Series: How to Market your Manuscript in 2009, and beyond
by Pat Darnell and the Herd
If you truly want to sell your book in today's market place, you better have an Apocalypto Cover on it. Faux ancient, or Potter-Charismatico cover art will smartly serve your marketing efforts, as these seem the only selling breed of books.
Even if your book is about "changing baby diapers" you might consider an illustration of a cute little infant with horns on your cover.
I look for "rare, ancient" text on shelves of Barnes and Ignoble. Others surely are drawn to the same style of cover. We live in a College town, and its student population is walking, talking cross section of our book reading society, or what is left of it. At local big barn book resellers, students gather.A place at oaken study tables comes at a premium at Barnes and Ignoble's on Texas Avenue
across from Texas A and M University. Arrive early and you can stake out a really sturdy library type table for an afternoon. However, there is a little bit of fine tuning needed if the fashionable bookstore is to survive the IT microcosm.Beside the ever pressing intervention of Electronic textbooks and friendly Hot-spot IT access... iPOD Touch and rival operating systems square off to show students the way to glorious button pushing careers.
Suggest to your publisher some of these ideas. For instance Moo Pig's "Book Marketing Analysts" suggest:
1. If Barnes and Ignoble's would only try some strobe lighting with disco ball "Buy One Get One Free" fifteen minute rave moshes at random times... this could bring a pile of toxic assets to the book retailer. And we all know by now toxic assets is the way to go.
2. Then while all those students are rushing up to the check out counter, B and I's could unleash Demo carts full of sausage and crackers for taste tests offered to the queue of students carrying spine cracking large books about WWII and
Eisenstadt...3. As the inventory leaves the shelves in torrents, B and I's could run a survey with store personnel holding scanning guns, while referring to the super large jumbo-tron drive-in-movie-like presentation over the children books area at the rear of the store.
Figure this into your pricing structure for your book since a large budget, high end, understated youTube ripoff would serve this scanning survey purpose very well as each participant gets a 333 on his\her hand.
4. Last idea to come from the think-thankless tank at Moo Pig's sweat box offices -- a good old book burning needs resurrecting, for gosh's sakes. How long has it been since we had uniformed Nubian's piling books in a parking lot fire? NO? Hey give it a chance.
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