How to sell stuff you haven't made yet

I haven't ranted about bad marketing here for a while, partly because I've been busy learning how to do good marketing. (My definition of bad marketing: Marketing that is clueless about what the customer actually wants, mainly because it doesn't care what they want.)

I've done several different courses from several different people, but the one that has really stood out is Clay Collins' "Interactive Offer". (It's actually saved me a lot of money. When you start poking round in the marketing field, you tend to get a lot of offers from people practicing what they preach, that is, trying to sell you stuff. For several months now I've been looking at those offers and thinking, "Yeah, that would be really good. But I don't need to buy this, because Clay's course will teach me that.")

Clay's thing is very 21st-century. You build a relationship with a group of people, and ask them what their problems are and what would help them solve those problems. And then you presell them a solution. And after that, you make the thing, because at that point you know it's going to succeed.

It's basically distributed patronage. In the 18th century, you had to find one rich person to pay you to make things. In the 21st century, you can find a whole lot of people who have a relatively small amount of money each, and make them things they want.

It's also the complete opposite of the kind of advertising and marketing I hate, where someone has a product that they want to sell, and they will interrupt you and try to sell it to you regardless of whether you need it or want it.

So, it's a brilliant concept, and Clay has used it to launch his last several products and got it down to a system, which he explains really well. (He's a nice guy, as well, which helps.) I'm very happy with my purchase.

I got in on the ground floor, the very first time he offered it. He's now created a whole lot of excellent material for us (asking us what we wanted at several points in the process, of course), and he's relaunching it all under a new name: The Presell Formula. (That's an affiliate link, but I'm not just recommending it to make some money. This is genuinely good stuff.)

What really sold me on the course was that Clay's free preview material for it was about three times as useful as the average marketing guru's paid course. And for this new version of the course, he's doing the same again: great preview material that you can actually use, even if you never buy the course.

Here's the link again: The Presell Formula. Go and take a look, sign up for his videos and enjoy his enthusiasm.

Life Leverage: my new nonfiction project

Over at Hypno NZ I've just announced Life Leverage: Simple techniques to improve your health and wellbeing.

The project is a book-and-CD combo, with the hypnotherapy tracks on the CD supporting the changes that the book talks about making.

I've created a mailing list where you can sign up for updates on this and my other hypnotherapy-related projects, such as audio recordings and videos. The idea is to assess demand so that I can decide what kind of a print-and-distribution model to adopt.

If health is a topic that interests you, please take a look. I try to stay on the scientific end of the health advice spectrum and make sure that my recommendations are well supported, but at the same time treat human beings as human beings and not squishy machines.

Free press releases

I spent quite a bit of Friday submitting press releases to a number of sites, a process which is often more fiddly than it needs to be. A couple of the sites I simply couldn't get to work at all; their CAPTCHA tech was faulty or the forms wouldn't post.

The easiest to submit to is NZ's own Scoop; you just email the editor, rather than having to register and fill out an online form which asks for the same information as all the other websites, but in a different order.

Here's Scoop's version of my press release about City of Masks. They changed the headline from "Book Promotion, New Style: Novelist Makes Maximum Use of Internet Technology" to the more clickbaiting, if slightly deceptive, "Renaissance Hits the Internet".

Anyway, for your reference and mine here is my collection of sites tagged "freepressreleases" at Del.icio.us.

Incidentally, I also found a nice site which you can use to submit a web page to multiple social bookmarking sites: Haliboo.

You can put a button like this on your site:



(That's functional, by the way - when you click it it will submit this site. It'll submit whatever the URL showing in the browser is, so if you want to bookmark this particular post rather than my whole blog, click the post's permalink first. That's the title of the post, for those unfamiliar with how Blogger does things.)

City of Masks proof

The City of Masks proof arrived from CreateSpace just now - impressive, considering that it was shipped on Tuesday (and I ordered it on Monday). Especially impressive this close to Christmas.

The cover looks great, title, cover illo, C-Side Media logo, even the spine text is correctly aligned, despite CreateSpace's dire warnings about the risks of putting text on the spine of a book under 130 pages (it's 128).

However, something's gone wrong with the ligatures in the interior copy, and the letter combination "fi" has dropped out almost everywhere it occurs (also fl, all apostrophes, and probably some others). It looks fine in the PDF I have here. I've just sent a support request; hopefully they can help me out.

I was going to do another proof in any case, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'm now planning to dual-publish at CreateSpace and Lulu. Lulu has much better pricing once you start buying in bulk, but getting distribution through Amazon with Lulu is relatively complicated, costs extra, and has certain limitations, so publishing through both at once makes sense. Unfortunately, when I was doing the original CreateSpace setup I picked the size 8.5 x 5.5 inches, completely arbitrarily - and Lulu doesn't print in that size. They both do 9 x 6, which just involves putting an extra quarter-inch all the way around the pages, so I should be able to do that without too many issues. (EDIT: No, I can't. CreateSpace doesn't let you change your mind about the trim size after you've ordered the first proof. Damn!)

The other reason I need to revise it is that I put a URL on the cover and in the front matter for a Wordpress blog, before I'd thoroughly investigated the functionality available at wordpress.com. I was relying on a description I'd read that said "Wordpress can do such-and-such", without realizing that while Wordpress the application can do a great many things when hosted on your own site, Wordpress the site is very sandboxed and paranoid and will let you do hardly any of them. In particular, you can't put HTML in your Wordpress blog which includes a form, so I can't include a signup form for my mailing list on the blog. That's a dealbreaker for me; people are much more likely, in my opinion, to sign up from a simple form than they are from just a link. So I'm going to be using city-of-masks.blogspot.com as my promotional blog for the book.

I'm planning to record myself reading the book and release it as a series of podcasts, then sell it as an audiobook. I may even, if I get myself organized, release the podcasts on the corresponding dates to the dates in Gregorius's journal (most of the book is told through journal entries). That would be kind of fun, and would give me a deadline.