Googling into the Abyss or Book Marketing for Infants

In football there is a thing called broken field running. I used to do it in high school. Basically you run to the side of the field while everyone else is running the other way. You cut back against the grain. So on a sweep to the right with everyone flowing over to the right side you turn and go to the left and go against all that momentum. At the end of the year  2013 this to me seems an apt metaphor for how we should treat tech.

Google is a great thing. We in the book marketing world use it all the time as does everyone else. But there is a point of diminishing return where Google turns against us and the best thing to do is run the other way. We see this in someone who wants to find the very best deal and googles until their eyes fall out and misses the deal anyway. Versus the man who calls the friend at the car dealer who scores a better deal than the googler every could.

Why is this? Because the human factor still trumps the Google factor. Authors now pound the Internet looking for readers but in fact they are running where everyone else is going. So the portals they find are already bursting with authors pushing their books. Versus the author who picks up the phone and calls the editor who gets their book covered in a magazine that leads to a book signing that leads to a book club picking up the book. Or the person who visits the Independent bookstore who takes on their book and talks it up.

These things happen because we still live in a world of humans and most people now prefer the Internet as a means of interacting. It is safer  and more convenient and not embarrassing. But that is exactly why you should run against the grain and go to the opposite side of the field. Who knows. You might even score a touchdown.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have
 

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.

http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/1938467582/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1359822181&sr=1-4&keywords=rocket+man

 

 

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