I hate to talk about “how to market” your tales. It de-emphasizes the fact that you have to write a great book or movie in the first place, before you can market it. But marketing your work is a necessity.
My main concern is this: back when I ran the writing track for DragonCon, each year I would put together dozens of writing classes, and about the same 40 people would attend all of them. Then I’d put up a class on, “How to Sell Your Novel to Publishers,” and literally the biggest auditorium that we had—with over 2000 seats—couldn’t hold the spectators. (In other words, folks want fame without doing the work).
Very often, I will look at a book that is written well, and I almost want to weep. I’ll see authors trying to tell tired old tales that I’ve seen a thousand times before, and trying to no avail to set themselves apart or make their work come alive…on my last Daily Kick…I got a letter back from a professional marketer asking for a bit of clarification. (Part 1 of this email conversation follows):
Marketer: First off, what you are saying makes a hell of a lot of sense, so much so that there must be a much more scientific, formulaic approach that has been done by each and every serious movie producer or studio and other entities involved, something they can put in the hands of their green-lighting specialists or producers…
Dave: Each of the major studios, as I understand it, has some kind of green-lighting marketing division. Their techniques and research are kept under wraps. There are also some good green-lighting companies that cater to independent investors and filmmakers. I worked for a time with Entertainment Business Group (EBG), one such company, and learned a great deal. But there are others. Past employees are forbidden to reveal certain details, of course, and I only share information that the company owner would give out in seminars. I didn’t keep copies of the company’s research databases.
I can say that there are different approaches to green-lighting. For example, White Light Entertainment looks at a “formulaic” approach. They believe that each audience has an ideal movie that they’re paying to see, and one can study the elements of plot, cast, setting, and so on, in order to determine what the ideal combination might be. I’m mainly discussing the approach that EBG was using, along with some of my own observations, and those of book professionals that I’ve known.
Marketer: But my main concern is that having studied stock analysis somewhat, it occurs to me that looking for similarities in the top movies of all time is probably not just similar to but rather exactly like stock analysis methods. All but one or two analysis models are built by predicting what will work in the future based upon probabilities reflecting what has happened in the past, although it can be argued that what will happen in the future is not tied to the past...
You might also ask yourself, did that movie work because it capitalized timely and well on one trend, or did it actually compound several trends well? So in studying the biggest money makers, maybe you need to look not just at the all-time results, but also at the trends of the moment…
David: You've got it all right, so far. Movie makers look for trends to some degree, and they’ve always got one eye on “what’s popular.” Books that go big get made into movies because there’s a guaranteed audience. The Scooby Doo movies were a big hit because they resonated with adults who watched the television shows years ago, and now wanted their kids to enjoy them.
In the same way, the Hunger Games movie is setting records for pre-sales. The book wasn’t as huge a hit as Harry Potter, but it is riding a powerful trend. It plays upon the resonance of television shows like Survivor, American Idol, and other reality shows, but it also capitalizes on the resonance of movies like Gladiator. So one might predict that “reality-based” books should do well with YA reads now.
(End of Part 1)
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