I remember when we were shooting the 1st indie film I wrote and directed, Tony Winner John Glover said to me at one point (with agreement and irony), “My mother taught me that two things are important in life: Winning Prizes and Being Popular.”
More and more, I realize Mrs. Glover was probably right.
The heart of my day now re: book promotion is asking friends to rate the novel and write even the shortest reviews –– and if you are reading this, email me and I will give you a free copy GLADLY –– so that we are successfully ranked in iTunes and then, on June 11th, I can ask people to copy and paste their reviews to Amazon.
In my many emails to my publisher, they mentioned an author whose book had launched that day and the poor guy had exactly zero ratings and zero reviews on iTunes.
We’re launching in 20 days and have 35 and 19, respectively -– but only because I am stopping one step short of literally knocking on people’s doors and sitting them down at their computers.
The process really does take only 90 seconds (for the rating) and however long it takes you to compose “I loved this book!” or some variation therein.
Part of the difficulty I think, for the unranked/unreviewed writer, may have been that he drastically underestimated how much prodding it takes from even the most devoted friends for this kind of thing.
I, however, having produced a zillion plays in NYC and taught public yoga classes for a decade, know just how many reminders and how much cajoling is required to guarantee an audience –– that is, until you reach some mysterious moment of critical mass.
When I first taught at the Laughing Lotus in its initial Christopher Street location, 22, maybe 25, people were all that could fit into the room without massive crowding.
And for at least a year, I taught classes that had 3, 5, maybe 8 students in them, as did the Founders Dana and Jasmine mostly as well. Yes, I attended some Sunday morning classes with Dana that were full, but I also was one of four students many, many times on a Friday afternoon.
When we moved to the new location –– and they’ve expanded again and taken over the entire floor –– my classes also had single digits, maybe sometimes reaching up towards a lucky 12 or 13.
And then … something began to happen.
There wasn’t a clear MOMENT, but in almost a drunken blur, suddenly I had 20+ people in every class. And then 30. And then I began selling out and we realized 45 was the absolute maximum that could comfortable fit into that room (although sometimes we tried for 50.)
I began to think of a class with 35 students as a “failure” –– had I done something wrong or taught something too crazy the previous week? –– completely forgetting that 18 months earlier, 12 was a “triumph.”
There just is a MAGIC MOMENT where publicizing things works and you reach CRITICAL MASS, although sometimes it’s definitive (like when I was on REGIS and watched the rankings climb on Amazon by the minute), and sometimes it’s blurry (like the gradual increase of your student fan-base/following.)
It’s good that I can remember that just right now now as I’m deep into promoting new material, aka my novel DOWNWARD DOG.
Every single five star rating helps … and pretty soon (let’s hope around June 11th) it’ll be EXPLOSIVELY out of my hands.
(And by the way –– it IS working –– as yesterday DOWNWARD DOG appeared in the top row of POPULAR PRE-ORDERS on iTunes.)
(YAY!)
Menu
