ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Lead generation is basically marketing speak for “how will you initiate interest in your product or service.” It’s not something many writers are encouraged to think about — there is a mindset, more prevalent in other genres than here in the romance community — that once the book is done, it generates interest simply because it exists, and there’s a sense of frustration when the newly released book (or books) aren’t generating the kind of visibitiliy and sales they’d like. Truth is, all writers need to generate leads. We call it different things — running a newsletter, building a platform on social media, blogging, generating adds on Facebook or Amazon, newsletters swaps, and putting calls to action in the back of a book — but they’re all predicated on the same idea: get someone interested in you and your writing so you can further that relationship and build a sale. It may be horrible marketing speak, but I actually like the phrase lead generation because it keeps me focused on high level strategy rather than immediate tactics and tools, which have a tendency to be less effective as more people use them. In just the last year we’ve seen Facebook adds and Newsletters become a tougher method to use effectively because of changes Apple’s made to the way it handles privacy, while the cost of Amazon ads has increased as more and more authors flock to them. Meanwhile, Booktok and Instagram have become the hot new means of reaching out

One of the most useful parts of Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is the breakdown of the five modes of capital used in the publishing industry and its adjacent fields. I’ve used these to build a publishing company, guide my writing career, and solve all manner of problems. But I also see a gap, born of Thompson’s focus. He specifically calls out Financial Capital as a key form of leverage, encapsulating all the cash-on-hand resources as well as the ability to generate credit, financing, and investment. It’s a key part of any artistic organisation, as very little happens without it.  The missing element — based on my experience — is probably time, which doesn’t appear anywhere else on his list. Traditional publishers default to the velocity models, focusing on a short, hot burn with sales — they generate interest, release the bulk of their stock into the world, and expect to sell the most copies in the first month. Failure to do so means using financial resources to warehouse books, using connections and marketing to keep books alive after the rest of the industry has set them aside, and tying up human capital managing the unsold books. That’s only viable for the evergreen titles, which generate so much interest there is constant demand. Indie publishers can work slow, because the books are always there. The financial cost of storing an ebook or print-on-demand title is negligible, so it doesn’t matter if they sell tomorrow, next week, next month, or in five

The yellow smiley face was first designed in 1963. State Mutual Life Insurance hired the designer, Harvey Ball, to create the logo attached to a company-wide “make friends” campaign after a merger decimated morale. They paid him $45 for the creation of two eyes, a smile, and a yellow circle. Nobody trademarked the smiley face, although plenty of found ways to copyright specific expressions of it. In 1970 the Spain brothers, Murray and Bernard, appended the words “Have a Happy Day” underneath and made a killing selling merchandise with the ubiquitous symbol. Contemporary operating systems all agree that the smiley face is a useful icon or emoji, now represented by the ascii digits of a colon and a closing bracket — 🙂 — but each system has its own expression of those emojis when the OS interprets the characters and translates them into graphics. As you might expect, the smiley face is a copyright nightmare once you dig into its origins. The Spain brothers took credit for the creation on national TV when appearing on Whats My Line in the seventies, despite knowing good and well that the originator was Ball. A second group attempted to take ownership of the design in 1971, when a French journalist launched The Smiley Company (and they seem to have been successful, with the Smiley Company fending off a copyright claim by Walmart in over 100 countries back in 2005). In 2001, Harvey Ball’s son Charlie started a non-profit dedicated to reclaiming the rights

We used to sell books by telling you how exceptional the story was. The whole back cover synopsis pushing you to invest in the character journey and atmosphere of the story contained within. Selling you on the author was a secondary concern, because the author was an invisible presence nine times out of ten. Your primary relationship was with the book, the bookseller, and the story, not the person who wrote it. Then blogs came along, and then Facebook, and then Twitter. YouTube and TikTok and Tumblr and Snapchat and Patreon and gods know how many others that I’m ignoring in that list. Find an author and like their work? Odds are you’ll be following them on one platform or another, the first step in a long-term relationship. Which raises an interesting question for marketing books: do we now sell readers on the author and the contents of the book? Make them sound like the kind of author that needs to be followed and engaged with beyond this one story? Inviting a long-term commitment from a reader might not sell the current book as efficiently as the traditional conventions around the back cover synopsis, but the long-term relationship sells books in two directions: through the backlist, as readers realise there’s more there; and in the future releases the author may make.  Selling the individual book is a solid choice in the velocity model of publishing, where everything focuses on the now, now, now, but the transition to backlist-focused business models

One of the recurring refrains in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative is the importance of unnecessary creating or back-burner creating. The creative work that you do that’s not on spec or on demand, but something that’s done because you’re curious, refining new skills, or simply interested in the subject. My accidental creating often revolves pro-wrestling, where I’ve done the occasional fanfic project for the Total Extreme Wrestling game and take deep dives into the mechanics and business of wrestling storytelling. This has often spawned insights here on the blog, the occasional paid writing gig, and countless ideas that have informed my practice as both an author and a publisher. This week, I listened to one of my favourite wrestling storytellers, Paul Heyman, being interviewed by the 90s pro-wrestling cultural phenomenon known as Stone Cold Steve Austin. A huge part of the interview revolved around why Heyman’s 90s wrestling project, Extreme Championship Wrestling, ultimately folded and got bought out by the industry leviathan WWE, and Heyman broke down not just the wrestling industry, but the whole damn entertainment industry, into a three-chokepoint system where a failure at any single point will doom your enterprise. For Heyman, a successful entertainment company needs Content, Financing, and Distribution. If you don’t have the content, you don’t have a company, and in a balkanised industry like TV where different providers traditionally provided one component of the triad, there’s a hunger for content that we’re seeing play out in new ways via the new distribution systems