Trends in Marketing

[Peg Herring]

It's entertaining to watch trends in any aspect of life, I suppose, and being a writer, I observe various fads and fancies in the writing business in order to decide what works for me and what doesn't. There is the rush to do book trailers, for example, and of course, blog tours. Lately, it seems that interviewing the characters in your books as if they were real is the hot thing to do.

If I had to be totally honest (and I try to be here), I think they all sound like fun. Certainly I could put words in Macbeth's mouth and have a great time with it. However, I wonder if we as authors don't get excited about things that leave the rest of the world pretty much unaffected. We love literary play, we love toying with words and creating images. We love talking about what we do. But there may be very little correlation to actually selling books in all this.

For example, I love Budweiser's ads. They're very clever. Does that lead me to buy Budweiser? Never have. I like watching movie trailers, but if theaters had to depend on me for sustenance, they'd be in real trouble. Haven't been out to a movie in years. And a lot of on-line stuff people describe sounds cool, but I seldom follow the links and actually look at it.

So everything works or nothing works. Nobody knows. I guess we might as well do what entertains us and get the joy of it. If it works for somebody else too, all the better.