Marketing Gone Wrong

Every six months or so, we get a writer who comes onto one of the message boards I visit, and he alienates himself by trying to market something.  It’s usually a non-fiction writer, but the last one was a novelist.  He’d published a handful of novels and was teaching writing.

I’ve been thinking about how that communication misfired so badly, because that may be something useful for a story.  Or certainly on how not to market.  I’ve known two other marketers, and both followed the same pattern as this fellow.

A number of years ago, a couple of us had set up an official Web site for an actor, with his blessing.  Enter the PR Guy.  PR Guy agreed to a deal with Photo Guy to sell photos of the actor on the Internet.  Photo Guy was setting up 50 “official” sites for actors to sell photos.  Most of the actors were retired and didn’t have Web sites.

Problem:  We already had the official site for this one actor.  Photo Guy demanded that we take off the ”official.”  We thought the whole thing was silly.  His site sold photos, and it was obvious it sold photos.  We listed credits, appearances, and FAQs.  We’d also been up for two years.

PR Guy went into marketing mode to get us to change, telling us what we “needed” to do.   Because he wasn’t consciously marketing, it caused him to miss some obvious cues.  Each no meant to him, “Yes, with right persuasion.” 

We went through this for two weeks, with phone calls and lengthy voice mails, all trying to market us into taking off the word official.  The only way he finally stopped was for the other person who was also doing the site to give him a verbal head smack. 

With the writer, I honestly think he fell into the same place–no idea he was “on” and marketing.  Marketers live by the sales.  They have to sell all the time because they don’t know when something might turn into a sale.   If they don’t get a sale, they don’t make money and pay the rent.

Everything for this writer became a sale–sell an idea, sell a method, sell a process–not something to discuss.  When people questioned the “sale,” he repeated all his points  because the sale wasn’t working.  The more people questioned him, the more he tried to sell.  The more he tried to sell, the more people became annoyed.  When he couldn’t make the sale, he became  angry and blamed the writers for not understanding his point of view.

This was really surprising, considering he was a published writer.  As writers, our first and primary goal is to make sure we’re communicating properly.  If one person doesn’t get the message, but everyone else does, then that’s his problem.  If twenty people don’t get the message, then something was wrong in the communication.  In this case, he missed not only that he was trying to sell and didn’t know it, but that he was selling to audience that was not only not interested but wasn’t ever going to buy.

Obviously, part of writing a book, even a novel, is some marketing.  But it’s also important to recognize that when someone isn’t buying, not to keep hitting them over the head to get them to buy.