A Lesson In Literary Marketing

***A LESSON IN LITERARY MARKETING***

Whenever I’ve written a short story or a novel, I wrote it with the idea of doing it for me and me alone. Every character, every plot device, every climax, they were all built around my own personal interests and core values. During these times of self-service, I forget that I’ve often described myself as an island with my interests. Let’s take a look at all of these keywords: liberal politics, professional wrestling, heavy metal music, mental illness, new age music, animal welfare, Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy, adult Lego fandom, and so many more than I’m often forgetting and often clustering together. Some of these things go great together while others may ruin the witch’s cauldron that is my core values.

As a writer, appealing to yourself will always result in having a fun time. While such individual thinking is encouraged for all forms of art, if you want to get yourself out there, you also have to appeal to people who will actually take an interest in what you do. In other words, you have to know who your audience is.

The example I want to use for this parable is my self-published urban fantasy pro-wrestling novella Occupy Wrestling. Every person who has ever read it from cover to cover has had the same complaint: unfamiliarity with wrestling logic and terminology. The strange lingo, I can understand where they’re coming from. Not everybody knows what the hell a spine-buster is or why being called a jabroni is a particularly humiliating insult.

But even if I were to scrub the novella clean of all wrestling slang, the story would still operate on wrestling logic. Only in wrestling can you justify two guys nearly killing each other over a “stupid” gold encrusted belt. Only in wrestling do you fight one day and come up fresh as a daisy the next day almost injury free. Only in wrestling does doing everything once a week make any sense at all. I can scrub the vocabulary clean, but if I scrubbed the logic clean, it would cease to be a wrestling story. Hell, it wouldn’t be a story at all, for that matter.

Occupy Wrestling is currently sitting pretty at 2.75 stars on Good Reads and Amazon. Even the two people who gave it favorable reviews (Edward Davies and Andy Peloquin) were scratching their heads at the wrestling logic and lingo. My beta reader Marie Krepps was even scratching her head despite watching wrestling during the Attitude Era in the 1990’s.

There’s a lesson to be learned here: if you have a product of any kind, market it to the right people. Do you have a science-fiction story about cute cuddly kitties? Market it to people who make frequent visits to the Humane Society. Do you have an instructional manual about crocheting? That sounds like an activity for an older generation, so market it to them. What’s that? You have a basketball drama? Market it to people who like basketball.

Following this logic, what should I do with Occupy Wrestling? Should I continue to send free copies to English professors, chick-lit lovers, and nonviolent people? Or should I market this book to…(drum roll)…wrestling fans?! Let’s think about this for a minute. Do you know why “YES!” by Daniel Bryan is currently holding a 4.05-star rating on Good Reads? It’s because it’s been marketed to wrestling fans, like me.

I love it myself, but let’s face it, Mr. Bryan writes like a celebrity. His memoir style is nowhere near as polished as Alison Bechdel, James Frey, or Elizabeth Wurtzel. Then again, people love “YES!” because they love wrestling and they love Daniel Bryan. Could I possibly do the insane thing and slip copies of Occupy Wrestling to the Dave Meltzers, Vince McMahons, Stephanie McMahons, and Eric Bischoffs of the world? Imagine that: giving people what they like instead of what you think they should like. Who would’ve thunk it?

Remember, boys and girls: you may get knocked down and it may hurt for a long period of time. Everybody experiences failure at least one point in their lives. It’s our ability to get back up, dust ourselves off, and go back to the drawing board to alter our strategies that makes us immortal in the end. Nobody thought The Beatles would be as big as they’ve been over the past half-century. Michael Jordan locked himself in his room and cried his eyes out when his high school basketball tryouts went up in smoke. There are people who still think Daniel Bryan is a B+ player despite everything he’s been through. None of these famous people gave up and neither should you. They changed their approach to life and I’m changing mine as well. Now I just have to figure out how to reach the wrestling fans in a way that they can relate to my novella. We’ve got ears, say cheers!

　

***CURRENT AND FUTURE PUBLICATIONS***

As of today, I have three defunct publications and three active ones. The active ones are Confessions of a Schizophrenic Savage (poetry and song anthology), American Darkness (contemporary drama anthology), and Occupy Wrestling (urban fantasy novella). Though self-publishing these three active books hasn’t earned me a great deal of fame or fortune, I’m still grateful that they’re out there and in the public eye. I don’t write because I want to be greater than JK Rowling or Stephen King. I write because I love to create beautiful things. You can call it artistic passion, the creative urge, or just plain autistic tendencies. Either way, there will be other self-published books to come and no matter how tough things get, there will be no giving up. Here’s a look at those future publications:

　

American Darkness 2: Black State (contemporary drama anthology)

Blood Brawl (Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy novel)

Filter Feeder (environmental fantasy novel)

Necrograph (dark poetry and heavy metal song anthology, almost a sequel to Confessions of a Schizophrenic Savage)

Poison Tongue Tales (science-fiction, fantasy, and horror anthology)

Watch You Burn (psychological fantasy novel)

　

***FACE BOOK POST OF THE DAY***

“Coincidence is killing an oversized house spider with a paperback copy of ‘Silence of the Lambs‘. Irony is using a Carl Hiaasen novel instead.”

-Me-