I work with some brilliant people.  These men and women don’t really get the credit they deserve and their job is hard. They are part salesman part Karnak. They are the marketing group.  I don’t care who you work for, there are present. Either tucked away in some fancy corner office (that they never occupy because they are flying around the world selling your product) or they are in your face once a week telling you how to write your book or design your game.  To be honest, I hope it’s the later.

I’ve spent a bit of time, not enough actually, digging into the minds of the marketing team and I’ve learned a lot from them.  One guy in particular, David DePaulis, our marketing rep for the recently shipped Nerf Elite video game on the Wii.  Aside from being the guy that came up with the peripheral concept for the game, he flies around the world selling our product (boy are his arms tired – ha ha).  I owe him a great deal, more than I’m going to go into in this post, but, thanks Dave.  Aside from being a Steelers fan you rock.

The aha moment that I’m going to cover today is that of looking ahead.  It sounds simple, but it’s a extremely complex problem.  I’m going to use the writing angle here on because I think it is clearer to see, and to be honest, when talking to writing friends of mine they are the biggest offenders.

Here’s the question.  Who are your readers? Not the guys and girls reading your published book right now.  If you’re published than you might have already figured this out, well…maybe.  I’m talking about, who are you writing for today.  If you are a YA author and you write novels for the 12-15 year old girls who pack around heavy vampire novels in their overloaded backpacks and you just wrote the outline for your novel, are you looking at 9 year old girls with a love for pets and social media devices?  If not, you should be.  Let me explain.

I’m bumping my head up the anniversary of starting my first novel (December 14^th 2008).  It is a good milestone for me because during that time I’ve penned my book, scrapped most of it in the second draft, rebuilt it, gotten harsh and wonderful feedback, written it again, attended writing conferences and classes, talked with agents, rewritten it again, visited with editors, rewritten it again, polished it, put it to bed, started a new book, sent out queries (fulls and partials request – yeah me!), gotten rejections (yeah me again) and, well you get the picture.  The fact is that I’m almost one year in and I’ve really done nothing to reach my (super amazing, undiscovered) readers yet.  If I’d started a trendy, time dependent, age dependent book where would I be? Let’s fast forward.

Year 2+ – best case scenario I find an agent, not just any agent, but the right agent.  She/he feels that my book will sell after, yup you guessed it, a few more rewrites.  Let’s say for argument sake that only takes another 6 months to find an agent and clean up my book.  It could happen.  Now the hard part begins.  The agent shops the book.  2 months? 6? 12?  Hard to tell, but let’s go with 6 again, an aggressive but plausible time.  The publisher puts it on the sku plan and finds a good time for my book to come out.  Another 6 months and another polish pass.  In a well oiled world this whole process might take 8-12 months, but in today’s not so well oiled world, we might be looking at more like 18-24.  Ouch.

Math time. 1 year for me to write get my novel to a point where I think it’s ready.

18 months to find and agent, editor, publisher, market, shelf…

How old is my 15 year old  (top of my target audience) reader that I wanted to grab at the beginning of this journey? Crap, she’s heading off to college.

The 12 year is still there, but probably not prime anymore, she’s starting to fall out.  The 9 year old that I was ignoring that was into pets and social media might be ready but she doesn’t like vampires – they are so last year in her eyes.  Also, who carries heavy books anymore?  She has an iPhone (come on, stick with me, in 18-24 months those will be hand me down devices.  Moms and Dads will have something new by then) and maybe even a 1^st or 2^nd generation Kindle.  Are you on that device?  Do you need to be on any others?  How many pets are in your book? Can she share passages with her friends and discuss them electronically? Can she send clips of your book directly to Twitter without leaving her device or does she have to key it in while propping thebook open on her lap and typing with her other hand? Believe me, she won’t take the time to do this.  Did she even pay for your book or did she download it for free?  If so, how are you going to monetize your 18-24 months of hard work?

To me, these questions are exciting, not as exciting as writing or I would be calling Dave DePaulis and asking him if I could join him on the marketing team at EA, but exciting none-the-less.  Exciting enough that I’m starting to really think about the best way to market my next book that will be on the shelves (or on your e-reader) in 2012.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:32 am and is filed under Fiction Rants, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.