Book Marketing and a Contest – by Frank J. Fleming!

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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Book Marketing and a Contest – by Frank J. Fleming!

Hi,

It’s me, Frank J. Fleming, novelist, IMAO founder and sometimes blogger, and writer for the Babylon Bee. I’m very famous and you’ve heard of me. My hilarious new novel Hellbender is now out on audiobook, so I thought I’d talk about the most important part of writing: marketing.

It doesn’t matter how good a writer you are, no one is going to read you if you can’t market your book. In fact, if you’re really, really good at marketing, you don’t even need to be good at writing. Really, I’d just forget about good writing — go ahead and
pound at the keyboard like a chimp to fill up a book — and then concentrate on marketing. Once you have a reader’s money, who cares if they like the book? It’s too late; you’re gone.

So here are some of my favorite marketing strategies:

Word of Mouth

One of the most common methods of marketing is word of mouth. Now you’re probably wondering, why the mouth? Well, it’s the best thing at forming words. Word of nose? No one is going to understand that. Word of ear? That doesn’t even make sense. Word of butt? That will actually hurt sales. So when you have words being said about your book, you want them — and I can’t stress this enough — coming out of a mouth.

Pestering

This is one of my most common strategies. All you do is keep telling people over and over, “Hey, you should buy my new book!” until they absolutely hate you and want you to stop. But the only way you’re going to stop is if they buy your book. Though they might
also attack you. That’s another option. Usually, they’ll settle on just buying your book, but as a warning, you are going to get roughed up a bit with this strategy.

Lying

This is a pretty tried and true method you can adapt to any situation. For instance, I tried to get someone to buy Hellbender and he was like, “Wait. Is that a science fiction comedy? I only read true crime books.”

So I said, “That’s what it is. True crime. Maybe the truest crime ever. And extra crimey.”

And then when he bought it and flipped through it and was like, “This looks like it was written by a chimp pouding at a keyboard!” I was all, “No refunds!”

Lying is great. You can also use it to make whatever you’re selling sound better than it is, though I don’t need that for Hellbender, since it has already won five Nobel prizes in literature and is in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the greatest novel
ever.

Kidnap Pets

I know. You’re probably rolling your eyes at this old-fashioned technique. In this age of targeted ads and A/B testing, why would you use anything as low-tech as pet kidnapping? But if you read any marketing book, the very first thing it will say is “People
love their pets and will buy almost anything to keep them from being harmed.” That’s why kidnapping people’s pets and threatening not to give them back unless they buy your book works even in our futuristic age of Facebook, jet packs, and digital watches.

Contests

Despite all your marketing, people will still just want to get things for free. Grr. I despise consumers; all I want is their money and they constantly don’t want to give it to me.

Still, you can use people’s desire to get things for free to help market your book by having a contest. You lure people in with their wanting free stuff but most won’t win the contest, and now they’ll want your book but will have to pay money for it. It’s the most
evil of traps.

Anyway, here’s a contest! I’ll give out five copies of the Hellbender audiobook to the five people who put the best marketing ideas in the comments. So come up with a great marketing idea — one that will help me sell at least a million copies [or I bet make him laugh himself silly!-SAH] — and put it in the comments, and a free copy of Hellbender could be yours.

But if you don’t win, you can just buy it and pretend you won. It will make you feel better.

 

168 thoughts on “Book Marketing and a Contest – by Frank J. Fleming!”

  1. Yeah, nothing off the top of my head tops what you have here.

    ‘My book has the secret to impeaching Trump’ has gotten old, and I’ve not seen the obvious next replacement yet.

      1. Been a while since I checked.

        Last time? “Refrigerate. Combustible. Do not store with hydroxides. Do not store with noble gases. Do not store in stainless steel. Neurotoxic. Fragile. Known to the State of California to cause cancer. Dunce. This side faces down.”

          1. The label on that jar neglects to say anything about that, because by the time you chop up my brain and ingest portions of it, you may already be on fire. If you aren’t flammable, consumption may be almost entirely safe. Unless you are in California.

    2. YOU CAN BE A PART OF FRANK’S NEXT BOOK!!!

      The deal-eo is that by purchasing THIS book the participant (pigeon, rube, mark) will win a chance to have some of their own random scribbles appear in Franks’ NEXT book. The number of ways to minimize damage to said forthcoming book are too number-y to mention. See Frank’s insightful paragraph about chimps and typewriters.

      You could even give them a byline… PSCHYE!!!! Like that would ever happen! LOL on my AO!!! Anyways, no one reads this far into anything cuz internet so I’ll rest my case.

      PS: Frank, How much worse is this than all the other terrible ideas you’ve received, huh? Not that much I’ll bet you!

      1. Hold all the kittens on the internet hostage 😍😍😍. They are far more lovable and less scratchy than the real ones.

        OOH OOH- FREE EMOJIS!!!😜✨💋💋🍢🍺🍺🍺

  2. “Buy my book or I’ll kidnap your pet.”
    But honestly, if you do kidnap my pet I would still not buy your book. I would just hunt you down and torture you mercilessly, day after day after day, smiling and laughing in fiendish enjoyment as you screamed. It would be nothing personal, though. Well, it would be to you, I suppose. Me, it would just be another day in the excruciatingly slow and painful end of your existence.

    Now, depending on your chosen demographic, you could approach this in one of two ways:
    “Buy my book and I’ll guarantee that Trump will not be re-elected.”
    or
    “Buy my book and it will guarantee Trump’s re-election.”

      1. “A Work in Progress: A Not Quite Autobiographical Fictional Novel of Science” by Some Guy from the State that Holds the First Primary in the Nation.

        Free Sample for advance orders!

        It was noontime on a dark and stormy night in the southern state of New York. The bedrock plain in the Adirondack Mountain was getting so muddy that the horses were getting bogged down as the mud came over the tops of their shoes.

  3. The false dunning email comes to mind:

    “You have not yet paid for your copy of the Nobel-prize-winning novel ‘Hellbender.’ If we do not receive your payment of [however much you feel like charging] within 72 hours, your copy will self-destruct and criminal charges will be brought against you. We take cash, check, money order, or credit card. No, we take that back, we definitely want your credit card information.”

    This has the added benefit of possibly panicking them when they look for their (likely non-existent) copy of “Hellbender” and can’t find it to return. As if you’d accept that in lieu of their money…

    1. I should have mentioned, you need to hack a list of email addresses from Google, Amazon, Facebook, or someplace like that. Shouldn’t be too hard; seems like everyone’s doing it…

        1. I actually forgot that was a thing. And took a few seconds after commenting to remember the below.

        2. Back in High School Chemistry, we got all excited about making Nitroglycerine. Then the teacher told us that the explosive stuff was actually trinitroglycerine, and no, we wouldn’t be making that.

  5. Dear Medical Journal,
    I am providing an extensive set of citations of your prior publications, and of publications in the more general literature. I am certain you can understand why these citations conclusively prove that you can have no principled objection to my article submission regarding the use of what is legally known as an infernal device in the treatment of substance abuse.

  6. “Buy Frank J. Fleming’s book Hellbender. He comes from a long line of (mostly unrelated) famous authors who are also named Fleming, so clearly reading his book will make you smarter, faster, and better in every way! (small print: may also make you more sexually attractive to marsupials.)”

      1. Ian McCollum begs you to disassociate from him. Immediately, unless you can offer him a sweet deal on a RSC 1918. Then, he may offer a negotiated settlement.

  7. Here are some methods I find work wonders to attract attention:

    Read-bait

    It’s like click-bait, but for people who occasionally read more than just the title anyway. Depending on your audience, you can go for social media posts in the vein of “You wont believe the government conspiracy revealed in this new book!”, or “Other writers would hate it if you read the final chapter of this book!”, or to keep up with current trends, “Fans are outraged by what happens in this book!”. Which is also known as…

    Offendertising

    As large groups of prospective readers have all the thick skin of a newly-hatched tadpole, they can easily be goaded in to promoting your book for you, by incessantly complaining about it online. All you have to do is mention – whether truthfully or not, doesn’t matter – that the book contains characters and themes that your unwitting spokespeople might find objectionable. Perhaps a cast that *gasp* isn’t entirely made up of race-fluid gender-unspecified LGBTQRSTYMCA-identifying fleshblobs. Or a story that *pearl clutch* isn’t about them fighting an evil oppressive conservative system of evil oppressive conservative stereotypes… for a total of five pages, before it devolves into an endless melodramatic soap opera about their dysfunctional personal lives. This is sure to gain the attention of a veritable army (sans the physical, mental and hygiene standards) of online promoters who will buy your book just so they can complain about it, generally by using…

    Zero-context lines

    Ever notice how movie trailers frequently seem to be telling one story with the few haphazardly edited and barely finished scenes they managed to get from the post-production crew, while the actual movie goes completely the other way? Now you can too! All you have to do is quote a few lines or describe a few scenes from your book, spiced up with all the outrage and attention-seeking methods described above, and presto – you’re all set to spin an entirely False Narrative™ (False Narrative™ is a registered trademark of the Democrat party; contact CNN for your free trial today), and get all the publicity it would normally take dozens of advertising agencies to organize, all at the cost of a few social media posts.

    As you can see, the miracles of modern technology and classic busybody mentality can be easily utilized for the promotion of literally anything. If the Kardashians can have their entire careers built on that, so can you!

    1. Ever notice how movie trailers frequently seem to be telling one story with the few haphazardly edited and barely finished scenes they managed to get from the post-production crew, while the actual movie goes completely the other way?

      Oh, you saw the Star Wars trailer last night too!

      1. Minutes ago, actually. It had horses. In a space ship. In space.

        I used to think Obi-Wan Kenobi riding a giant squealing lizard was ridiculous. That it couldn’t get any sillier than that. I used to think that Super-Leia and Admiral Holdo-my-beer were the dumbest ideas anyone would put in a script, let alone actually film. Well, I stand corrected. They’ve officially reached the bottom of the barrel, charged through it with a jackhammer, and are now digging to China… which is fitting, since it’s their apparent (and pretty much only) target audience.

        Thankfully, I’m of the opinion that the real Star Wars sequels are the Timothy Zahn novels (and the Jedi Knight games), while everything from and including “The Clone Wars” is just some fan-fiction practical joke that got out of hand. So yeah, I’m good.

        1. Incorrect. The horses were *on the exterior hull of a spaceship* in space.

          Yeah… I love Star Wars, but unless we’re wrong (i.r. it’s actually in atmosphere at night or something like that) then my Disbelief Suspender 3000 just overloaded and burned out.

          2. I’m guessing it really is in atmosphere; and moreover, here’s how the whole plot goes:

            Some time after The Last Jedi, the rebel- I mean Republic fleet is trying to whip up some support after being torn down to a single ship thanks to the genius of Vice Admiral Holdo-my-beer. Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is having doubts about the whole Supreme Leader thing, while also returning to his Vader fanboying ways, with a sprinkle of some Forged-In-Fire, repairing his broken cosplay helmet.

            While both sides of the war are looking for ways to turn the tide, a new threat appears – the spirit of long-gone Emperor Palpatine himself. His own plan is to takeover either Kylo Ren or newly-minted Jedi Knight Rey Whatshername, and reincarnate in full power. He’s also using a fleet of Star Destroyers hidden for decades in the oceans of Endor. And he’s telepathically trying to turn Kylo and Ray on each other, because he thankfully slept through the events of TLJ, and didn’t see just how well it worked the last time.

            In the climactic final battle, Republic forces engage the Emperor’s army of robot zombie stormtroopers, thus ripping off Knights of the Old Republic II in the process, while Kylo turns on his own side… again… and joins Ray in destroying the Emperor, thus preventing the only actually charismatic character in the new trilogy from making another appearance. Sadly, Kylo dies during or shortly afterward, leaving Ray as the obligatory Strong Female Character™ to lead both the New Republic and the New Jedi Order in a way that’s totally logical and believable, and not Mary Sue-like at all. Also, Poe and Finn do some stuff, but, like the last time, it’s not really relevant to the actual story.

            Remember, you saw it here first… or at any other website where someone has managed to put two and two together, but I’m still calling dibs on my version.

            2. My interpretation of the addition of Palpatine in the thing was that was J.J. Abrams saying, “WTF, Rian? You killed my main villain? Now what am I supposed to do? Oh well, I guess I’ll just bring back Palpatine. Snookie was just a lame rip-off of him anyway.”

              Sadly Thankfully, Kylo dies during or shortly afterward

              Fixed it for you. I can’t imagine anyone being sad to see the last of Darth Emo.

          3. Oh, and one last thing:

            The Rise of Skywalker actually refers to… dum(b)-dum(b)-dum(b)… Darth Vader. As in, remember how in TESB, Luke is referred to as “the son of Skywalker” by the Emperor? Yeah, that’s what they’re going for with the title. Such clever, much wow. And here, the spirit of Vader – now Anakin Skywalker – will be the one helping the kids defeat Palpatine… again.

            Overall, I still think it’ll be a fitting end for the new trilogy – movies that nobody asked for, with a story that nobody cares about, and with characters nobody will remember in ten years.

              1. BB-88 was kinda cute. Impractical as heck, but cute. Otherwise? Yeah. Ripping the memorial scene from __Triumph of the Will_ straight, no variation, no changing camera angles, for Force Awakens threw me out so hard I never went back.

                1. I think I saw TPM in a theater, while I watched Attack of the Clowns on DVD. Did the skim-watched the DVD of Return of the Jar-Jar and figured I’d not have to deal with Star Wars again. (Lucas messing with Who Shot First killed any desire for a DVD on the original series).

                  So, my only exposure to the new remakes of Star Wars has been commentary as well as John C. Wright’s spectacular 11(?) part takedown of TLJ. I feel it’s best that way.

            2. I spent all of the scenes with Kylo and the mask in The Force Awakens thinking how appalled Anakin’s ghost would be, so this may actually be the most positive thing I’ve heard about the whole thing.

              1. Okay, I admit I might, might possibly regain interest int he series if they reboot after The Empire Strikes Back , slaughter all the ewoks and reveal that all — ALL the subsequent films were just Empire propaganda, sliming the reputation of the Jedi … although I’m quite sure they could not pull it off.

              1. And if they were, it would be called “Galaxy Rangers” (or “Saber Rider”, for that matter), and it would be awesome! (Yes, I know they had robot horses there… which is apparently a surprisingly sensible idea if certain DARPA projects like BigDog and its successor LS3 are considered. Still counts.)

        2. Okay, horses on the space ship.

          I thought they’d reached Peak Stupid with the arching fire of SPACE WEAPONS but clearly I was wrong. Never underestimate the power of teh stupid.

          1. I recall reading someone going into Phantom Menace saying they only way they could [SCREW] it up would be to have a chariot race…
            …
            Pod races.
            …
            “They [SCREWED] it up.”

        3. I’m a fan of a lot of Kevin Anderson’s Star Wars work, the Rogue Squadron books, and the Young Jedi Knights/Junior Jedi Knights books, so I would draw the lines slightly differently.

          My remaining interest in Star Wars is fanfic, quite literally. Official canon is like that of many other properties, something to mine if useful for a given story, and often otherwise ignorable.

          1. My favorite part of Stackpole’s “I Jedi” is when the POV character points out all the stupid decisions made in the Jedi Academy trilogy by KJA. “Wait, he blew up a star and murdered a planet … but he’s sorry and not on the Dark Side now … so we’re all going to brush it off?!”

            1. I enjoyed reading it.

              I’d classify it as a critical essay or social commentary rather than fan fic. It isn’t reading some Star Wars for story enjoyment, it is reading John Wright for the sake of my story telling chops, and to understand the situation around TLJ.

              By fanfic I partly meant writing my own.

      2. Long ago, I realized few movie trailers had anything to do with the finished product. Some of them might actually come from some alternate universe…

      1. (Having trouble posting, so sticking with shorter comments)
        Kickstarter won’t put this on the popularity rankings. Board Game Geek won’t let him update the profile. The advertising has primarily consisted of wokescolds denouncing it and so raising its profile.

        FYI, I’ll be bringing my copy to Liberty Con.

        1. Strangely, it’s the first thing I see on the Kickstarter entry page every time I go there the last couple weeks. I finally broke down and backed it.

          It looks like it’s using very similar mechanics to Steve Jackson’s Illuminati card game.

      2. Saw that on Ace of Spades a while back. While I was at work. Guys at *both* offices next door had to check and see what I was laughing about.

        That *may* or may not be three of the backers right there…

    3. I have a tendency to at least look twice at any book that has been universally condemned by the “race-fluid gender-unspecified LGBTQRSTYMCA-identifying fleshblobs”; and have been known to occasionally buy one based on such a “recommendation.”

  8. Frank J. Fleming is a direct descendant of Alexander Fleming, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of penicillin. This is important because Frank’s new book, Hellbender, has be shown to cure baldness, sagging jowls (and other body parts), STDs, and obesity. Just being seen reading it is known to increase the reader’s attractiveness to the gender of their choice.*

    *These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA, but we can say them anyway, because who’s going to read the fine print anyway.

    1. Ditto on c4c.

      Having a lot of fun reading alternative creative marketing options. Don’t want to miss more. Don’t care about the contest. Don’t listen to audio books …

  10. Just let it be known that you voted for Trump and might do it again in 2020. The Lefties will burn you in effigy on a pyre made of copies of your book.

    Which they will have to buy. Profit!!!

      1. Just think, hundreds of pyres all over the world made of thousands of copies of your book! So exciting! You could probably get a second or even third printing out of that. ~:D

      1. I expect to read of cyclotrons being banned in Berkeley, which would be utterly HILARIOUS considering history.

        And I want my own particle accelerator (and no, CRT’s will not suffice).

            1. Actually, quite a bit of it. Comes in handy for reloading.

              I’d say, “Got Milk?” But we see too much gender confusion as it is; and someone might miss the humor.

    3. It might actually be banned in Boston; I don’t know. And for all I know, they had a very good reason.

  12. There;s the drug dealer strategy. 1) Write something so good it’s addicting. 2) Offer readers a free sample. 3) Then write more stuff. Once they are hooked, they’ll continue to buy your stuff whether it’s any good or not. The chief problem with this is writing something that good in the first place.

    A variant of this strategy is 1) write a couple of works that are so good they are addicting. 2) Promise the readers more. 3) Quit writing and rake in the cash. 4) Make lame excuses and abuse the chumps who unreasonably pester you to keep your promise.

    1. George R. R. Martin, please write and write faster,
      You’re not going to get any younger you know. …
      You’re not our bitch and you’re not a machine
      And we don’t mean to dictate how you spend your days,
      But please bear in mind in the time that you’ve had,
      William Shakespeare churned out thirty-five friggin plays!

    2. I think you may be a winner just for pointing out the link wasn’t working. Working links are very important.

  14. Spray paint the URL to buy the book on the sides of boxcars; they go everywhere and people have to stop for them. They might as well read your ad while they wait for the train to go by.

    1. Oooh, I like this, but go big! Spray paint it on the side of a cruise ship, so you’re in everybody’s vacation photos! Besides, then they’ll have the address of something to read when they’re quarantined for a norovirus.

    3. I’m going to steal an idea from D. D. Harriman and suggest a large targeted dust explosion to put an image on the Fleming Rabbit on the face of the Moon. The technical details will be left to the student. The legal details will be left to the law firm of Dewey Cheatham and Howe.

    4. Well, at least that’s less burdensome than wearing a sandwich board and marching up and down the main street of the nearest commercial district. Less wear and tear on the sneakers, too.

  15. A week ago, I would have suggested that you get the Prez to denounce your book on Twitter. But now, getting Hillary Clinton to accuse it of being part of a Communist, pardon me, Russian plot to start a third party might work even better. Incidentally, A. E. van Vogt’s Linn series (Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn;, originally pubbed in Astounding in the late forties and early fifties)) have horses on space ships, but rationale is that the spaceships are left over from a higher civilization that collapsed, and still work, though the present civilization only know how to pilot them, not how to build new ones, so they’re used to take war horses into battle with, yes, swords and arrows as weapons. Van Vogt may be out of favor these days, but I still like his stuff.

      1. Donald Trump, Jill Stein, Tulsi Gabbard, the samples lady at Costsco – but not Bernie “Honeymooned in the USSR” Sanders.

      2. She hasn’t accused me.. yet.
        Evidently I haven’t presented a big enough RADAR profile to the.. [Tries to think of name that doesn’t insult the undeserving, fails].

        2. I think she has to know of you, and know that you oppose her and her demonic associates, before she starts calling you a Russian assets – or sending the Arkansas mob to arrange your “suicide.”

        3. She’s not using radar. After propagation, the signals she sends out would be far far below the noise threshold of her receiver. Assuming her circuits don’t simply run directly from her transmitter to her receiver.

          Seriously, the whole of the Democratic Party going all in on backing her tantrum has obviously not been super great for her sanity. Kinda sad really.

          1. I’d say watching social dementia in progress. Obvious if you’ve seen it before or have no sympathy for the individual in question.

            FYI. Running 2 for 2 on this one. Seen it, been sucked into it before, with someone cared about & loved … grandmother. HRC – no sympathy for, so can easily see the horror of how it affects others.

            Social Dementia – the ability of during the actual conversation to appear sane and clear headed. But examined in light of day, is bat poo crazy, has nothing to do with reality.

      4. I am going to have to call this an overstatement — she hasn’t called out any of her supporters as Russian agents, even the ones who are Russian agents.

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  17. Alfred Coppel as “Robert Cham Gilman” apparently lifted the horses-on-spaceships thing intact from van Vogt, backstory and all, for his first three Rhada books.

    Coppel’s novels are more readable than van Vogt’s, in that he was able to tell a coherent story without continually veering off into dead-end tangents.

    Alas, Coppel never quite “made it” as an SF author, and nothing of his has been in print for decades. But you can find most of his short stories at archive.org. I expect he planned a “fix-up” novel combining all the Gree stories, but he was writing old-school SF and the editors were apparently mostly buying New Wave…

      1. Thus far too much of New Wave fiction, and apparently one of this year’s Man Booker winners. PoV changes multiple times per chapter are just the beginning, according to several people.

      2. Forced to choose between a coherent story and an entertaining one I pay for entertaining.

        As those following the Demoncraps anti-Trump narrative have noticed, coherent does not equal credible.

  18. Make outlandish, unverifiable claims for how your book can cure baldness and erectile dysfunction, remove stubborn belly fat, whiten teeth, stop urinary incontinence, and broker peace across the Middle East.

    Followed of course by an unintelligible, sesquipedalian legal disclaimer in four point text.

    2. I read it whilst drinking a double Manhattan, and did NOT waste any whiskey (or vermouth). Perhaps I’ve developed a small measure of immunity? Or is it being (mostly) orthogonal to Reality?

  21. Place, in appropriately tiny text, “not a” followed by huge text saying “HUGO AWARD WINNING NOVEL!”

    Oh, wait – that would probably hurt sales, wouldn’t hit? Howabout “Hugo Rejected Novel”?

    Perhaps “Soon to be an award-winning Television Series” for that all important tie-in buying?

    “No animals were harmed in the production of this book!” couldn’t hurt.

    1. Jackie Chan talked about some of his earliest movies where the poster for the movie would seriously say… (really small) the next… then (really big) BRUCE LEE… and then (really small) Jackie Chan.

  22. The best marketing strategy is to nuke the Moon with enough nukes to spell out “buy Hellbender”

      1. Nuke the moon! It’s always an awesome strategy. After all, a good strategy is one that Frank J. Fleming enjoys. Wait, that’s not right.

  23. Does your promotional material mention that the book is Gluten Free? Or that it is 100% Fat Free? And that reading it has been proven effective at preventing Global Warming Climate Change?

    Perhaps you should hire a Celebrity Instagrammer or {Adult Film] Actress to pose a the author? If it isn’t too late you could even have that actress do the reading, or at least the free sample Audible usually offers.

    Judging by the material in my Spam Filter, popular marketing terms include prurient, frisky, throbbing, carnal, tool, and MILFs. Have you considered re-titling your book “MILFs In Space”?

  24. Nukes are expensive. Get Lens Larque (From Jack Vance’s
    Demon Princes series) listed as coauthor. Then when critics and reviewers pan the book, he’ll put the blurb up for you.

  25. Split a paper copy into thin sections. Leave them on trains and buses, where readers looking for a fix to get them through the commute will get hooked on a few pages. Remember to stamp a QR code on the last page.

  27. In all seriousness, Marc Alan Edelheit has a book about making it in the indie market, and he can justify that because he’s done it. His Stiger series, and its two spinoff series both do exceptionally well on Amazon, sufficient that he’s quit his day job and writes full time now.

    Look it up on Amazon, under his name.

    1. There are a ton of books on “making it in the indie market” and every author who writes them has made it.
      Each is different.
      There are many many many paths. Do what works for you.

      1. Yeah, that’s always my attitude on those sort of things. I think my own path into the success I’ve had is completely unrepeatable.

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  30. Honestly, I mostly go with the “you wrote a book?” “oh yeah, I wrote a book,” approach.

    I mostly did it for the Agnes Nutter reason anyway, to have a copy for myself.

    (yes I forget I wrote a book shut up I’m busy reading)

  31. Marketing strategies? Well there’s always the tried and true. And by that I mean beautiful, scantily clad members of the opposite sex. SCMOOTS for short. If you can ever figure out which one this “opposite” is, you’re golden, because 99% of everybody loves them some opposite sex. I’m pretty sure it is in the list of thirty-some odd, or ninety, or eleventy-thirty-six or whatever number there are now. Figure out which one this opposite sex is, put ’em on a cover clad in scantilies, and you’re golden.

    Of course, for the teeny tiny percentage that actually want to read the words in the book (hardly worth mentioning, really), you can try addiction. Sprinkle cocaine on the pages gently. Or some other contact-feel-good pharmaceutical. They’ll keep coming back for more. Or for you, for jail, but anyway, free publicity! Might be handy to have a backup plan, escape route, and multiple (non-conflicting) alibis. Just in case.

    If they happen to miss the cover and go straight to the pages, but are wearing gloves, dastardly devious readers those ones are, you might have to break out the big guns. I mean big words. Sciencey words. Folks who wear gloves when they read tend to have big libraries. And volcano lairs.

    Of course, if it’s an e-book then the cocaine bit is right out, and the big words get looked up on wikipedia, so don’t be using them just randomly. That’s just stupid. You can even try sticking foreign words in there, but English has a way of swallowing all the good ones and carrying on like no one was looking, even if they were totally looking, and pointing, the whole time. So make sure the words work. That’s important. Great writers do that, I’m told.

    I must discommend the tearing out random pages and sticking them in bottles, to throw in the ocean. That’s more of a long term strategy, and your book might be out of print before anyone collects a mostly complete set somewhere in Africa, and trades pages with another guy in Australia, and a third and fourth in South America.

    Okay, so we’ve covered blatant sexuality and drugs. And cheap word tricks for those folks easily distracted by big words. What’s left? Music, of course! You can get a sweet rock ballad going about your book, nd people sing along to it, some portion of the music loving population might buy it just to say “sure, the song was great, but the book was definitely better” like people do with movies. Side note: don’t do this with movies, they’ll get it all wrong, unless it is Peter Jackson. And you won’t get Peter Jackson. But you might get a guy with an accordion to burp out a few notes while reading one of the spicier passages, and hey, who knows?

    Of cours, if you’re really ambitious, you could put it on a political platform and get buying your book to be compulsory, like a tax, like they did back a few years ago with Obamacare. If you like your book, you can keep your book! It’s a great campaign slogan. Just rely on the stupidity of the American voter… err, reader, and you can’t go wrong, right? And you have to pass the bill to find out what’s in the book, of course. Except you can buy it now, so that’s out. At this point, what difference does it make?

    Now if you’ll pardon me, I have an operation scheduled, yes the common tongue-from-cheek extraction. Shouldn’t take too long, but the waiting list, man, it’s atrocious. Should have it done sometime before I’m two hundred and sevety, if all goes well. It’ll be on a Tuesday.

  32. THIS BOOK WILL MAKE SJWS’ HEADS EXPLODE!!!
    [tiny, tiny print] if you force them to read it. Or if it becomes a best-seller. Or gets nominated for a Hugo. Buying a copy will help. Maybe. Well, it can’t hurt. Right?

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  35. “It’s a Book about Pirates!”
    “It’s a Horror Story!”
    “It’s a Homoerotic Spacethriller!”
    “It’s the Greatest Book ever written in the history of the Human Race!”
    – Rep. Adam Schiff (D)
    ( Repeat 7 times.)

  36. Let the readers know that Fleming is pronounced flaming.
    This will attract LBTQ readers.

    Donald Trump does not want you to read this book.
    (Any number of public figures can be substituted for DJT)

    The electricity used to generate this book was from Green Energy sources
    (Do not mention that birds and insects were harmed in the making of
    the book, due to windmills and solar)

    Be careful about the lies you tell.
    You might be mistaken for the MSM, whose circulation is in decline.

  37. Three time proven strategeries:

    The underwear gnome strategy :
    1. Steal underwear
    2. ??????
    3. Profit

    The Kowtow (endorsed by Hollywood AND the NBA!):
    Everyone knows that the biggest, most lucrative market is in China. Execute this strategy like the CPC executes dissidents!
    1. Make sure the villian is a capitalist pig.
    2. Include no references to Winnie the poo
    3. Send out blurbs praising China (any Krugman column will do)

    The Mitt:
    1. Create a burner twitter account, something like ‘Delectable PieHole’
    2. Send out tweets with a rousing defense of your work (something like: eh, that Frank guys not that bad).
    3. Threaten to have the media Doxx someone for wrongthink unless they buy your book.

  38. Free with? As in “Buy this audiobook and get, free with your purchase, an ebook copy.” Yes, people don’t want to part with their money but seem more than willing to if it means they get something extra with the purchase.

    Free with could include:
    – alternate version of book (already mentioned)
    – book notes / character sketches / alternate covers
    – chapter of other book or short story featuring characters
    – collection of ‘Best of’ blog posts in handy PDF format
    – a chance for a 1-on-1 or short group discussion with author about book, publishing, etc.

    1. I don’t like free. Free means no money.

      You do get the ebook free with the paperback already.

  39. Free with. As in “Buy this audiobook and get, free with your purchase, the ebook version.” People don’t like parting with their money but love getting a “bargain” which this is a version of.

    Things that can be “free with”
    – alternate formats of same book (already mentioned)
    – book notes / character sketches / rejected covers
    – chapter of next book in series or free short story featuring character from book
    – collection of “Best blog posts” in handy PDF format

  40. My wife has suggested I leave copies of my books on city buses so when a rider picks it up and starts flipping through, all the other riders will think it must be the hottest new thing – because bus commuters only read the hottest new thing, right? I’m sure it would work great, but neither one of us wants to pony up the bus fare, plus we don’t want to have to get onto a city bus. You should totally try it though.

  41. Put out a video of two shady-looking characters speaking in Ukrainian. Doesn’t matter what they’re talking about, just sub-title the video stating that an American agency apparently in charge of putting nuclear weapons on the moon had broken into the computer system of Ukraine’s top intelligence agency, and stolen the word-for-word transcript of Trump’s discussions with the Ukrainian president, which would absolutely sink Trump if revealed. The information is being passed, to the people that need to know it, hidden in coded words and phrases in a book distributed by the moon-nuking agency called Hellbender.

    Even if someone who speaks Ukrainian gets out there and tries to accurately translate what’s being said in the video, it’s easily dismissed with claims of “Russian disinformation, put out at Trump’s request!”

    Within a week, some whack-job SJW (or Adam Schiff) will say that they’ve cracked the code, and then everyone will be buying the book to prove them right/wrong.

    As the man said – by the time they figure out what went wrong, you’ll be sitting on a beach, making twenty percent.

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  45. Whatever you do,
    Never
    Never
    Never
    Never
    Never
    As in
    NOT EVER
    Should you state that your book contains any information that could lead to the arrest and/or conviction on anyone with the last name of Clinton.

  46. With pornography being a multi-billion dollar business, sell your book on porn sites. Lie and say it’s a book about introductory rope bondage techniques and with every sale the buyer is entered into a contest to win a date with their favorite porn star. Guaranteed results.

  47. Kidnapping pets is the old, low-tech way of doing things. Nobody really does that anymore, it’s tedious and you end up with quite a lot of bites, scratches and (shudder) stings.

    No, the future is high tech kidnapping. Specifically, ransomware. Most people use ransomware to steal money – you’ve seen them. “I’ve encrypted all your data, send me $50 or you’ll never see it again.” You see, you just replace “stolen” with “encrypted” and “pets” with “data”. Most people can’t really tell the difference.

    Additionally, a book sale is much cheaper than a $50 ransomware payment, so people find your ransomware to be a bargain over other, more expensive ransomware payments.

    Incidentally, you can find my books at my website (williamhkline.com). If you ever want to see grandma’s pound cake recipe again, you know what to do.

  49. Just so everyone knows I’m listening to Hellbender courtesy of FJF (he’s nothing if not courteous) and I’m not even tired of listening to it! I do wish it was a movie cause listening cuts into my movie time and if it was a movie it wouldn’t do that. Frank, any suggestions?

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