You don't have to watch my granddaughter's first comedy
video to understand this blog post, but it will help.
Well, okay. Watching
the video won't help, but it's kind of fun, anyway.
This post is about bad choices. Specifically, bad marketing choices.
Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote to John Kehne,
author of the official website for December 21, 2012, asking if I could place
an ad for Zinovy's Journey with him. It
seemed like a great idea at the time.
His site was about the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it and so was my
book. People interested in that topic
were already flocking to his website, even though the fateful end-of-time date
was over two years away. He confirmed,
in our e-mail correspondence, that his site was receiving, at that time, over
6,000,000 page hits a month!
That's a huge target audience.
Even considering that only a few of those six million
readers would notice an ad, and not all of them would hit the view button, and
even fewer would actually choose to buy the book, that's still a sizable market
of potential buyers. I was excited about
the possibilities.
I gave John Kehne my elevator pitch, and he seemed to think Zinovy
would fit in with other products he was selling, so I stashed the idea away in
my file of marketing ideas and plunged on with the publication process.
Now, two years later, the book is published and ready to
sell. A few days ago, when I decided the time was right, I clicked into the
12/21/12 website and applied for a $150 banner ad. I'd already created a banner
to the specs he required. I was ready to
go.
But the timing was not so right after all.
The end of the world is now three months away.
The topic is hot, and getting hotter all the time.
And all the ad spaces in the website have been sold.
Now you might think, at this point, that my bad choice was
to wait so long to place the ad. That
was my first thought. But deeper in my
consciousness an uncomfortable idea had been squirming around for quite some
time.
Almost from the beginning, I'd
wondered about the wisdom of advertising a book set at the time of the coming
of God's rule on earth on a website that said the world would end on December
21, 2012, just because the Mayan calendar ended on that date.
In my author's notes in the book I say that anyone who
predicts a specific time for the end of the world is either deceived or
deceiving. Strange bedfellows, my book and the December 21, 2012 website.
Sometimes what looks like a good idea, from a human
perspective, is not a good idea from God's.
I believe my book has a future. I
believe it will find readers. But I'm
actually relieved this marketing door has slammed shut. There will be other ways to get the word out.
I suspect every writer is confronted with the temptation to
prostitute her work, or herself, at some point in the process of writing,
publishing and marketing a book. Perhaps
at many points. What that looks like
will be different for every person. What
I might feel is prostitution might simply be good sense to someone else. But the issue needs to be considered, for
every honest writer.
How much personal integrity
am I willing to sacrifice to make my book a success?
We need to consider that what appears to be a very sensible
idea could end up being a bad choice.
