Marketing
In the publication world, there’s a tremendous amount of focus on the publication date as THE time for publicity and promotion. I’ve seen authors throw up their hands the week after publication, when media interest is just starting to trickle in, and say, “I guess we struck out.”
As I’ve mentioned here before, book promotion and publicity take time. It can often take months for an article or review to appear. But even though it’s ideal to get promotion efforts started before the big on-sale day, the sky’s the limit as far as what can be done, and what can happen, even long after that day.
My friend and literary idol Anjali Mitter Duva is a glowing example. Her debut novel, Faint Promise of Rain, released in October of 2014. Since then, she has devoted herself tirelessly to promoting it via traditional media, social media, public speaking engagements (including the occasional dance performance related to the book’s plot) and much more. Last year, her efforts led to the fulfillment of a dream: a foreign rights deal with French publisher Editions Tallandier. The French edition, Adhira, fille de la pluie, released in France (where Anjali grew up) this past May – almost 4 years after the U.S. publication. Anjali’s deep commitment to long-term promotion played an important role in this wonderful turn of events.
What did she do? How did she do it? I’m thrilled to have Anjali join us today to talk about her incredible journey, and share a number of extremely handy and insightful tips: One of my favorites: “know that you’re in it for the long haul and make plans that are slow, steady and sustainable.”
Welcome, Anjali!
SB: From the very start, you had a clear vision of what you wanted for Faint Promise of Rain. Can you share that with us?
AMD: When I started to write Faint Promise of Rain, way back in a previous era, I already knew I was in it for the long haul. You see, I planned from the start to write a set of four related but free-standing books, all historical novels with dance and India at their center, yet all set at different times and contexts in history. FPR was to be the first. I think some of this long-term planning comes from my background as an urban planner working on infrastructure projects: very long projects with frequent cost overruns and schedule changes! This long-term vision is what set the tone and pace for my promotion efforts: slow, steady, sustainable. My idea was to build a loyal, strong readership and following, because I knew (at least, I hoped, and still do) that people who enjoyed my first book would likely enjoy my next three as well. But these are historical novels that take, for me at least, years to research and write. So my approach had to be one I could sustain–financially, logistically, energy-wise–over time. Years, if not decades. Five […]
Read More
The author before and after learning how to use a semicolon
I get approached from time to time by aspiring new writers, asking for advice on how to get started. The longer I’ve been doing this, the harder it gets to answer them. At this point I’ve been in the game nearly 20 years, so how do I condense what I’ve learned into a quick conversation or a brief email? And what if they are interested in a completely different type of writing than the kind that has made me as rich and famous as I currently am? (Hmmm – now that I think about it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But I digress…)
So how to advise them? Do I lecture them on the ever-changing industry? Warn them of the dangers of reading the works of Clive Cussler? Or simply hand them a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style and turn around and run? Depending on who asks, it’s hard to determine which advice would be the most useful.
When in doubt, fire up the time machine!
I’ve been binge-watching the old Stargate SG-1 TV series recently, and several of the stories focus on time travel, a concept that has always fascinated me. In a couple of episodes, the main characters manage to pass messages to versions of themselves who are living in a different time.
This got me to thinking: what kind of messages would Current-Day Keith send to Past Keith?
After considering obvious nuggets like “buy stock in Amazon” and “don’t enroll in Trump University,” I started thinking about what I would tell Keith The Writer From The Past (or, KTWFTP). Since SG-1 episodes usually incorporate a ticking clock or some other increasingly urgent complications, I decided to ramp up the pressure, and limit myself to five pieces of advice. Here’s what I came up with to share with the younger (and yes, hairier) Keith.
1. Know your genre – and its conventions.
Probably the biggest – and hardest – lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that genre matters. Historically the genre of a book just wasn’t something I thought or cared about – as a reader or as a writer. But after writing one hard-to-categorize manuscript after another, the first message I would pass on to KTWFTP is to pick a damn genre already. It will make things SO much simpler.
Why? Genre simplifies things by setting expectations. It helps an agent sell your book. It helps a publisher market your book. It helps a reader choose your book.
And if you’re self-publishing, it helps YOU market your book, which is utterly crucial. In an era when anybody can publish anything, you need a way to make your book stand out to your potential readers.
Read More
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Put your very best writing on the first page of your manuscript, I was once told, and the rest will rise to the challenge. This is a good thing, because your very best writing belongs on every other page, as well.
In fact, today I want to convince you why your very best writing belongs everywhere.
Synopsis
Most writers consider it a necessary evil, so why spend more time on it than you have to? Here’s why: if you treat it as a precious piece of storytelling, you might sell your book. Or a movie option. Infuse your synopsis with voice and drama and character. Make the reader feel something. Such synopses are out there, writers, and yours may be competing with them.
Website
Think of visitors to your site as browsers in your personal store. You wouldn’t want to leave punctuation and spelling errors lying around for them to stumble over, would you? Your customers are already hindered by having no beautifully designed book to pick up and flip through. Make your graphics and digital copy pop off the page to shake your reader’s hand in a way that says, “I am a competent, confident writer that you can trust for your entertainment needs.”
Blog posts
Blog posts have come a long way since those first steam-of-consciousness missives by “iamawriter” in the 1990s, when capitalization and correct spelling were optional. These days it couldn’t be more different. In 2014, while promoting my first novel, I was surprised at the hoops my publicist sent me through just to come up with original content for book bloggers. She vetted all posts and sent them back with comments like “you can write a stronger opening.” And I could.
This was my first stab at an opening for As I Turn the Pages in answer to the question, “How has dance impacted your life?”
I was an active child with an unquenchable thirst for rhythmic physical endeavor. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was playing hopscotch and jump rope, skiing (snow and water), diving, taking gymnastics, and cheerleading. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.
Second try:
I leapt into the world feet first and ready for action. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was skipping across chalked patterns, diving from springboards, slicing hills with my skis, flipping over high jumps—then trying to do any or all of it on the balance beam. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.
Pro tip: Even if the point of your post is to interview another author, fashioning your questions so they elicit a story arc represents your own abilities as a novelist better than five random questions.
Social media comments
You may not realize the impact you make with the comments you leave on other people’s social media posts.
Read More
image by Guillaume Joly
Writers get tired.
The process of writing, of editing, of writing some more, of editing some more, of searching for representation, of reworking the book yet again, of waiting so long to see your words in print that you forget you even wrote some of them, of publishing in its maddening and bountiful entirety… well, some days, it can feel like too much.
Every stage has its own ups and downs, but personally, I find the promotion stage both the most exciting and the most challenging. Many parts of the publishing process can feel out of your control. Partly that’s because they are. But promotion is different because, unlike other stages, it has the capacity to go on forever. The joy and terror of publishing in the social media age is that once you have a book, you literally could be promoting it every minute of every day.
(Note to writers everywhere: do NOT promote your book every minute of every day.)
Right now, my latest book (published under a pseudonym, as regular readers know) has been out in paperback for a few months. Typically, this is when a publisher’s efforts to promote the book taper off and any further promotion is squarely in my hands. Since my next book isn’t out for almost a year, it’s a little early to start pushing that one, so it would make perfect sense for me to push a little harder on promotion of the paperback one.
And yet I spend day after day not doing it. Why? Because, as I mentioned above: tired.
But I’ve been here before, and I always find a way out. I will this time too. In case you find yourself in the same situation, here are my three rules for getting out of a why-do-I-bother, so-tired-of-promoting-this-book funk:
Read More
Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash
I have to confess I’ve never been a huge fan of public speaking. And yet, since Everyone Knows You Go Home came out in March, I’ve been on a whirlwind of a book tour that’s consisted of day after day of public speaking.
And I’ve loved every minute of it.
Despite being an introvert and a person who grew up very shy and soft spoken, reading my work in front of audiences has been a transformative experience. Whereas for my first book, I would get nearly unbearably nervous before an event, for my second I’ve learned to embrace the nerves as productive energy. It reminds me a lot of my teens and early twenties, a time when I was a dancer and performed onstage regularly. Always, before curtain, I’d become overwhelmed by a rush of nerves that immediately went away when the music started. There was no going back at that point, so I’d have no choice but to surrender to the moment. Those three to five minutes of dancing were always pure bliss, liberating in ways that are hard to describe.
Reading my work has begun to feel like that as well, but only because I don’t think of it as reading or public speaking. I think of it as a performance. Framed in this way, it’s something I realize I’m lucky to be able to do. Here is an audience—real, live people!—wanting to experience my work.
As a show of gratitude, I try to make that experience as enjoyable as possible. Below are some ways performing affects how I prepare for an event—and how it might help you, too.
Read More
‘The Spirit of the Printed Word’ is one of Arthur Crisp’s murals in the reading room of Canada’s Parliament Building. Image: Parliament of Canada, House of Commons
Torching for It
Murals are among some of the West’s most interesting public art.
This one is The Spirit of the Printed Word by Arthur Crisp, 1921. It’s in the reading room at the Canadian House of Commons. I came across it during our coverage at Publishing Perspectives of the Canadian Parliament’s hearings on the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act–which has led to terrible losses (some $50 million annually) for authors and their publishers.
Crisp’s Spirit shows us the allegorical figure lifting high her “torch of knowledge” and her mirror, which the curators’ commentary tells us “reflects the news of the world.”
No fool she, Spirit has engaged, as you can see, two small boys to do all the work. I readily join her in commending this labor approach to you. The guys appear to be slogging through the business of lugging stacks of paper and handling typesetting. These kids need Kindles.
There’s a deco-sleek pigeon gliding by near Spirit’s torch on the right, a bird said to represent the transmission of information. On the left, there’s a more fluttery dove, symbolizing good tidings.
Notice that a mural is work of aesthetic advocacy. And in his testimony to the Canadian parliament committee, John Degen, who heads the Writers’ Union, said that some Canadian authors have stopped writing because the copyright exceptions assigned to education have simply gutted their copyright-revenue earnings.
That’s a case in which trade- and textbook authors are watching their publishers get nothing for the use of their titles in close to 100 school districts and ministerial areas of Canada. It’s an obvious moment in which author advocacy is critical. Degen is up to the mark, too.
“Fully 80 percent of our licensing income has simply disappeared,” Degen told the legislators, “because schools now copy for free what they used to pay for. Each year in Canada more than 600 million pages of published work are copied for use in educational course packs, both print and digital, and the education sector is essentially claiming all of that work for free. The world’s authors are also watching this process with great interest and considerable anxiety.”
If anything, what the Canadian copyright crisis reminds us is how loosely an author corps is formed in a national setting, and how vulnerable it can be to unthinkable policy blunders like the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012.
And that gets us to our provocation today.
Who’s on Your Advocacy Mural?
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
In terms of industry players on the policy level, authors are the ones from whom we hear the least frequently. Publishers are better organized and in Canada were integral to the development of the copyright revenue agency that’s now under attack in that country. The publishers association’s folks speak eloquently to the issue, they’re terrific advocates, actually, for themselves and their authors.
But one of the defining factors in any picture of the publishing business has been that it’s an industry based on the voluntary submission of its fundamental product, the content, by people it does not know (until […]
Read More
Image – iStockphoto: Kristina Jovanovic
Hemming in the Tension
When I tweeted up the author Anne R. Allen for writing that “Word count guidelines have been trending down in the last decade,” I found our colleague Hugh Howey checking in from a galaxy far, far away to say, “Slaughterhouse Five, Frankenstein, and Fahrenheit 451 are three of my favorite sci-fi works of all-time, and each is around 50K. The problem part of most novels is the boring middle bit. Best to just leave that part out.”
The desired price of the hardback began to determine the length of the manuscript, which is a weird way to do art. Personally, I'd read more fantasy novels if they came in smaller size but more often. Waiting 7 years for a 1,500 page tome is no bueno.
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) March 21, 2018
He’s right, of course, as is Anne Allen, and we went on to discuss (briefly!) the problem some big-name authors run into in this regard, too. I call it the Clancy effect. Once they’re established as a publishing house’s majors, the editorial touch gets lighter, often more pixie dust than anything else. Typos are caught, we have to hope, but developmental work (“structural” edits to your British neighbors) goes out the window.
That can go to anybody’s head, and many of us can name an icon whose work got leggier and sadly shapeless as the big career flabbed on.
I've seen this personally when I edit anthologies. The bigger the name, the more umbrage the author takes with any suggestion. I think writing can get worse over a career because of the unwillingness to be edited (and laziness from the publisher).
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) March 21, 2018
Too Much Entertainment
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
At London Book Fair last week, another element of this issue came into sharper focus as I moderated a panel for the Byte the Book organization, which looks at the industry from the digital vantage point.
While the session was titled “Publishers Go Prospecting: Finding Hidden Treasure in Your Content,” I’d worked out with our four fine panelists (from the BBC, Penguin Random House, Vodafone, and Hodder Education) an approach that would take us past the obvious issues of spelunking for good backlist titles. (Bring Up the Bodies, as Hilary Mantel might say.)
We looked at today’s mushrooming level of competition for reading time from really fine television and film. After all, you may have felt the first really deep tremor of storytelling’s new cinematic leadership in February when Amazon Publishing created its Topple Books imprint in direct collaboration with Amazon Studios and the activist-filmmaker Jill Soloway (Transparent, I Love Dick, Six Feet Under).
Tom Goodwin
As the futurist and corporate strategist Tom Goodwin told me, “Book publishing is not in the ‘text industry.’ It’s not in the ‘reading industry.’ It’s in the ‘what do people want to spend their time doing? industry.’”
And that’s where the rubber is going to increasingly meet the shortest road possible.
Read More
A few months ago, in response to a personal conundrum I shared with you, we debated the merits of wrestling a novel that wanted to be written in first-person into third, and whether that would be wise from a marketing perspective. Positions were expounded, personal research advanced, and a few minds possibly changed or stretched. Well, my friends, if you are an indie writer, or traditionally published but able to influence your book’s marketing campaign, the first-third debate doesn’t end there.
You have yet another decision to make.
To wit, have you noticed the accelerating trend toward first-person marketing copy? i.e. taglines or back cover copy written from within the point of view of one or more characters? (Click here for a peek at the current #6 book in the Kindle US store.)
At the time I was putting out Cold and Hottie, given its frequent use by some of contemporary romance’s bestselling authors, I certainly did. But would it be the right move?
To get a handle on best practices, I did an unofficial survey of followers on my Facebook page—presumably people open to my fiction—and asked them what they thought of first-person book blurbs. Before I summarize what they said, I should make it clear that my author page skews heavily toward other writers. Their collective wisdom, therefore, might not extend to readers in general or your genre’s readers in particular. As you might have noticed, a good number of us get hung up on rules that readers don’t see as necessary.
With that said, here are the results:
Read More
The news about Facebook’s embroilment in a data-harvesting-cum-political scandal kind of makes us all want to unfriend the platform for good.
For sure, our collective conscience would be cleaner and we’d all be a lot less distracted without it. Some of us would probably even feel a vengeful twinge of self-righteousness seeing Zuckerberg and his cohorts caught at last with the smoking gun that proves their invention is not only bad for us, but just downright bad.
While a breakup with Facebook might inflict some short-term suffering on most folks — pain from the loss of online friendships and a hollow void in that space between minutes that status updates used to fill — for writers and authors, it would pose a nearly existential dilemma.
For better or for worse, Facebook is still the platform for authors from a community-building and visibility perspective, with its unsurpassed power to spread the word, engage readers, and generate promotional opportunities. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat combined could never pack the same punch that Facebook schmoozing can.
Throughout all my years as a writer and a publicist helping writers, a few constants about Facebook have reinforced this belief:
Read More
image by CannedTuna
Author interviews are very much on my mind these days from two perspectives: as the interviewer and as the interviewee.
As the interviewee, I’m talking a lot these days about my novel GIRL IN DISGUISE, coming out in paperback Tuesday, March 6. A paperback launch doesn’t involve as much publicity and marketing as a hardcover launch, at least in my case, but it does involve interviews. Which is great for me! I love interviews.
I also have a major interviewing project underway where I’m talking to authors about their novels, not mine. Each day in March, in honor of Women’s History Month, I’m posting an interview on my blog with an author whose work is inspired by amazing women in history. 31 interviews is, well, a lot of interviews. (The #womenshistoryreads project may even extend into April — I keep thinking of more authors I want to include, and they keep saying yes!)
Plus I’m now doing author interviews for the Chicago Review of Books, like this one with Leslie Pietrzyk, whose riveting, evocative novel SILVER GIRL just came out last week.
So that’s my situation. What about yours? If you’re an author, should you care about author interviews, from either side of the table? If you’re an avid reader and blogger, should you conduct them?
Here are a few lessons learned from my recent experiences, both asking questions and giving answers.
They’re almost always a good idea. Sure, there are counterexamples. If you’re an author, giving a very long interview to a website with very little reach may not be worth your time. You can always say no. But as an effort-to-yield undertaking, in general, interviews are great. So many readers turn to the internet as a way to connect with writers whose work they admire or enjoy. Your interview will be there when they do. Reviews are good too, but I’d rather interview a fellow writer than review their work. A review implies evaluation of the work, determining whether or not it’s worth someone’s time. Interviews provide a lot of information without judgment. That’s great for writers and readers alike.
If you do them, E-mail is easiest. Is it great to have the back-and-forth of talking to someone live? Yes. Is it worth the hassle of transcribing, trying to capture spoken words and get them precisely right, to get that energy?
Read More
Disclaimer: Hating marketing is not required to use these tools. In fact, if you enjoy marketing, you’ll have a blast using them.
I’m active in several online writing communities, and one of the most frequent things I read about is how much authors hate marketing. It’s usually accompanied by talk about art and creativity, and once in a while someone tosses this suggestion across the virtual meeting room: all you have to do is write a great story and they will come.
Except, thousands of writers have written thousands of great stories and no one, except their parents and their Uncle Bobby in Poughkeepsie, ever came. The hard truth is—whether your path to publishing is via the traditional, indie, or hybrid route—if you want a sustainable writing career that involves receiving income and reaching as much of your target audience as possible, you’ll need to do some marketing. If your target audience is Uncle Bobby in Poughkeepsie, you’re probably that one writer who won’t need to market.
Mention marketing to many authors and the conversation comes to a screeching halt. Marketing can seem like a complex equation that includes long and short-term strategies, talk of ROI, and aliens. Okay, maybe not aliens, but for some, marketing can feel otherworldly. But in its simplest form, marketing is just this: it’s the stories we tell about our stories. How, when, and how often we tell these stories become our marketing plan, whether we ever intentionally create a plan at all. If you’re a writer and you’re on social media, have a website, blog, or even just talk about your work with friends, you’re already marketing. So here are five inexpensive and relatively easy-to-use tools to help optimize the marketing you’re already doing.
Facebook Shop Template
Most of us know we can create an author page on Facebook, and while recent changes to the platform’s algorithms make Facebook pages feel even more inaccessible, it still makes sense for authors to have one. For starters, it can be an effective way to communicate with fans, especially if you use it to create a private Facebook group. But one underutilized benefit of the author Facebook page is the ability to sell books from the platform. You’ll need to start by making sure you set your page up as a shopping template. Written Word Media has a great post that walks you step-by-step through optimizing your Facebook page as a sales funnel. You can find that tutorial here.
Random fact: A bandwagon was literally a wagon that carried a circus band. Or so says the Internets. They were part of circus parades at first, and then politicians discovered them, as politicians are wont to do. According to todayifoundout.com, here’s what happened next:
“Politicians started to use bandwagons in parades through towns on their campaign trails. It’s believed that Dan Rice, a famous circus clown, was the first to rent out his bandwagon to a political campaign.
As a campaign became more and more successful, other people and politicians sought to rent seats on the bandwagon and ride it through town. In doing so, they received face time with the public and believed that the success of the original campaign would rub off on them.
There are records of the phrase used in political speeches throughout the 1890s, usually in the form of warning potential voters not to ‘jump on the opponent’s bandwagon in haste.’ Because of the negative connotations associated with the phrase, many didn’t admit to having a bandwagon of their own despite it becoming common.”
(Emphasis added because ‘famous circus clown’ is my new life goal.)
And hence, the phrase “jump on the bandwagon” was born. Cool!
So, why am I telling you this arcane bit of etymology? Because I want to talk about genre, and specifically, genre-bandwagoning (Is that a thing? If not, it is now!) and it’s opposite: genre-abandoning.
Imagine that you’ve been seized with an idea. One of those Ideas, ideas that won’t leave you alone. You write your story without worrying too much where it fits in the market because, hello!, that’s what we’ve told you to do and you’ve been listening. You write and polish and beta, and then there you are with your bright, amazing story that you are ready, finally!, to take out into the market. And then your agent (if you’re lucky enough to have one), or some well-meaning book-friend tells you, “No one’s buying Steampunk[1] anymore.”
Ka-chunk. (This is the sound my brain makes when I’m panicking. It’s kind of like that sound in Law & Order, only scarier).
“But, but, but,” you say. “There are Steampunk novels sitting at #1 and #2 on the NYT right now. And this is my best work ever.”
“Sure, the last gasp. Editors are buying for 18 months from now.”
“So what are they buying? What’s the next trend?”
[Insert Agent/Friend shruggie here.] “They don’t know.”
“But, but, but, I saw in the deal news that here were, like, at least two other Steampunk titles sold this week.”
[Insert Agent/Friend giving you “the face.” You know, that face that makes you feel like a moron so you don’t ask what the face means. To quote/paraphrase Watson in Sherlock. “No, I don’t know what that means. That’s why I find the face so annoying.”]
You decide not to ask any more questions. You slink out of the meeting you were excited for feeling slightly sick.
But what do you do (I mean, after the drinking)? You have to do something. Do you simply accept that Steampunk is over and stick this novel right in the drawer (along with the others)? Do you push back against the rising tide and insist that your agent take the novel out anyway? Or do you cast […]
Read More
Last year, as a way of giving myself a meaningful deadline and my writing broader exposure, I signed a contract to participate in a multi-author boxed set. In theory, the expectations around my story were quite doable: a half year in which to write and edit a 20,000-word contemporary romance novella. I even had the nugget of an intriguing idea and began writing without delay.
For a time, progress was excellent.
Famous last words, right? Because of course, with three months left on the calendar, the challenges began.
First, with 30,000 words composed, it was obvious I was on my way to writing a full-length novel.
This wasn’t a deal-breaker, however. I knew where the story was headed (look at me, becoming a grown-up outliner and such!) and I was still in love with the idea. It felt like a fresh take on a hot trend (office romance), and it was exciting to think of writing a marketable book I also adored.
The bigger issue, and the one I needed to solve immediately, was that my characters were becoming emotionally removed. They did stuff, but they had stopped explaining the why of their actions.
The solution was one I have employed to good result in the past: write in first-person, then convert the passages to third. (This approach can provide added benefit by deepening the third-person point of view.)*
And lo, when I tried it, the heavens did part and the pages did sing. I suddenly had character motivation, emotionality, and internal consistency.
I also had the passages in first-person present tense—a problem because, try as I might, I couldn’t get them to match the preceding 30,000 words, written in third-person past.
With the deadline approaching, I could see four options:
What was an author to do, especially an author still building her audience? An author who didn’t want to sacrifice quality, and who hates missing deadlines?
Honestly, the conundrum made my head hurt. This was the first time as an indie writer that I urgently longed for an agent or publisher’s advice.
Here’s how I compensated:
Read More
Image: Procter & Gamble, Business Wire, the 2017 Times Square holiday restrooms, a promotion for Charmin. The line too small to read in this image is: “The best seats on Broadway.”
This “media opportunity alert” arrived in my inbox:
Hi, Porter, Thought you might have interest in checking out this event spotlighting Mark Ballas and girlfriend BC Jean.
The singer-songwriter duo has teamed up with Charmin for the December celebration of restrooms in Times Square–an entire storefront of unique, unforgettable, state-of-the-art bathrooms free to the public (timely for the holiday season in NYC).
On December 19th, Jean and Ballas will perform singing and dance routines on-site.
Happy to have you there for a front row seat/interview with BC and Mark.
Please let me know if you’re interested?
I wrote back:
Hi, Nadia, I cover the international book publishing industry. Despite what many may think of books these days, our publishers do not believe we’re talking about toilet paper. Yet. Thanks, though.
With the help of AdWeek, I’ve learned that from 2006 to 2010, Charmin rented space in which to create bathrooms for seasonal shoppers in Times Square. It has revived this holiday tradition this year at 1601 Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets with 14 “themed bathrooms” open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for shoppers, through December 24.
The first thing we learn here is that if you work for a toilet paper company, you’d better love bathroom jokes. This is Procter & Gamble at work, squeezing the Charmin for every last available pun. All’s fair in love and advertising.
But the second thing we learn here–and the reason I’m subjecting you to this plumber’s view of American marketing–is how a publicity person/PR agent should not be operating. If you’ve got a publicist for your books or are thinking of hiring one, you need to know what this dynamic looks like from the journalist’s side of the stall door.
My provocation for you today comes in the form of three questions with which to quiz your publicity person.
Read More
