Marketing smarter (not more expensively)

For some time, Dennis Johnson at the energetic Brooklyn publisher Melville House has been asking this question about Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone.

“How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since?”

Here’s one of his most creative answers to that question. As I saw in my brief career as an assistant bookseller, publishers print and distribute thousands of copies of Advance Reader’s Copies or ARCs for forthcoming books. Yet although the purpose of these ARCs is to drum up attention and enthusiasm, they are generally very boring. Title, author, and publishing details are printed on a light blue paper cover, and that’s that.

Melville House has shown that you can grab the attention you need not by spending any more but just by being a little bit different. Of course, being different can be scary and involves some risk—the risk that you will annoy people who are used to getting their ARCs the same old way. But in this case it paid off.

Even better, to my mind, is that it paid off by using a testimonial. Seth Godin argues in Purple Cow and elsewhere that what’s needed to cut through the noise in today’s media is a genuine voice.

Real testimonials from real people (not testimonials cooked up by the marketing department) can do that—especially when they come from a voice as significant as Primo Levi’s.

Seth Godin is on a roll

If you’re interesting in marketing and communications, it’s worth checking out the daily blog of Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and many other useful books.

Lately Seth has been on a roll, posting a number of unusually intriguing observations.

He explains just why Apple was able to sell $150 million worth of iPads in one day (it’s not just because it’s a cool product). He reveals how the ”Levy flight” describes the behavior of animals foraging for food and Internet users foraging for information.

He argues that companies prosper by focusing more on their social responsibilities than on their “rights.” And in ”When in doubt, disaggregate” he reiterates the main point of his book Purple Cow: that it’s no longer possible to success by selling average products and services to average people.

A very serious post about advertising

Since I started blogging two years ago, I’ve been pretty careful to keep the silliness out. No piano-playing cats. No dance routines at weddings. But since I do write about marketing and advertising, and since this is an unusually good (and funny) collection of examples of how context is everything, I’m making an exception and bringing you the Top 15 Wrongly Placed Ads. (The photo shown here is one of the more harmless ones.)

Madagascar chocolate

Earlier this week I wrote about Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin, and posted a love poem from Madagascar at Words Without Borders, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

Now, by one of those odd convergences, Seth Godin and Madagascar and Valentine’s Day have come together again. Godin says he doesn’t do consulting, but apparently he’s been talking to the people who make Madécasse Chocolate, “the only imported chocolate made on the continent with local beans.” (Well, Madagascar isn’t technically on the continent, but it’s considered part of Africa.)

As it turns out, Madécasse is based in Brooklyn, not far from where I live, and the chocolate is sold, among other places, at one of my favorite independent bookstores, McNally Jackson.

At any rate, Godin’s point is that you can’t market effectively by being all things to all people. Pick a story and go with it.

For example, the Madécasse story about made by Africans in Africa is very powerful, at least as powerful as fair trade, if not more (they keep four times as much money in Africa by selling a bar as they would if they just sold beans to other companies).

If that’s true, then why not put your workers on the label? Big beautiful pictures that would be an amazing juxtaposition against all the other abstract stuff in the store. Tell me the story of the worker on the back. Make each one different and compelling. Packaging as baseball card. I wouldn’t put a word on the front, just the picture.  Now I not only eat something that tastes good, but I feel good. You’ve made it personal. The story on the back is about a real person, living a better life because I took the time to buy her chocolate instead of someone else’s. When I share the chocolate, I have something to say. What do you say when you give someone a chocolate bar? This package gives you something to say.

The illustration I’ve borrowed here is apparently Godin’s idea of what the Madécasse package should look like. I think it works, and I’ll be interested to see if the company goes with the idea.

Linchpin by Seth Godin

Over the weekend I bought Seth Godin‘s new book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? On Monday I finished reading it, and in the evening I went to hear the author at the Borders in Columbus Circle, where he was appearing with Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art.

The idea of Linchpin is an attractive one. At a time when the economy has drummed into us that no one is indispensable, it’s appealing to be told that we may be indispensable after all, or that this book can tell us how to become indispensable. But the book quickly makes it obvious that it’s not so easy. Career survival requires being genuine, creative, and willing to take risks, says Godin. In fact, it requires being a kind of artist, and artists are subject to blocks.

The reason for that block is what both Godin and Pressfield call Resistance, and Resistance is very hard to overcome. Facing it requires facing our fears, and as Pressfield put it, you may find that the thing that scares you the most is the thing your soul needs. It’s easier to avoid doing difficult creative work by procrastinating on Twitter or Facebook or by keeping busy with routine, following-the-map tasks.

How do you overcome Resistance? Welcome your ideas, says Godin, even the bad ones. (I was reminded of Anne Lamott’s chapter on why “shitty first drafts” are a good thing.) Set deadlines, meet them, and move on to the next thing. Shipping all the time, he says, is the way to avoid burning out.

In the end, said Pressfield, he found that the pain of not doing the work he wanted to do was greater than the pain of doing it. Similarly, Godin said that if he ever stopped shipping, he would have to become a bank teller, and then he would have to blow his brains out.

Even if you make a habit of overcoming your Resistance and doing the creative work you were meant to do, there is no guarantee that it will make you money. It has made money for Godin, but he isn’t fooled by that into thinking it will do the same for everyone. After twenty years of studying successful people, Godin said, the only thing he’s found that they have in common is that they’re successful.

In Linchpin he makes it clear that trying to make your art pay can debase it, and that the best course for many people may be to bring their genuine, creative selves to both their day job and their novel—but without any expectation that the two can be combined.