(via Who are the Purples?) I found out about this new free online video-making software and told myself I would only spend 60 minutes playing with it. Here’s what I ended up with.
D.I.Y. city
Detroit’s been on my mind since we released The Purples. What a great city it once was, what a wreck it is today. Been reading the dispatches about Detroit from TIME magazine this past year, which give a more well rounded vision of the city. And today in the NY Times there’s a long, prominent article about how young artists are migrating to the city and trying to transform the wreckage and rubble into art, in some cases one inch at a time. As one local cynic says, “You can’t change a city of 800,000 with 200 people. There’s so much work to do.” True, but you have to give these black-clad artists credit, and it doesn’t hurt that major national publications are covering their efforts.
Social marketing for THE PURPLES
Step 1: Get the book and/or PR about the book uploaded to as many places as possible. Step 2 is MUCH harder: Surf around all these sites & message boards, make connections, do some helpful posting, reach out to book bloggers, etc. You have to be rather shameless, and that’s hard for me.
The number one goal still remains getting the book into the hands of people connected to broadcast TV/cable or film. *Cue The Impossible Dream music.*
Here’s where I’ve put THE PURPLES, in terms of online presence, in no particular order:
CreateSpace (+ message boards)
Amazon (+ author page/video)
Book website (ThePurplesBook.com)
YaGottaReadVideos (blog)
BlazingTrailers (blog)
BookCaster.com (video blog)
Launched THE PURPLES yesterday.
Meaning we told friends and family about the website: http://ThePurplesBook.com. Warren did the writing, I did the proofreading, layout, and cover design, and Amazon CreateSpace is handling the printing-on-demand, with Smashwords doing the eBook sales. So far it’s cost us next to nothing (except tons of time), and if we sell a small number of books we’ll quickly break even. The real goal here was to have the content in a nice trade paperback book package to send around to TV and film producers because we think it has potential (doesn’t everyone?).
Even though book sales aren’t our real goal, for my own learning purposes I’m also going to be testing social media as a way to spread the word and market, seeing what works, what doesn’t. That takes a lot of time (you have to build relationships and do lots of following) so stand by for those results. Meanwhile am learning a lot about self-publishing, book marketing & PR, website building, book trailers, ecommerce, photo research, Mac troubleshooting, SEO/SEM, juggling multiple projects/websites, etc., etc. It’s all good stuff to add on to my old school selecting, editing, and people management skills…
In my next post, I’ll list all the sites I’ve currently set up THE PURPLES on. I need a place to store all the links at this point, anyway.
Over the weekend, I finished submitting Warren’s novel THE PURPLES to Amazon’s CreateSpace. Will have hard copy edition in hands by Wednesday! It was an interesting experience—harder than I expected but CreateSpace has a great users support community.
Next up, reformatting text for Smashwords e-book. They will send the submission through their Meatgrinder html mill and spit it out in many formats including epub and mobi. So onto the Kindle THE PURPLES will go. And after that perhaps Podiobooks. Am working on the book’s website/blog over the next few weeks, too.
But this is all the easy part. Next up: the marketing. Any buyers out there for a first novel by an unknown writer? Anyone?
