Marketing – Page 6 – Joseph Carrabis, Author Blog

Caveat Emptor – Have I Got a Deal for You!

Can they prove what they’ve claimed? (Simple strategies for recognizing scammers)

Note to folks who saw this on Facebook: I go a tad deeper here.

Interesting LinkedIn experience a while back.

Got this solicitation:

Authors, YOUR BOOK, memoir, or story idea synopsis as a movie? Make it so! You should hire us, Hollywood award-winning Screenwriters and IMDb Producers to write you a PROFESSIONAL script. FREE QUOTE: 1) send us your email 2) tell us the name of your book OR your story idea from synopsis to … Producers PREFER PROFESSIONAL scripts from books, and don’t have time to read books. Producers do not read scripts from beginning novice script writers who are book authors. They can tell ASAP from first few script pages if an expert wrote the script! We are IMDb award winning PROFESSIONAL scriptwriters, and award winning IMDb film producers. Our scripts WINS include best scripts top awards at Cannes, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, Hollywood, & OVERSEAS, etc., and 100s (YES! 100s!) of other BEST SCRIPT awards and BEST FILMS too. NEW Best Script AWARDs at the ECA and UTAH F.F., etc! We do not do book reviews. (We do NOT want other writers finished scripts to buy or option!)

I wrote back:

Could you provide the names of the scripts, the awards they’ve won, the movies made from them, please?

Got this reply:

you need to do your own due diligence on our awards and film accomplishments

Followed a few moments later by:

On IMDb, sites, and 100s of awards! I cannot send you all of them here. Clients need to do their own due indigence of course. If you want an A LIST scriptwriter who have LOTS of A LIST films that writer will cost you 100 thou and more as a WGA UNION writer. We are not that, because we want to work and have lower fees. But if you want a writer with TOP CREDITS, you would then need to pay VERY HIGH fees. Is that what you want? Then be my guest and look for a writer with A LIST credits. 🙂

First, the email address provided was gmail. Really? Sorry, someone offering to help you out and asking for money has to have something more substantial than a GMAIL account. Especially when they make the claims they do.

Second, anybody making the claims they make then saying “Go verify us yourself” is not to be trusted. If you want my business, prove to me your worth it. Saying you’re worth it and having the credos indicating you’re worth it are two quite different things.

Third, dear god don’t tell me (essentially) I’m an idiot for not accepting you at face value; the follow up basically says they don’t have lots of cred, they’re not WGA, and ends with “Is that what you want? Then be my guest and look for a writer with A LIST credits.”

Well, umm…yeah, I do want someone with lots of credibility in their industry, knowledge of their business, and a proven track record.

Idiot Moi! Right?

I ran my own business 25+ years. We put our list of happy clients, satisfied customers, recommendations and their results front and center. Did a prospect have a question about our track record? Here’s a client company and the contact in that company. Ask them directly.

Get Specifics
Beware of marketing claims that only contain generalities. Example: “Authors have seen substantial increases in sales using our platform.” The other one I like is “XYZ resulted in lots of pageviews, which resulted in substantial increases in royalties.”
Continue reading “Caveat Emptor – Have I Got a Deal for You!”

What’s your social networking philosophy, Joseph?

Well…umm…hmm…

Not sure I have one. But now you’ve made me think of it, here goes…

My response is based on a number of factors and mainly on human psychology and neuroscience.

The most open, accepting, gracious people on the planet hold something in reserve when meeting strangers. It’s natural. It’s in our neural wiring. We don’t know if the person we meet is friend or foe so we favor foe until we’re sure of friend. The neural wiring of this goes back through evolution to a time before humans were humans.
Continue reading “What’s your social networking philosophy, Joseph?”

How do you demonstrate you’ve written a well-told, interesting story in a tweet?

At the end of Metrics? We don’t need no stinkin metrics! (finale), I wrote “(anybody notice I haven’t covered “How do you demonstrate you’ve written a well-told, interesting story in a tweet?”
that’s a big question. let me think on it a bit and get back to you.)”

This is me getting back to you.

The first way to demonstrate you’ve written a well-told, interesting story in a tweet is to practice your craft (to which most authors go “Duh!“).

But think about it. You need to demonstrate your competency in both story-telling and -crafting in 250-260 characters (the link to your work’ll take up some characters) (want to see a kind-of master at this? Check out @ShorterThanFic. His tweets are both a riot and gems.)

A tweet demonstrating you’ve written a well told, interesting story is primarily a sales tool and great sales tools get past all the defenses consumers have developed to sales pitches and touch them at either their core or identity levels. They need to slow the consumer down enough to focus on the sales pitch’s content and not everything else going on around them distracting them from the pitch.

In other words, a good sales pitch aka a tweet demonstrating you’ve written a well-told, interesting story needs to get inside the consumer and make sure nothing else gets in for long enough for the pitch to take root and become actionable (== the person wants to buy your book or at least learn more about it).

This takes us back to blurbs. A blurb’s header is often a good tweet. I don’t recommend summing up your novel in one sentence. That exercise may be useful when submitting to agents and publishers but it usually takes the form of a statement and statements rarely have a call to action (an inducement for the consumer to purchase or learning more).

For example, some good tweets re The Augmented Man might be

Greetings! I’m your friendly, neighborhood Threshold Guardian. This is a protected post. Protected posts in the My Work, Marketing, and StoryCrafting categories require a subscription (starting at 1$US/month) to access. Protected posts outside those categories require a General (free) membership.
Members and Subscribers can LogIn. Non members can join. Non-protected posts (there are several) are available to everyone.
Want to learn more about why I use a subscription model? Read More ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes Enjoy!

Blurbs

Noun: blurb
1. A promotional statement (as found on the dust jackets of books)

I’m studying blurbs.

You know that stuff you find written on the backcover and/or dust jacket of most books? That’s the blurb. It’s underneath the endorsements (if there are any) and the grabber-headline.

My study revealed that opinions differ (Duh!). Some times the terms used for the same things differ. There’s no hard and fast rules, only opinions.

Opinions are called soft data, meaning they’re subjective and hard to pin down into something actionable. However, get enough soft data and you can perform statistical analyses that turns soft data into hard data, meaning objective and pin downable, provided you remember your original source is soft data and therefore your valid results could be valid results based on invalid information or incorrect analyses. Two-thousand people claiming something is valid doesn’t necessarily mean it’s valid. It could mean two-thousand people are incorrect.

The Chinese General Solicitation
I study soft data using The Chinese General Solicitation. I learned the Solicitation a long time ago, it’s served me well ever since in any number of situations:

Ask the same question to lots of different people.
Get their answer,
then ask lots of questions to get an explanation for their answer.

Do that until you run out of time, money, or both (and recognize that the data won’t harden up quickly. You generally need lots of people taking part), then make a list divided as follows:

Top of the list – find out what everybody agrees to.
Second part of the list – find out what most people agree to.
Bottom of the list – pay attention to what you agree with (not because it’s least worthy but because it’s your gut-check station).

Now lets apply these concepts to Blurbs.

1. What does everybody agree to?

Metrics? We don’t need no stinkin metrics! (finale)

I got ya charts right here, they make the data clear, unless you’re doing metrics you’ll never know if you’re near. Can do, Can do. This is what metrics can do…

This is the fourth post in a thread on author marketing metrics, specifically regarding some fascinating advice I got through a Facebook group (that spawned these posts). Part 1 provided a cantankerous but realistic intro to the subject of author marketing metrics. Part 2 started an analysis of the advice along with a few suggestions re selecting keywords on Twitter and Amazon and closed asking how one demonstrates their story-telling and -crafting ability in a tweet (we’re getting there). Part 3 continued the analysis.

Here we get to some tough questions that should be asked about any advice you get. But before we do…

Only take advice from someone you’re willing to trade places with.

It’s worth pointing out that the person giving the twitter advice is

Not a recognized name author
Publishes through a POD service that does no marketing (and isn’t it amazing how many POD publishers make doing all your own marketing sound like a godsend?)

I’m not willing to trade with the person who gave the advice analyzed in Part 2 and Part 3 (should be obvious from my comments on the advice. if not, read the following).