Friday 24 October 2008

The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride and Us Too

The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride Youtube book trailer
I was going to focus today. FOCUS!

But when I heard about the Steffi McBride book, all the little bits of blogging material that I've been trying to ignore in the name of writing my novel came rushing to the fore - so important to share this, especially in the current downturn. So I've got to just quickly tell you about Steffi McBride and all the other stuff that might be meaningful to the Rise and Fall of Us as writers.

I heard about Steffi McBride in today's Guardian RSS feed which highlighted Andrew Croft's new novel The Overnight Fame of Steffi Mcbride - or more precisely, how the author is using Web 2.0 to the hilt to promote the novel:
But what, arguably, makes Steffi more interesting than your average airhead celeb is that she's the figment of an author's imagination and these tantalising - or annoying - insights into her star-studded existence come courtesy of her updates on Twitter, the social media "microblogging" site, and her Facebook page. Read the article
The book trailer is appealing (a bit long but quite appealing - makes authors want to rush out to the nearest drama school in search of cheap but capable talent to star in their book trailers). And suddenly all that wasted time in Facebook turns out to be an investment in my future success as a writer ... I'm off to friend Steffi now (for the record, her friend count is only 33 at the moment, will be interesting to check back in a few weeks). It will also be interesting to see what FB does to the page. FB took down the FB page of Vern, Sarah Macintyre's wonderful comic creation for the DFC comics, on the basis that Vern was not human.

The article appears on the heels of a series of guest blogs on book marketing running on the agent Nathan Bransford's blog . Bestselling author Michelle Moran (Nefertiti) blogged in two parts. The first part was about the nitty gritty of the business, the lingo, the marketing department, the publicity department ...
So you’re a few months away from publishing your debut novel. Your publishing house has suggested that you pitch in to help promote your own work, but you don’t have the first clue as to where you should start. Or perhaps you’ve already published your first book without doing any of your own publicity and marketing and now the hard realization has hit that this time around, without a significant change on your part, your career is going to end as quickly as it began. Now you’re willing to try something – anything. But what works? What doesn’t work? What should you be doing? Michelle Moran on Book Marketing Part 1
Michelle's second blog was about blogging, websites, online reviewers ...
... don’t be afraid to try new ways of publicity and marketing, even if you’ve never heard of anyone else doing it before. This is what a great publicist will do for you, and what you want to do for yourself. There are so many ways of promoting a book that aren’t widely used, and many of them are free. Michelle Moran on Book Marketing Part 2
And finally, the guest blogger on Nathan's blog today is M.J. Rose (The Reincarnationist), who shares this lovely kernel:
Not even the most brilliant pr and marketing can sell a book people just do not want to read. M.J. Rose on Book Marketing
Having gotten that off my chest, I can now go back to work. Enjoy, everyone.

3 comments :

  1. Ah well, there goes my Saturday. You know full well, don't you, that you've blogged on my favourite topic - marketing and writing! Yeah! I now realise why I had a previous life in a marketing department! ;-)

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  2. i forgot to mention that on the steffi mcbride website, there is a ocmpetition inviting people to submit their own book trailers for the book.

    clever, clever. make the reader do your marketing. although this is a ploy now widely used. the nerdfighters do it for john green's books (nerdfighters.ning.com). and the guardian newspaper today announced another similar youtube competition.

    i think the steffi mcbrdie social networking ploy though should have been started way earlier than they did - long before the book was launched. it takes a long long time to reach critical mass.

    btw book marketing is one of my fave topics too. i have considered turning Notes from the Slushpile into a blog on book marketing. But first I have to get a proper book contract.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Vern's still gutted about that...

    ReplyDelete

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