know. I'll wait until you get back.) while he showed me how to extend the footrest to massage the bottom of my feet (it was suprisingly uncomfortable on the back of my ankle).

When he had helped us, he moved on to help a lady in a wheelchair find the perfect handheld back massager. We sat there through the entire 'refresh' cycle, and my lumbar region felt great.

Then we walked to Waldenbooks, and I engaged for the first time in a time-honored writer tradition. I don't actually know if other authors do this, but I bet they do. I found the spot on the shelf where my book will go. I didn't actually scoot the other books over to make room, but I can see it. I wonder if it works in my favor to have a "B" name, instead of a middle-of-the-alphabet name. It's a good thing I got married because Kennedy is stuck on a bottom shelf, far removed from the ends.

I have always felt something like nostalgia and anticipation with books. Walking through our main library-all four floors of it- I see the rows and rows of shelves, thousands and thousands of books waiting. One neat thing about the old system of card catalogues was that the little card would come out and get stamped, and you could see how often that book had been checked out. It always seemed sad to me when it had been years, like a girl that nobody asked to dance. Or for the boys, like the last one to be picked for the kickball team. Now we just scan the barcode-the kids love to do that, and then proudly carry their own books-but I wonder how long that book has been waiting for someone to flip it open, to read the first few sentences. To turn to the middle, check out what's happening a hundred pages in. to connect with something enough to take it home and have a little chat.

So I love bookstores and libraries and garage sale books and thrift store books and books I borrow from my mom, my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, and whatever friends are silly enough to trust me to give a book back. I do get them back, it just takes awhile.

Now I have the added pleasure of imagining MY books on the shelf at Waldenbooks. I'm not so interested in imagining my book at a garage sale, but I suppose that happens to everyone.

Dad was patient enough to listen to me go on about how the publishing company contracts with the bookstore over who gets on the front table, and if the cover is facing out or the spine. And how most people can't tell more than half the time when someone is lying (even law enforcement is only right 56% of the time, unless you're secret service super-agent. They are right 98% of the time. Isn't that interesting?)-according to my research for my book. And then I gave a synopsis of my book, and he listened. And he asked a few questions about Lilith (one of my characters) and the legends about her. And then he realized that Lilith on Cheers was a hint by the writers about what kind of woman she was.

A little bit ago, an guest on Nathan Bransford's blog wrote about the dream of writing, about that perfect day. I have had so many, but today was perfect in its way. Hanging out with my dad, getting a free massage, talking about the sea turtle sculpure table we saw, or the teak root bench (gorgeous and competitively priced) and how one day he wants to sell his house and buy a sailboat was enough for today. Plus, he promises to sail up to Charleston, SC. I'm going to take him to the bookstore when he gets there and show him my book on the shelf.
Can't get enough?