Thursday 26 November 2015

Sylvester Stallone selling bread or why it is so hard to promote a book

Promoting anything is hard work. To market food is excruciatingly painful, and that is something we all need; we'd die without it. And yet, to advertise bread, Warburtons at one point employed Sylvester Stallone. If you need Rocky to sell people one of the staple foods, what on earth do you need to do to promote something as useless as a book?! 
Sylvester Stallone advertising bread

I think artists other than writers have it so much easier. A picture - no problem: you see it, you like it, you click +1 or Like, you Tweet it, put it on Instagram, Flickr, whatever. It's there for the taking. Music - a bit harder, but you put it on YouTube and five people at least are going to watch it. It takes a minute of somebody's time and that's a minute many are willing to spare, to have a little break from work or life in general.



Above: Adele's cover in 25 different styles. Five minutes that will entertain you

But any book requires your time. Not a two-second glance. Not few minutes of listening. It takes hours to read. Your brain may actually refuse to engage in the activity, because it knows all those pages shall take all that time. If it's bad, you will waste it. If it's good, you will not be able to stop. And often we don't even have spare moments to read each other's blog posts, clicking pluses only if we like the picture, not mentioning the entire BOOK...

So I can only imagine what agents, publishers and authors themselves must do to promote a new release... I know what lengths I have gone to already and how much time it took me to get a single article out. It seems to me like Mission Impossible - you probably need Tom Cruise to get involved...



All we can do is try. So here's my attempt - I do not know Tom Cruise personally, and hence I can only tell you that Qwerty's story is now available on Amazon... :)

Kindle (free for Kindle Unlimited)


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