The Mad Marketing Strategy

I’m an expert. I have six books under my writerly belt and can throw my marketing girth out there for all to see and admire. Why can I say this? Because I received my first royalty check—that I promptly spent on socks at Walmart—which is why I am starting a new marketing endeavor aimed at those illustrious folks who proudly call themselves Midlist Authors. It’s called MAD: Midlist Author Dictators.

Here’s how MAD works. We midlisters have tried every conceivable marketing method known to computer-huggers everywhere:

• We’ve shouted on Shoutlife.
• We’ve given and received ridiculous gifts on Facebook (hugs, gardens, little cyber-bits of foof).
• We’ve blogged ’til the cows came home, and then we took movies of the cows and hoped to start a viral revolution on YouTube.
• We dusted off our amateur movie skills and made B-level book trailers.
• We’ve spoken to book clubs, fielding questions about that pesky scene (that we don’t remember writing) on page 154.
• We’ve paid handsomely for a website whose visitors consist of our grandmothers, four stalkers, and ourselves (which counts for most of our hits).
• We’ve paid printing companies mucho bucks for business cards, bookmarks, t-shirts, auto decals, and mugs. (And we’ve cleared out a closet and a garage to hold these items.)
• We’ve spoken to groups large (12) and small (1) and solicited email addresses for our gem of a monthly newsletter—only to have our subscribers rebel by unsubscribing and vowing to never read any of our books.
• We’ve twittered away entire days, telling our seven followers the intricacies of our days, how much we’re writing, what we had for breakfast, and what exactly the dog ate to make him throw up those colors.
• We’ve given away free books to people in Nigeria in exchange for $540,000. (Well, a book and also all our account information).
• We paid handsomely for a professional picture only to discover the picture actually looks like us. (We opt for a picture taken in high school when sags and wrinkles didn’t exist.)

So we’ve worked hard, we midlisters. And what has all this toil brought us? Nothing. So we’re starting a revolution. We are now MAD! (Midlist Author Dictators, in case you forgot the acronym.) Here’s how the MAD program works:

• We read books about dictators (benevolent and not so benevolent) and figure out what made them tick. We take notes. We puff ourselves up. We practice on our dog, trying to make him do new tricks. Once we’ve perfected that, we go to the next step.
• We take what we’ve learned and create an empire where we are our own dictators, forcing the general populace to buy every one of our books. This includes backlists and the books we bought for 25 cents from our publisher because they were destined for the fiery furnaces of destruction.
• We rule benevolently (hopefully . . . There is that thing about absolute power corrupting absolutely.) And then we retire in the Cayman Islands off all those meaty royalty checks. (But we have to hire someone to decipher them because, for the life of us dictators, we can’t figure those puppies out!)

So there you have it. A new marketing method for a new generation! Midlist authors unite! Get MAD! Dust off your dormant dictator and have at it! Your very future depends on it. If you can’t sell books the old fashioned way, you may as well dictate. And if you fail? I hear Walmart is hiring greeters—their own micro-version of crowd-control-cart-distribution monarchy.

 

Mary E. DeMuth helps people to turn their trials into triumphs. She mentors new authors through the publishing process and has written two tutorials on book proposals (one for fiction and another for nonfiction). An expert in Pioneer Parenting, Mary enables Christian parents to navigate our changing culture when their families were not good faith examples to follow. Her parenting books include Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture (Harvest House, 2007), Building the Christian Family You Never Had (WaterBrook, 2006), and Ordinary Mom, Extraordinary God (Harvest House, 2005). Mary also inspires people to face their trials through her real-to-life novels, including Watching the Tree Limbs (nominated for a Christy Award) and Wishing on Dandelions (NavPress, 2006). A pioneer parent herself, Mary and her husband, Patrick, reside in Texas with their three children. They recently returned from breaking new spiritual ground in Southern France, where they planted a church.