BOOK PROMOTION IDEA: EDMONTON'S FIRST CHARACTER DEATHMATCH by HAL FRIESEN

IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A FUN AND ENTERTAINING WAY TO PROMOTE YOUR BOOK, you might follow Hal Friesen's example. I asked Hal to pen me a Guest Post explaining his Character Deathmatch, a marketing tool he created which encourages audience participation. I, along with seven other local writers including Hal, will be participating in this event on Saturday, June 28th, at Audrey's Books in Edmonton at 1:00 P.M. It's going to be a lot of fun. As you can see by the descriptions and placards that follow, Hal has put a lot of time and effort into this event. Thank you, Hal!

I'VE DONE A FEW BOOK EVENTS, and I always felt the spirit of the event should better capture the raucous enthusiasm some books engender. When I read a good book, I want to run outside and scream about it to the world. I’m not alone in this regard, so why then, do so many book events feel  stifled? Peru offered me the answer I was looking for: Lucha Libro, a twist on Lucha Libre, Mexico’s pro wrestling. Known as “literary wrestling”, writers don masks and are challenged to write a short story in five minutes. The winner takes off his or her mask and proceeds through the tournament, with the final victor having his or her first novel published.

Lucha Libro changes the idea that literature is boring and tries to make it as exciting as possible. I wanted to have a book event like that, where people got together and were excited about books. I wanted to engage the audience, and most of all, I wanted it to be fun. That’s when I came up with the notion of the Edmonton Character Deathmatch.

This is how it will work: two authors will duel by reading a sample of their work, one after the other, with selections focusing on a particular character. The audience, given creative action placards (such as “assimilates”, “judo chops” and “baffles with brilliance”), will then vote on their favorite character. It’s silly and fairly arbitrary, but it adds a level of engagement, progression, and (hopefully) tension to the tournament. I’ve gotten Lucha Libre masks for all the authors, but I can’t promise that everyone will want to wear them.

The winners of the duels will be determined by audience vote, and will take each other on as characters are eliminated from the contest. The final victor will walk home with a trophy that is as incredible and ridiculous as the event itself. To make sure the contestants remain fresh in the audience’s mind, each character has a stat card, similar to a sports trading card, that lists all of his or her qualities and weaknesses.

Here’s a snapshot of this year’s contestants:

Name: Angela Simonson, half-demon teen EMP

Appears in: The Puzzle Box, Creator: Eileen Bell

Mission: To meet her father, while making life as miserable as possible for her mother. Oh, and not destroying the world in the process!

Special powers: She’s half demon, and can wreck most electronics with a half-assed internal  EMP. However, a Djinn has just given her three wishes, so she can do just about anything she wants (but only three times. And being half-demon seems to really mess with the wishes, so she has to be very careful. Normally, she’s not careful. Not at all.)

Name: Edgar Domingo Vincent, undead drunken playboy

Appears in: Edgar’s Worst Sunday, Creator: Brad OH Inc.

About: In life, Edgar Vincent has been something of a cad. Callous comments, thoughtless promiscuity, binge drinking and excess sufficient to shame Caligula, are standard Saturday night fare.

Mission: When Edgar finds himself in the cloudy planes of the afterlife on one particularly dreadful Sunday, he must put aside his ever-present hangover and try to figure out how he ever got to this point, and where he’s meant to be going now.

Weakness: Sundays.

Name: Eve Lopez, gravity manipulator

Appears in: Weightless, Creator: Jay Bardyla

Mission: Before, it was learning to control her abilities. Now, it's to save the world, repeatedly.

About: What do you do when something beyond your control forces you to lose control? And what happens later when people want to control you? A battle to maintain a sense of self is easier fought when the whole world isn’t fighting over you but for Eve Lopez, the world’s sole super-human, both battles are never-ending.

Name: Fra Francisco, drug-dealing double agent for the Papacy and Inglais

Appears in: The Tattooed Seer, Creator: Susan MacGregor

Mission: To locate witches in Esbana, and to convince (or kidnap) them to come to Inglais to aid Ilysabeth’s rise to the throne.

Special power(s): Deceit, drugs, espionage, masquerade, acting, tumbling, kidnapping, assassination (but only the bad guys)

About: (This is a rare depiction of him, painted when he was much, much older. He also bears an uncanny resemblance to Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth 1st's Spymaster.)

 

Name: Haywire McGuire, altruistic Metis fugitive.

Appears in: The Tenth Circle Project, Creator: Billie Milholland

Mission: To save children from slavery in the post-apocalyptic City of Glory.

About: On the run from the law, wanted for an assassination she didn’t commit, Haywire McGuire teams up with other fugitives to rescue children from a life of servitude.

Interesting stat: She hangs out with ChloroMorphs (people who can trade the iron atom in their hemoglobin for magnesium to temporarily gain the power of photosynthesis).

Name: Lola Evangeline Starke, sharp-tongued bare-knuckled bruiser

Appears in: Die on Your Feet, Creator: S.G. Wong

Mission: To find the truth, no matter what the cost.

Weakness: Lola is haunted by a ghost named Aubrey O’Connell, invisible to her (as all ghosts are to the living) but plenty audible.

About: Happy to partake in all that the City’s swank supper clubs and gambling joints have to offer, Lola is unafraid to mix it up with the seedier elements of Crescent City’s dark underbelly when the job requires it.

Name: Nestor Tark, helicopter father super trooper

Appears in: Shepherds of Sparrows, Creator: Hal J. Friesen

Special power(s): Genetically modified Vrellish Highborn, with exceptional strength and agility in gravity and in a rel-fighter. Deadly with a sword.

Mission: To find somewhere he belongs, and where he can raise his family.

Weakness: His physiology doesn’t allow him to eat fruit or vegetables.

Name: Tad Klassen, post-rehab atheist anti-hero

Mission: To stay clean, and to reconcile with his family on his terms.

About: At age eighteen, Tad was fed up with his parents’ hypocritical faith and constant bickering, and he walked away without a backward glance. A year later, fighting addiction, Tad returns from his self-imposed exile to find his place in a family that’s slowly disintegrating.

THE JEERING HAS ALREADY STARTED ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER, and I’m sure there’ll be more playful jabbing throughout the event (June 28 at 1:00 PM at Audrey’s Books). This is all tongue-in-cheek, however, since everyone involved is really supporting each other and coming together to make the event a success. Regardless of who wins this Saturday, everyone should come out wearing a smile. Check it out! It’s something Edmonton has never seen before. 

(I second that, Hal. Thanks for all your hard work. It's going to be a great event. I know we're all looking forward to it! - Susan.)

GUERRILLA MARKETING: PROMOTING YOUR BOOK WITHIN GLOBAL TECHNO-BABBLE - GUEST POST by BILLIE MILHOLLAND

THE FOLLOWING IS A GUEST POST BY BILLIE MILHOLLAND. I asked Billie to address how she promotes and markets her books, because, as well as being an entertaining and excellent writer, she is one of the most successful promoters I know. What I find especially helpful is that she manages to promote her work in an effective, non-invasive way. She tells me she's just scratched the surface as far as this topic goes. With luck, I can coax her to come back for a future post. 

IN AUGUST, AT WHEN WORDS COLLIDE IN CALGARY, a conversation about book promotion with a couple of new writers hit the inevitable stone wall of disbelief. “I have to promote my own work? I thought my publicist and my publisher did it.”

I’ve heard so many versions of that reaction; you’d think I’d have a canned response ready. I don’t seem to, because the level of shock, resentment, and foot-stomping resistance to this notion is unpredictable. Short answer (elevator response): yes, you do have to promote your own work. First of all, unless you're a celebrity or a well-known professional in a high-interest field, you won’t have a publicist early in your career. Secondly, small publishers have even smaller budgets for promotion. Even if you snag a big name publisher for your first work, you are still an unknown. Your slice of the publicity pie is ribbon thin. Long answer (evening-in-the-pub response): the promotion of your work begins at birth – your birth, not the birth of your book. Okay. Slight exaggeration designed to emphasize the long-term complexity of effective promotion of your literary work. Seth Godin recommends starting your promotion three years before your book comes out. Even if your magnum opus has all the ingredients of an international best seller, enough human beings have to read it for the word to get out.

According to UNESCO data from 2010, about 350,000 new titles are published yearly in North America. As of July, 2013, www.goodreads.com had 30 million members/readers. Faced with stats like these, many authors panic and go into scatter-shot mode. “Aaah! Gotta get to as many readers as possible in the shortest amount of time before I lose the edge.” This often translates into a litany of “Buy my book! Buy my book!” all over Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and, yes, even e-mail. 

Harnessing social media to call attention to your new publication is essential, but using it as a bullhorn will only annoy people. We are all subject to sensory over-load from social media, and consequently have developed tune-out responses to 'buy-this-look-at-me' noise.The key directive to remember when using social media to get people to read your book? Be Authentic. Notice I said, ‘read’ your book, not ‘buy’ your book. When you’re first published, friends, family, and colleagues will buy your new book, but not all of them will read it. From this early built-in fan base, you need to spread out and find your real readers, strangers – folks who want to read what you write. No matter what combination of social media you choose to use, it still comes down to the old adage – one reader at a time. Social media is built through relationships. Building real relationships is the only sustainable way to increase readership.

Your job is to get your work in the hands of as many people as you can. Traditional marketing of anything is costly. It requires advertising, press releases, and an endless variety of selling techniques. It is essentially an arm’s length process. Guerrilla marketing, on the other hand, is up close and personal. It’s where you include people you’ve met at conferences, sports events, music festivals, online. Not people you've just exchanged business cards with, people you've had a conversation with, shared something that was not your-book related. Guerrilla marketing is where you do the unexpected, create surprises, encourage people to have fun. 

One of the best and most recent examples of guerrilla marketing that I’ve witnessed was a campaign by an Edmonton writer who wanted to go into outer space. Hal Friesen wasn’t marketing a book, but everything he did could be done by an enterprising writer trying to draw attention to an upcoming book. It’s worth your time becoming his friend and scrolling back past September 10, 2013 on his Facebook page to study his 167 days in a space suit. Or, visit his website to get the shortened version of his incredible marketing journey. Of course, now that he has a book to market, he is well on his way toward establishing relationships with a broad spectrum of potential readers.

Guerrilla marketing includes finding ways to cross-promote with other writers. Find out who else in your community has had something published about the same time as your publication. Invite them to share a panel discussion with you at a library event, share a table at a seasonal community event, exchange blog posts. 

Book launch promotion is often under-exploited. At a traditional book launch, a writer stands like a preacher before an audience trapped in chairs. The mood is church-solemn; the writer drones on, reading long passages from the work in question. There are many ways to defeat this tradition. Turn your launch from a class lecture to a casual visit with your readers at your kitchen table or in your favourite watering hole. Create an atmosphere that encourages enjoyment for the passage(s) you plan to read. 

o   If the story is set in real geography, show photos and tell a few focused anecdotes about the place(s).

o   If the story is set in an actual time period, share some interesting trivia from that era that relates directly to what happens in your story.

o   Share some of the interesting adventures you had while researching your book (people you met, unusual facts you discovered). 

·     Read briefly. If you are attached to reading a long passage, break it up and intersperse your reading with interesting trivia about your writing journey. Read slowly. Don’t race. Make sure you know how to pronounce smoothly all the words you’ve used. Keep your chin up; when you lower your head, sound pools at your feet instead of flowing out into your audience. Practice enunciating. Most of us mumble and truncate words in casual conversation. You want your words to be clear. If your audience has to strain to hear what you say, listening fatigue will make them tune you out. They will take to checking their watches instead of anticipating your next phrases. Smile. These are your friends and supporters. You don’t want them to think you’re not pleased that they’ve come out. Thank those who came out and those who helped do anything at all toward your event. Of course, this is only useful if you’ve written a compelling book, but that’s a topic for other discussions, many of which have already been explored on this blog.

ABOUT BILLIE MILHOLLAND: Promoting community events and artistic projects on a shoe string is where Billie first learned to use innovation and surprise in order to be noticed above the sensory overload of this tech-dense era. She has had success with marketing both fiction and non-fiction over the last 20 years. Most recently, she is promoting The Puzzle Box (Aug 2013), a collaborative novel that contains her novella Autumn Unbound – an unravelling of what happens to Pandora after she was blamed for opening Zeus’s forbidden box, and The Urban Green Man (Aug 2013), a short story anthology containing her story, Green Man, She Restless – a near-future revelation of what happens to a scientist after she's imprisoned by a megalithic GMO conglomerate.