A Promote-Your-Own-Way Case Study
Saturday
Night Live Writer Uses
Article/Essay Route for Marketing
Article/Essay Route for Marketing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of the multi award-winning
HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers
HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers
In the
second edition of my The Frugal Book Promoter, I suggest writing articles and
selling them (or giving them away free). It is an especially good way to get
exposure for authors who are shy or think they’ll hate marketing but admit they
love writing. So I was pleased to see an op-ed piece in the LA Times written by Patricia Marx,
former Saturday Night Live writer and
a staff writer for The New Yorker.
The little credit at the end of her piece said it
was an essay excerpted from her new book Let’s
Be Less Stupid: An attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties. She let her
Saturday Night Live voice shine throughout the piece and added a sidebar that
was a quiz on “how to be brainier.” The essay included a nice byline for her, and
the essay was illustrated with a brain-map of the worries we tend to have as
our brain ages—in color no less. And it was huge
attention getter!
This kind of marketing is pure genius because:
•
The piece was a
marketing time-saver. Marx didn’t have to write anything she hadn’t already
written. She probably only tweaked the excerpt a bit to suit space requirements
and maybe added the sidebar. She carefully
slanted the article to related topics that are in the news right now. Think: Aging
population. The fear of Alzheimer’s. Dementia. These are topics news outlets
from CNN to the Wall Street Journal
are covering these days.
Her humorous voice
immediately captures readers who then want to know more about her expertise and
about her personally. Thus, a huge percentage of readers probably do what I
did—that is they read through to that little bio/credit line to get that
information. (It didn’t include a link, but that is probably because a URL or
link goes against the LA Times’s
stylebook.)
Marx can repeat
this particular marketing approach to every paper in the nation. I mean, she
has a whole book of chapters and subheads to choose from so she could
accommodate papers that require an exclusive.
•
If her
credentials had not been quite so stellar, she might well have done the same
thing submitting guest posts to blogs that may not be quite as hard to impress
as the major newspapers. She probably will do that in any case. Stephanie
Meyers of Twilight fame used blogs
effectively to propel her series to bestseller status.
And Marx probably
got paid and paid pretty well. That money could be put toward a great marketing
budget for her book.
And guess what. You can do the same thing. Yes,
you may have to adjust your technique or approach a tad to fit your title, your
writing style, and whatever happens to be news in the moment (or you can wait
until a topic that complements your book becomes an in-the-moment subject—and I
promise if you keep your marketing hat on, you’ll recognize something related
to some aspect of your book when it comes up!).
ABOUT THE WRITERS ON THE MOVE BLOGGER
Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings
her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, and retailer to the advice
she gives in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers and the many
classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for UCLA Extension’s
world-renown Writers’ Program. All her books for writers are multi award
winners including the first edition of The Frugal Book
Promoter. TheFrugal Editor,
now in its second edition, won awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views
Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and others
including the coveted Irwin award.
Howard-Johnson is the recipient
of the California Legislature’s Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment
Award, and her community’s Character and Ethics award for her work promoting
tolerance with her writing. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly’s list of “Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who
make life happen” and was given her community’s Diamond Award for Achievement
in the Arts.
The author loves to travel. She
has visited eighty-nine countries and has studied writing at Cambridge
University in the United Kingdom; Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia;
and Charles University, Prague. She admits to carrying a pen and journal
wherever she goes. Her Web site is www.howtodoitfrugally.com.