It’s a (Mad, Mad) Marketing World — So Plot Your Marketing
By Guest | June 2, 2017 |
Please welcome novelist and screenwriter (TV, film) Dale Kutzera to Writer Unboxed today!
Dale grew up in the Pacific Northwest and worked as a screenwriter for over ten years. Among his credits are the VH-1 series “Strange Frequency,” the CBS drama “Without a Trace,” and the independent film “Military Intelligence And You!” He is a recipient of the Carl Sautter Screenwriting Award, and the Environmental Media Award.
His novels include the “Andy McBean” middle-grade adventures.
He has recently released a plotting guidebook for novelists called “The Plot Machine.”
Dale’s “The Plot Machine: Design Better Stories Faster” is a book spot-on for the WU audience; it’s for intermediate writers, not beginners, and proposes a fresh way to think about story — through the design of the plot itself.
You can learn more about Dale and The Plot Machine on his website, and by following him on LinkedIn and Facebook.
It’s a (Mad, Mad) Marketing World
Now more than ever, writing has become a matter of quantity as much as quality. You can blame the 500 channels on your television, the game machine below it, and the millions of books just a click away on your phone or tablet.
That’s a lot of options for story-consumers and a lot of competition for story-producers.
Standing out in this crowd is either impossible or insanely expensive. Television networks, movie studios, and traditional publishers can no longer rely on old-media to reach a wide audience. The top concern of every agent, editor, development executive, and producer is marketing. The first question asked of every manuscript, screenplay, and television pilot is, “How would this be marketed?”
Genre, plot, characters, setting—the traditional elements on which a work is judged—all take a back seat to marketing. This isn’t to say that leaders in the story-industry are blind to quality, just that ease-of-marketing is the first hurdle a project must clear.
1. Branding
If given a choice, would you market a stand-alone story, or the first in a series? Assuming both are of equal quality, the smart choice is the series, because the marketing dollars spent on story #1 would build an audience for story #2.
Franchise or branding potential is the second hurdle a story must clear. A major decision for writers today is whether their property can become a series (the same characters in many stand-alone stories) or a serial (one story spanning several episodes). Star Trek is a series. Harry Potter is a serial.
This pressure to brand has lead to the decline of stand-alone stories, whether individual novels, anthology TV series, Movies of the Week, or the sort of high-minded theatrical films that win Oscars.
2. Name Recognition
The impact of marketing and branding are all around us. These days, it is hard to find a theatrical film that isn’t a sequel, a reboot, or an adaptation of some pre-existing, pre-marketed property.
Stand-alone books or films are typically the work of name creators who have become a brand unto themselves—for example, the comedies of Judd Apatow, or the horror novels of Stephen King. Traditional-media is like a popular nightclub. Only the hipsters with name recognition get past the velvet rope.
3. Changing Distribution
As traditional media focus on fewer high-profile projects, new means of distribution have broadened the field for everyone else. Filmmakers now look to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu as legitimate “studios.” Authors can publish directly on Amazon, iBooks, and Nook.
These new outlets have changed viewing habits. Our audience is accustomed to binge-viewing stories without commercial interruption whenever they want. The nation no longer watches the same program at the same time on the same night…then talks about it the next day around the water-cooler.
4. Changing Stories
Changing the way we distribute and consume stories has changed the kind of stories we create.
Stand-alone projects are in the decline. On the rise are genre stories (crime, romance, thriller, science fiction) written in series or serial form. These stories are often crafted for “stickiness,” with complex narratives that attract viewers like bugs on flypaper. You can blame the TV series Lost for the popularity of this narrative style, but soap-operas have used the technique for decades.
Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and everything by Shonda Rhimes are deliberately “sticky.” Such shows may attract a loyal audience, but their complexity can be a barrier to new viewers.
This brings me back to the importance of quantity over quality.
If the path to financial success is now paved with franchise stories, then writers have to write more words. Gone are the days when Margaret Mitchell, J.D. Salinger, or Harper Lee could write one novel and then pretty much retire.
Writers today must generate a lot of content. That means writing faster and plotting faster. The ability to design plots efficiently will determine a writer’s success or failure.
Plot like your career depends on it.
How do you plot your marketing?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Great article, Dale. I agree with you about the way writers must keep up with the new trends in the entertainment industry. After a ten-year hiatus from writing my first and only science fiction novel with limited success, I was encouraged to start writing again in 2013. One piece of advice I received from that person was that branding only works if you publish several great stories in a short period of time, and if they are a series, it works even better. I rewrote that first novel as the beginning of the Alex Cave Series, and now that I’ve published five books in three years, I’ve built up a decent number of fans who anxiously await the next Alex Cave adventure. By the way, I also grew up in the Pacific Northwest, on Orcas Island.
Lucky you, growing up on Orcas. My family would vacation up there some summers when I was growing up.
And congrats on the series. I wish I had that discipline. I’ve been writing all over the map, but have decided to go back to my own detective character and focus just on that series going forward. Trying to take my own advice.
Hi Dale: I’m sure your book has value for many writers. But for me, may I disagree with your premise? Do you really believe that the fast track is a good thing for writers? “…writing faster and plotting faster … quantity over quality…plot like our career depends on it” seems in opposition to the true craft of writing, which is a process of artistic creation that demands time, respect, and skills. And anyway, genuine plot evolves from the characters, not the marketing goals of the author. Marketing folks are constantly trying to bait writers into joining the race (yes, it’s a mad, mad one) and hop on the trendy series train, sell at 99cents, or do giveaways. Your post begs the question why are we writing and for whom? I’m not a marketing maverick trying to win; I’m a writer with a small but sturdy readership of my three novels and short stories. It’s not high success but it’s not failure either. I’ve learned that nothing in this writing and publishing industry is so black and white; nothing is easy, quick, or promises financial success as you seem to suggest. You mention Harper Lee, but she is well known for saying “Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.” A thoughtful post today, Dale, and really got me going!
I strongly feel the same. There’s cheap, fast food to be consumed standing in between two rushes, and there is the classy restaurant dinner “au quatre chandelles” elaborated by a starred chef; each can have to his/her own taste, circumstance and need.
Every writer has to find that balance between their heart and their pocketbook. Some…and I consider myself in this category…write purely for their own self-satisfaction.
Hopefully there is a sweet spot where your work not only makes you happen and proud, but also finds an audience. That is the ideal any artist strives for.
But….we don’t get to choose the marketing environment into which we have been born. Any era has it’s own quirks and rewards those who can adapt to them. To that end, I do believe that a facility with plotting can help.
I would think it all depends on whether writing is your vocation or you avocation.
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, known as Cordwainer Smith, didn’t write for a living. A professor first at Duke University, and author of the classic textbook “Psychological Warfare,” he wrote because he loved to write, saying in the prologue to the collection 1965 “Space Lords:”
“These stories are for us– for me who write them, because I love them; for you who are looking at them.”
And aren’t those the best kinds of stories?
The corpus of Cordwainer Smith’s future history is quite large, and very well loved and respected. But he didn’t hurry it, didn’t crank it out like a worker in Orwell’s kaleidoscope from “1984.” It was a labor of love, not of commerce.
Perhaps it’s just me, but what Dale describes treads frightfully close to Orwell’s kaleidoscope. Is that the future of writing?
I am fortunate to have a career that allows me to follow Cordwainer Smith’s path, and write stories that I love as I find the time and inspiration to do so. And if it never sells, I will still have the stories, still have loved writing them, and still love reading them, just as I do now (although it does slow the writing process considerably when I succumb to the urge to do so.)
BTW, the dedication in Smith’s “Space Lords” is one of the most powerful and touching writing I’ve ever read. Younger readers, unfamiliar with the issues of Smith’s day, may not understand the nuances. But hopefully they’ll still feel the story.
It strikes me that the writer who is trying to break-in is in a tricky situation: as you explained, you can’t break-in without having multi manuscripts and yet if that first manuscript doesn’t sell its impossible to sell the second manuscript in the series.
This is true if you’re going for a traditional publishing path. I’m not a huge fan of that path unless you have an inside track to a major publisher. The money for a new writer isn’t great, you give up a lot of creative control, and you have to fit into their calendar.
I think a better path is to take those couple titles and publish them independently. You may find an audience online and build up some writing chops so that the next MS is even more professional and likely to attract an agent/publisher.
I agree with Paula.
The advice I give anyone who asks is to realize that what works for one writer may be the worst possible advice for another.
If newbies are aware of this, they will save a lot of time not going down paths (except to sample them) that they can clearly tell are not right for them. Best: sample lots of paths.
I loved Lawrence Block’s columns on writing and cut my writing teeth on Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. Except it was the kind of advice – from an extreme pantser – which left me – an extreme plotter – baffled for years. He made perfect sense – and I couldn’t get from where I was to where he was.
Then I realized at one point that, although I enjoyed those columns on writing which had been published in Writer’s Digest, they were non-fiction, and that I didn’t like the fiction he wrote. His advice – if nothing is happening, bring in a man with a gun – didn’t result in the kind of stories I wanted to tell.
Big eye opener: figure out how to produce what YOU want to write.
There’s plenty of advice out there for all kinds of writers. But you first have to realize there is no ‘One True Way.’
Figuring out what you want to write is the ideal….in large part because success is often based on picking that one genre and sticking to it. In that way it is a bit of a trap. So choose well.
I thought I’d be the only one who read this latest WU and wondered why we need to feed the beast of fast, mostly mediocre, and more of it. Then I started with Paula’s comments and didn’t feel quite so alone in the literary landscape Dale offers as a goal.