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Sunday, March 17, 2013

Outsmarting the Whole World

Hitting the Internet is now akin to taking on the whole world. Take marketing a book. You are literally competing against the noise of the world. The rarefied channels of the literary world have become so narrow that most of us operate in the larger world where the biggest megaphone wins. This is what is so daunting about selling anything on the Internet. You are not competing with the store down the street or the stores in your town or the stores in your country. You are competing with the stores of the whole world.

And you know it when you hit that wide open market where everyone is selling. When you start a book you don't think of selling. I'm sorry but you don't. In fiction it is a vision, an emotion, if not a dream. Then you enter the wide open market of the Internet. Now all you think about is selling. And there is a million ways to do it and that paralyzes you. I literally get a headache from the multiplicity of avenues that present themselves. Even the big publishers have to pick and choose but as a book publicist said to me....you have to do everything.

So you have this large gaping mouth of the Internet but the question is how to fill it. And there comes your first inkling that you are trying to move this mammoth rock. That you as an individual have less than the chance David had against Goliath. A slingshot looks pretty good about now. But you don't even have that. You have your keyboard and you're endless queries and then you have your God given ability to do what is critical and not get lost on exercises.

Because if you do get lost on just working to work you are finished. Bots do that much better than you and they never stop. Your only chance is to outsmart the forces that be. In other words...you have to outsmart the world. Nothing less will do.

 
 
“Rocket Man is the funniest serious  novel since Russo’s Straight Man.” Chicago Sun Times
 

Books by William Hazelgrove