To Market, To Market
Last night, my wife and I sat down to watch "Ratatouille," the Pixar movie about a rat with a heightened sense of smell who ends up cooking in a famous Paris restaurant. It's a wonderful movie--the word 'wonderful' is pretty much a given when talking about Pixar--but at one point we paused it to have a brief discussion about an article I'd read about a rift between Pixar and Disney. Disney was upset at Pixar due to the difficulty they would have marketing a movie in which, let's face it, rats run rampant in a kitchen. Needless to say Disney (rightfully) felt this was not the most, well, appetizing plot for an animated family film.
In the end the critically acclaimed movie made well over $200 million. And our conversation about this marketing brouhaha lasted less than a minute. Yet it got me thinking. I've never watched a movie or television show, listened to an album or played a video game and thought, "I wonder how they marketed it." The product obviously was marketed, otherwise I never would have heard about it, but as a consumer those things didn't interest me. The product I was watching, listening to or playing was all I was concerned about.
This got me thinking about books and book marketing. This blog has been running for over three years now, and since starting it I've discussed many issues pertaining to marketing. I've gone to numerous conferences since THE MARK came out, and I've been on panels where we've discussed nothing but book marketing. In the bar at the end of the night with other authors, what's the most prevalent topic of conversation? Marketing. Publicity. Whose book is being marketed well, whose isn't, and who is doing what to get the word out.
Frankly, I'm a little tired of it.
Not the marketing itself. As an author, you pretty much have no choice but to market your books. Barry Eisler once compared an author's advance to a loan given to a small business. You can shove the money under your mattress, or you can invest it to grow your business. Marketing is all about growing that business. If you put a group of authors in a bar, they can and will talk about marketing until the bar closes (and even then the bartender might have to call the cops to roost them). If an author blogs, most likely they'll write some pretty lengthy stuff about the marketing of their upcoming book or what they've done in the past that has and has not worked.
I've done that. And I'm a little tired of it. So from this point on, this blog will not be used to discuss marketing. I don't think most readers want to hear how the hamburgers are made, and I'm weary of talking about it to people who, frankly, just want to read a good story.
Readers are like my wife and I watching "Ratatouille." They care about book marketing as much as I care about boardroom meetings between Disney and Pixar. In the end if I watch the movie and enjoy it, I could care less about the marketing efforts behind it. Most readers, nay, the overwhelming majority of readers could care less about marketing. It's all about the story, the characters, the authors. They want to know how an author came up with this idea, how this character is going to grow, and whether that scene in chapter four is based on fact. As authors, sometimes we have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. Because we love talking about marketing and publicity, we assume everyone does. Therefore we kill hundreds of cyber trees every day talking about it, while the readers who don't work in publishing houses and don't have contracts to fulfill are sitting in their favorite chair with a cup of coffee wondering how Jack Reacher, or Kinsey Milhone, or (hopefully) Henry Parker is going to get out of their latest predicament.
There are some great blogs devoted to book marketing, and they will always have their audience. In the end, it's all about what you want to accomplish, what kind of audience you want to reach. See, I'm a reader, first and foremost. When I was entranced as a kid by Terry Brooks's SWORD OF SHANNARA series, I didn't even know what marketing was. I loved the stories, loved reading about Shea Ohmsford and the Druid Allanon, and my brain would have shut off if you tried to talk to me about co-op placement. And right now, I have more in common with that kid than ever.
This is not to say that authors shouldn't care about marketing. They absolutely should, especially these days as more of the marketing and publicity burden is falling on authors. But authors should care about marketing in the same way a farmer cares about soil conditions. It might matter a whole lot to them, and they could probably talk your ear off about nutrients and fertilizer, but the person buying the vegetables doesn't really want to hear about it. All they care about is whether the food tastes good.
I'm a reader. Give me a great story and wonderful characters, and I promise you, I won't care how the book was marketed.
posted by Jason Pinter at
9:15 AM
13 Comments:
Great post, Jason...I so agree. And the Ratatouille comparison is very apt. I'm in that waiting period before my first novel comes out, so marketing fills my brain--but other than my wife (who's a book editor) people are far more interested in the book itself than in how I'm going to get it noticed. And they should be!
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Good move.
Marketing discussions are interesting (sometimes) to other authors. But I can't imagine why anyone else would care.
Was Ratatouille any good?
Totally agree David. They're great fun in the bar at conferences, but if your goal as a writer (specifically a novelist) is to get readers, it's totally counterproductive.
And Ratatouille is terrific. Only two Pixar movies I didn't love were "Cars" and "A Bug's Life" and I'd still give them each a solid B/B+.
Agree with your take on Pixar too, Jason. (Man, I'm agreeable today.) They hadn't quite hit their stride yet with A Bug's Life, and I heard that Cars suffered because all the most talented people wanted to work with Brad Bird on Ratatouille instead.
The Pixar shorts are terrific too. What a great company.
P.S. Jason: Have you seen this? The best Pixar short not actually made by Pixar:
http://www.oktapodi.com/film.html
I'm so glad I wandered across your blog just when you happened to post this. I'm just coming back to reading blogs, after a long break spent getting into the nitty gritty of hamburger-making, working in marketing at a small publishing house.
Now I'm driving a train. And searching for blogs that inspire, and not just teach me how to sell. They're harder to find. I was about to give up for the night. Your post reminded me why I'm looking.
So, thank you. That's all.
The Ratatouille comparison is very apt! Nice way to make your point.
Great post, Jason. Thank you.
Ditto and Amen. I am tired of talking about marketing with other writers and weary of thinking about it so much of the time myself. I know we have to do it. I try to find interesting ways to have my work noticed. But marketing is not the reason I started writing. It isn't the part of my job that makes me alive, awake, happy. It certainly doesn't help me feel like I am earning my airspace on the planet. Thanks for the reminder.
I like the comment about advances being basically small business loans, except that the general idea of a business loan is that it will be multiplied like planted seed corn most of the time, whereas for most authors, the advance is all the corn they're ever gonna taste.
I also agree that writers' preoccupation with marketing has gotten tedious. It's not just the problem of so many authors having to be so preoccupied with marketing (because publishers have discovered that they can drop that responsibility, like the good editing they used to provide, on the writers now and so we have to do it), but because it's so easy to confuse writing in order to market, with writing about marketing, as if our readers really care.
But the more insidious effect of this preoccupation is on the mental lives of writers. As a psychologist and writer I can assure you that a writer's mental real estate is finite. Time that should be spent reading literature (whether Tolstoy or Chandler or Nancy Drew mysteries) is devoted instead reading our Tweets (and other writers' blogs). Time we really really truly NEED to spend perfecting our craft (ten years at a minimum to be worth our first publication; ten years AFTER our first publication before we will probably write our lifetime's best stuff) gets spend doing easily scannable blog posts, clever tweets, composing elevator speeches. Nobody much reads the old shrinks like Eric Fromm anymore; they warned about this pressure in our culture to turn our personalities into marketing agencies. It may mean that we limit our abilities a lot as we strive to become really good jingle writers, instead of really good writers.
I'm an author and marketing discussions aren't even interesting to me. I've been through all those bar talks and all the wondering what works and what doesn't and, truthfully, I think the best thing you can do is just write great books.
I, too, want to know what's going to happen to my characters. I couldn't care less how they're being marketed.
Boy do I agree! I can't imagine readers would care or should care about marketing.
And I wish authors didn't have to care about it either.
Authors should write. Publishers should publish books - not just print them - and publishing includes bringing the book to market and finding readers for it.
So what are you reading?
And I adored that movie, Jason.
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