Quiet, Effective Ways Of Book Promotion: The Humble Hyperlink

One of the best ways to promote your book involves HTML.  You know what you need to learn?
The hyperlink.
Because too many damn authors talk about their books in the abstract, with mushy comments like this:
“I had my baby shortly after I got the idea for my second book, so I had to juggle changing diapers and writing…”
Which is nice, but hey!  Which book did you write?  What’s the name?  Where’s it published?
Just add this:
“I had my baby shortly after I got the idea for Hot Lesbian Alligators, my second book, so I had to juggle changing diapers and writing…”
Now, the trick to this is to be a functioning human being.  If three out of every four comments you write make reference to Your Fantastic Book, then smack yourself in the genitals and try again.  But if you’re an author, eventually your book will come up – and when it does, just quietly drop in the name so we can look if we’re interested.
Don’t go out of your way to promote the book.  Don’t make funny ha-ha jokes like adding “(BUY IT NOW)” after mentioning it.  Your book is a friend, you see, and when you mention a friend you’re proud of you name them, so treat it like that.
And yeah, there are people who will yell at you for that mild level of self-promotion.  Fuck those assholes.  Assuming you’re not bending every conversation to revolve around the twisted spoke of Hot Lesbian Alligators, mentioning that your book exists is not overpromotion.  Particularly if you’re a woman or a minority, you’re battered on a daily basis to not mention your achievements, so you self-sabotage before you even start – and all the while, talentless white guys like me shamelessly trumpet their books like they were Jesus announcing his sequel to the Bible.
(When Jesus writes the Biblical sequel, it will be called – say it with me – Hot Lesbian Alligators.  Jesus has gotten way more modern in His parables.)
So don’t be afraid to mention it, unless the forum specifically says not to, or a moderator complains.  Let no one make you ashamed for mentioning the existence of your book.  As long as you’re not making any claims to its quality, you’re merely saving the curious a potentially-fruitless Google search, and as such you’re actually doing people a favor if they’re sufficiently interested in you that they want to follow down to your books.
So remember.  Hyperlink that motherfucker.

Witness My New, Book-Themed Nails!

So for ConFusion, I asked my Mad Manicurist Ashley to do me up with books and bookcases.  Let’s see how she did:


Beautiful.  As usual.
Oh, speaking of books, the Cleveland Book Release party for Flex will be on Friday, March 6th.  Details to come later, but reserve your calendar now!  Come out to see me, so I’m not standing pathetically alone in a pile of books!  HALP

So This Appears To Be Actually Happening.

The weird thing about being an author is that months pass by when you are not.  As a general rule, you don’t get a lot of feedback as an author, particularly when you write short stories; maybe a couple of Twitter-mentions, maybe Lois Tilton reviews your tale, but mostly you write a story and it vanishes after a month and then you’re back to zilch.
I mean, you know you’re an author; you’re writing.  You’re talking to other writers.  But the feedback from the world is negligible.
And selling a novel is weird, because the feedback comes in clusters.  You get the acceptance, and it’s all WOO I CAN’T TELL MY FRIENDS YET HOLY GOD SIGN THE CONTRACT SIGN THE CONTRACT.  Then you make the announcement, and it’s a voluminous roar from your friends.
Then nothing.  Weeks and weeks of nothing.
Then you get the edits!  A flurry of activity.
Then nothing.
Then you get the copyedits!  A flurry of activity!
Then nothing.
Then the proofing!  And holy crap, is that more boring than I can convey!
And then weeks and weeks of nothing.
So my novel has been A Thing in my life, but months have passed by where it might as well have not existed.  You just sort of go on cruise control, like ya do with stories, where you wait for things to happen.
And now, things are starting to heat up.
After months of delay, the Advanced Reader Copies for reviewers are up on NetGalley.  People are starting to talk about this not just as “Hey, that thing that Ferrett is doing,” but as an actual book that they’re excited about.  I’m planning podcasts, blog tours, publicity – and for the record, if you want me to make a post for your blog or talk on your show, talk to me, I’ll go just about anywhere.
There’s that shivering excitement of knowing that strangers now have your book in their hands, and you hope they like it.
You oscillate between hope and despair – I’ll sell ten thousand copies!  No, you’ll be lucky to sell five hundred.  This will be a success!  They’ll hate it.  You’ve done everything you can – for me, sending in the final proofs felt slightly despairing, like, “This book is now as literally as good as it’s going to get” – and so you have that feeling of the roller coaster ratcheting upwards, knowing there’s a drop coming, unable to see over that rise in front of you.
Reviews are coming. And you’re either Ned Stark or Littlefinger.
Last night, I spent an hour writing, then an hour prepping an excerpt of my book to be read aloud in a podcast, then I answered interview questions for an hour.  The work is starting.  I’m still coordinating book tours, trying to figure out how all this works, getting the signing…
…and I know this will eventually explode.  In March there will be a flurry of Goodreads reviews, people telling me they loved it or hated it, I’ll watch my Amazon rating like it was my heartbeat when I was in the ER for cardiac arrest.
And sometime – I expect in May – it’ll all fade again.  It’ll become Just Another Book, the last thing people read, and it’ll probably have a little more traction than a short story, but this will dwindle to backlist.  It’ll be something I discuss, but the excitement?  Over.  Except for a few fans who, hopefully, will tell me how much they loved it.  (I hope I hope.)  I’ll have something to sign at conventions at long last.
But for right now, I’m in that zone where I can’t quite see the drop, but the rollercoaster is rattling harder, and I hear the people out in front whooping.  Is that a good whoop, and this is going to be a joyous ride?  Is it a bad whoop, where you discover this next rush is lame?
I don’t know.
Yet I can feel the pull of it.  Something is happening.  I’ve never gone over this hill before.  It’s going to be weirdly exciting even if the book flops – all the talking I’ll do, all the preparation, all the people treating these words I churned out like they were just some other book on the shelves.
I’m transitioning from “Oh my God this is important to me” to “Oh my God this is one of thousands of books published this year.”  It’ll be brutal.  It’ll be eye-opening.  It may even be profitable.
It’s coming, and the next six weeks are only going to get crazier.
 

Why Pick-Up Artists Work, I Think.

Pick-up artists.  I have such a love/hate relationship with these guys.  I love that there’s someone out there trying to teach socially awkward men how to get the physical affection they need…
…but then in the process of gamifying the system, they proceed to objectify women and make sex into a competition.  Eventually women become like climbing mountains, where they start finding increasingly ridiculous challenges that they don’t even particularly want – they just need to take these new skills for a spin.  They rank women to measure their challenges, becoming what they despise in the process.
Anyway, there’s a lot of framework and standardization among pick-up artists.  You gotta “peacock,” wearing gaudy things so women will have something to comment on.  (I can vouch this works, as my casual conversations with women have tripled since I got my pretty pretty princess nails.)
You go out and “neg” women, subtly insulting them to show how thoroughly Not Impressed you are. (I can also vouch this works, as it’s something I sorta do semi-organically – I don’t set out to take pretty girls down a peg, but so many women are surrounded by men who are terrified to express an opinion, lest they accidentally drive this pretty girl away. Saying, “Holy crap, NO!” on occasion actually makes you more interesting, as you’re exhibiting a form of confidence.  I dislike outright insult just to drop them into defensive mode, though.)
You trot out well-worn anecdotes to try to get into the sack.  (*cough*)
The thing is, the pick-up routine becomes an obsession for these guys. They fine-tune the approach.  They start excluding variables.  They work on it like it was a stand-up routine, constantly polishing every aspect from the opener to the closer, and…
…I don’t know how necessary that whole schtick is.
See, I don’t think the routines of the pick-up artists are as key as they think – it’s just that women like casual sex as much as men do.  And while most guys claim they just want sex, it turns out they actually want commitment in a frightening way that creeps up around the edges.  They say women are the commitment-hungry gender, but holy God I’ve known so many dudes who had a one-night stand with someone they liked and could not let that shit go.
A lot of women are actually fine with casual sex.  It’s just that guys often try to sneak in “committed sex” under the guise of “casual sex,” and when that doesn’t work out for them then holy shit, let’s unleash a sewery tide of slut-shaming on this bitch who dared to spread her legs for me.
What a great reward system you’ve devised, guys!
So I think the routine isn’t all that important.  Expressing yourself as a confident person who’s not going to follow her around for the next six weeks, constantly calling after she’s made the mistake of hooking up with you?  That, my friend, is key.
I think that’s one of the reasons I – a pudgy, bug-eyed neurotic – has gotten as much sex as I have.  I like you.  I want to have sex with you.  It’s not going to be more than that unless you want it to be.  And given my lack of skills in many areas, that open-yet-unattached approach been surprisingly effective.
But hey.  I get the need for a routine, in some cases.  Particularly if you’re socially anxious, having the confidence of a script can help you gain the strength to talk to an attractive stranger.  Breaking the ice is fucking terrifying, especially when rejections can be so offhandedly cruel, and that’s why despite my reservations about PUAs I can’t say there’s not a need for at least some of what they do.
Seriously, though.  I think if you can just be actually legitimately okay with casual sex, you’d be surprised at how often it’ll happen.  Even for someone like me.

Selma: The Exceptional Biopic

I absolutely hate biopics because of the shameless way they game critical acclaim. Let’s take last year’s “Twelve Years A Slave,” for example.
I thought “Twelve Years” was a decent horror story and a thoroughly mediocre movie.  It had a few nice tricks, but the directing was pedestrian, the pacing turgid (and perhaps as a conscious directorial choice to make the audience feel the endlessness of slavery, but boring is still boring), and the writing functional.  On my own, I would have given it a B- in the way I did “Saw” – effective at making audiences wince, cathartic, but not much more.
But see, the magic of biopics is that if you make a film about something Truly Important, criticizing the story slurs right into criticizing the subject matter.
“How can you dislike Twelve Years?” people cried.  “Well, you must be for slavery!  How can you dismiss this whole experience?”
Except I’m not.  I think the historical relevance of Twelve Years is great, I’m glad we got a major motion picture on slavery (which hardly ever happens), I’m thoroughly anti-slavery.
However, I thought this picture was crappy.  I wish the story as presented was better.  I wish we had tons of films about slavery, the same way we have endless films on white people in the Regency era swanning through England, so we could see just how tedious this was by comparison.
Likewise, a Great Film about Gandhi or Alan Turing or anyone historically important becomes immediate Oscar-bait, because if you don’t like the movie then you must not recognize the greatness of Gandhi!
Worse, biopics lend themselves to what I call “Capote syndrome,” where you make a movie with one great performance – Philip Seymour Hoffman absolutely nailed it – but the film itself is wandering, and not particularly interesting, and so yeah, it absolutely deserves to win “Best Actor” but everyone else is meh.  (Likewise, I thought “Twelve Years” housed two great performances, wrapped in a big ball of meh.  I liked “Lincoln” just fine, but you take Daniel Day Lewis out of that film and it vanishes.)
So no; try though people might to conflate the historical importance with the cinematic execution, it’s possible to have a mediocre movie about a transforming historical figure.  And it’s possible I’m wrong about “Twelve Years” – we’ll see if anyone’s still watching it in a decade or two.  We all know that critics are often wrong, and I could be so here.  But my point is that thanks to public reaction, the distinction vanishes so it becomes hard to critique the film without seeming to dismiss the event.
(And that doesn’t mean that a mediocre movie won’t hit home and hit home hard for some.  Right now, I’m dealing with mourning for my goddaughter, who died of brain cancer.  Show me any movie about kids being sick, I fall apart.  But that doesn’t make those movies great movies or anything; they’re just plucking at heartstrings that are extremely tender.  Likewise, I don’t doubt that a film like, say, “The Butler” or “American Sniper” was absolutely moving for many people, but I question whether that’s because the movie was good or – like me and Rebecca – it was an average film that unearthed some super-intense memories.)
Now, after 500 words of trashing biopics….

OH MY GOD SELMA IS SO FUCKING GOOD

Selma is not some recreation of a man – it symbolizes the heart of the conflict of the Civil Rights movement, putting you firmly in the shoes of African-Americans in the 1960s and showing all the trials they had to face.
And Selma does not pull punches in the flaws of its characters, the conflicts that threatened to rip the Civil Rights movement apart.  Not all Negroes cheerfully lined up behind Martin Luther King; we see the militant wing of Malcolm X nipping at his heels, the local activists who are pissed that King has swept in to make a media show of a town they’ve been working for years to improve.
It pulls no punches in saying that MLK went to a town where the Sheriff was cool-headed enough not to beat the shit out of black people on national TV, and he failed, and he is choosing Selma because it will be a nice visual bloodbath to shock America into having some febrile nature of a conscience.
It shows how easily MLK could have been crushed, if LBJ had decided that he wanted King gone, and yet for all of LBJ’s good will MLK still needed to force LBJ’s hand so once again, the Negro’s right to vote wouldn’t be shuffled under in a tide of “We’ll get to that later.”
What we get with Selma is a story – and a good story, one filled with tension, because even though you know it works out you get to see the toll it took on the men who got us there.  It doesn’t pull away from the hard decisions; it leans into them, letting you see just how brave these people were without putting them on a pedestal where they’re just Big Damn Heroes.
Selma is as good as people say it is. And it’s an uncomfortable movie, but it’s also not torture porn; it shows you what you need to know, and does not shy away – that lingering shot of the dead girls at the beginning sets the stakes – but it’s more concerned with the living than the dead.  When Martin Luther has to go talk to a man whose grandson has died, the scene where he tries in vain to comfort the living takes twice as long as the death scene.  And that’s purposeful.  We feel the resonation of the deaths long after they’re gone.
Selma is modern.  It doesn’t have to stretch for parallels – though it’s largely unspoken except for one lyrical reference to Ferguson in the credits, we have a hidden set of deaths and abuse that nobody wants to look at.
There’s no modern-day analog to Martin Luther King, or even Malcolm X, and I don’t think that’s the fault of the black community.  Today is a day of fractures; there’s a thousand media outlets, everyone can have a blog, everyone’s on Twitter, everyone has their own choice.  I’m not sure we can have a great uniting figure any more.
When you hear the words of King, slow as syrup, each word thought through precisely, man.  You wish a little that we were back in the days when one man could be lifted to such heights.  Because what he said, and did, to focus the movement, to keep it on track, still resonates today.
Go see Selma.  It’s so worth it.