F.W.
Woolworth is reputed to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is
wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half.” I just signed an advertising
contract and can hardly wait to find out which half it gets me into.
A bit of
backstory is in order here. For my first two mystery novels, I produced video
trailers to promote them. I thought they were pretty good, but when they went
up on YouTube, even with extensive flogging on my part, hardly anyone was
looking at them. The videos were essentially an unrecovered expense.
My third
novel, Not Death, But Love, came out
at the end of May, and though I retained Chip Scheuer, my video guy, to do one
for that book, I held off on getting it shot. The way I was looking at the
whole thing was evolving, largely as the result of an article I read in Vanity Fair earlier this year.
Going Directly to the Reader
It was a
profile of the best-selling mystery author James Patterson, and one of the
things it mentioned was that when he first started writing mysteries, he
advertised his books on local television. Having been an ad man himself,
Patterson knew the value of promotion, and his ads were simple, but,
apparently, quite effective.
That got me
thinking that perhaps my next video trailer should be 30 seconds long so that
it could be used as an ad on TV. Cable advertising is pretty reasonable these
days, and I figured I could do a trial run somewhere at an affordable cost. If
it gets results, I could try to build on it. If not, well, I tried.
Rigo
Torkos, who edited my previous videos, put me in touch with a cable TV
consultant, and after considerable back and forth, I decided the idea of
running the video on television in a closed market, just to see what happens,
was feasible. Last week, I signed a contract to do a two-week test run in
Monterey County in November.
The Target Audience
Because the
book centers on a retired English teacher who starts out to write her family’s
history and gets dangerously close to a long-buried secret, I felt the book
would be appreciated by female readers, who, after all, are the majority of
readers — especially fiction. So the consultant and I targeted cable channels
that deliver a high number of women viewers between the ages of 35-64.
The video
features my wife, Linda, as the retired English teacher, with a simple
voice-over and atmospheric lighting. The cover of the book is prominently
featured, as is the address of the website for the mystery series and the fact
that the book is available on Amazon. Short of putting a link on the TV screen,
I tried to make it as easy as possible for people who see the ad and are
intrigued to buy the book.
And so the
story begins. It has been represented to me that enough people will see this TV
spot in the two weeks it runs that if one percent of them buy the book, I’ll
see a bump in sales, regardless of normal monthly variation. Regardless, I’ll
have an answer. I eagerly await it.
