Sarah Allen's Blog, page 39

Marketing Lessons from Doritos and the Superbowl

Just some quick thoughts.

This year what stood out to me was Doritos.

Not only were their commercials the most hilarious, they were fan-made. This means Doritos scored in two ways: They put less effort into the commercials and got more out of them. The fans were involved and excited and willing participants. That's a recipe for success right there.


So how do writers follow this lesson? What about putting together an anthology? Hosting a contest of posters and paintings and fanvids based on your book?

Do you think this would work? What are your ideas?

Sarah Allen

What are your power songs?

You know, the songs you hum to yourself when you need a boost of courage and grit. There are some really good ones out there. As cheesy as it is, here's one of my favorites:


What are your favorites?

Sarah Allen

The Universe owes me for a sucky yesterday

So here's how my day went yesterday.

I went to work. My shift was just a four hour one, which was nice, and I thought a good start to the day.

After work I had an email from someone telling me that I did not get this other job I was applying for. Then I went into minor panic mode, because I didn't realize how much I'd been counting on that financially. I'm so done with squeak by mode.

So, I kinda also had this speeding ticket from two months ago that I needed to take care of by today, and let me tell you, Virginia speeding tickets are a lot meaner than Utah speeding tickets. In Utah (or at least in Provo) its like, sit in traffic school for a couple hours and we'll call it good. Anything called "school" can't be too bad, and in fact its not. Here the tickets are like pay this fine or go to court and PLEAD YOUR CASE IN A COURT OF LAW. Ok, so that's not unusual and I'm being dramatic but its very intimidating. So, anyway, then I had to take care of that, meaning decide whether to add to money stress or take a chance with a judge which probably wouldn't change the money stress anyway only add another kind of stress but the lady I called said I had to pay by two or it wouldn't go through in time so I had to decide fast so I just paid and got it over with.

Then last night I was picking up my sister and on the way back (and this was at like, 5:30 which is THE WORST DRIVING TIME everywhere within a 50 mile radius of the city) I was turning a corner and people stopped for a red light fast enough that I nicked the corner of the big SUV in front of me and scratched the back left corner paint a little and so I had to stop and the three Mexican guys in the car took a picture of my insurance and the scratch and my licence plate and they were nice but it was still really really scary because this hasn't happened to me before and what if my insurance goes up I HATE SQUEAK BY MODE.

Three punches in the face. As they say, mishaps come in threes. Same with my answers for why I'll be just fine.

First, just the simple belief that I'll be okay. Like I was saying to my HLP, there is a big difference between This Sucks days and I'm Drowning days. I've experienced the Drowning days, which definitely don't feel survivable, but just the fact that I'm able to talk about this and I'm already doing fine means I'm not in drowning mode, that I'm getting the strength and confidence I've felt like I don't have, and if it takes a few knocks to show you you can take it, then I guess that's okay.

Second, I do genuinely believe that when things are rough and totally not working out the way you wanted them to it means that if everything went according to your plan it would get in the way of something much better. God knows us and our situation and what we want even more than we do ourselves, and even though its hard, I think its much safer to trust that He knows what He's doing. All that only means that something AWESOME is on its way, right?

Third and lastly, and right now the most helpful thing of all, is that as I write this it actually is last night and mom is making tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches and there is lime sherbet in the freezer. Also it's Tuesday night, and that means a brand new Chopped.

As a fave song says, tomorrow will be kinder. Now pass the ice-cream.

Sarah Allen

Hobbies Away from the Screen

[image error] So, a lot of a writers life involves a computer screen. At least it does for me. There's the social media management, your Facebook fan page, Twitter, Pinterest. There's the online research, Google and Wikipedia. This is all not to mention the actual writing part, which basically everyone does on a computer these days. (Maybe I'll get a typewriter just for fun spontaneous use?)

I think I might be on the overdoing it end of the spectrum, I admit it. And by "might be" I mean definitely need to save my eyes and back and health. So then comes the deciding what to do to take you away from the screen. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of awesome fun exciting things out there, but if you're as single-track minded and obsessed as I am it sort of becomes a challenge to find things to do away from a screen that still make you feel like I'm moving towards my writing goals. But I've come up with some things that might help. At least I think they'd help me.

1. A gym pass. I actually do pretty good, generally, at getting to the gym when I have a gym pass. For some reason it feels more productive then just "going for a run," perhaps because its a specific location made for that purpose. Also there is television.

2. A dog. Solves EVERYTHING.

3. A Guitar. I so wanna get a guitar and spend some away-from-screen time writing tunes. Not original, I know, and I'm a total noob, but you gotta start somewhere, right?

Those are my three personal solutions. There are some other really good ones, like starting a garden or doing something artsy. One of my roommates was an art major, and I was always jealous that she had that to work on when she wasn't writing/at the computer. So for those with any visual-art skills, that could be awesome too. There are so many beautiful and amazing outdoor things, like biking and hiking and rock climbing and all that, and if I was an outdoorsy person then that might work. But I'm no more outdoorsy than I am artsy, and I'm trying to go with what works here. So if those things work, more power to ya, and I'm jealous.

How about you? What worthwhile things do you do away from the computer screen? That not only take you away from the computer screen, but fulfill you personally and creatively as well?

Sarah Allen

Friday Funnies

Just some funnies to make your Friday a little better.
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Stuff I Do While I Wait to Hear Back From Graduate Schools

I look at this. I try and fail and try and keep trying to flesh out a new outline for Novel #2.
I watch this:And this:I eat cereal and watch Chopped with mom and think about pirates and the Iditarod and check out the website for the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico and text my friends in Utah and Arizona and Thailand (Well, with her its usually online chat). I work and stress about money, but not too much. I check my email AGAIN to see if any more agents have gotten back to me. I think about short story collections and screenplays and songs I want to write and ideas for projects on Tumblr and YouTube that may have to wait until I am even less stressed about money but are still fun to think about. I think about walking to the library but then decide its too cold. I eat the chocolate covered raisins my mom always buys from Costco DANG HER.
I read Jeffery Eugenides with the same mixture of awe and wonder and jealousy and disgust that I feel towards many writers working in literary fiction (Though with Eugenides its heavy on the awe and wonder and jealousy and a little lighter on the disgust.)
I think about what to blog about and my fun Tumblr and short story ideas and then think I should be focusing much more on getting this next novel going and so I go back to that and try and fail and try again and...
Back to my outline.
Sarah Allen

Pirates and Pixie Cuts

I'm just blogging about what's on my mind, people.

What do these have in common? I don't really know. Sexiness?

I don't really know if it is going to have anything to do with my next novel, but either way it provided a good excuse for me to spend an hour on Wikipedia reading about pirates the other day. Anne Bonny, what a rebel. I'm not writing a pirate novel or anything, but I think my MC for novel two might be interested in shipwrecks and underwater archaeology.

This is why I love writing. Everything counts as research.

I'm also very seriously considering a pixie cut. Slash I'm going to get one (I think?) though not immediately. See, I have a round face, not what would typically work well with a pixie, but I'm going to do it because either it will a) get it out of my system or b) turn out surprisingly well.

So, these are some ones I'm liking. Watcha think?
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Mmm, that makes me excited :) I also want to save up for a guitar and watch ALL THE TED TALKS BECAUSE THEY ARE AWESOME.

This is what I am thinking about while I wait for responses from grad schools.

How is life for you? :)

(Or maybe I'll reconsider this one...)
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The Single Most Important Quality a Writer Needs

There are a lot of things a writer tries to be.

Creative. Funny. Clever. Good at networking. Intelligent, talented, lucky.

All those things are important, and I think can definitely make our writing journey go that much smoother. Whichever talents God has blessed us with, we should use them to our advantage. Use our strengths to make up for our weakness, collaborate with people who can do certain things better then us, and, without beating ourselves up for our weak points, try to do better.

All this is well and good.

However, there is another quality that is absolutely more important than any of those things. It has nothing to do with which school we went to or which agents we know or what genre we write in. You can take the must wacky, wild, obscure path to success and you will find it, if you only have this one thing.

That one thing is persistence. Keep working, constantly and consistently, and you WILL get where you're going. Flaws and weaknesses in any other area can be made up for with basic persistence. If you know you're writing is weak in certain areas, write and practice and read and get feedback and write some more until you've learned to do it better. If you really don't know much about marketing and publicity, learn what you can and don't stop until you've found someone else who can do the job as well as you want them to. Just don't stop.

Maybe we've heard this a lot before, and maybe I'm not the best person to be reiterating this advice since I'm still in the trenches myself. But to me its a good and nice thing to think about on down days, when I feel like I'm going nowhere. I was talking to my brother about my querying process and how many rejections I've gotten so far and how many letters I have out at the moment and he said it showed "dedication." I'm glad he thinks so, because if I can be dedicated and keep it all up every day then I know eventually something good will happen.

For all of us, because we will never stop.

Sarah Allen

Thoughts While I Watch Chopped

My mom and I have gotten in the habit of watching Chopped together at night. It is the perfect decompression show. It's entertaining, fun, and the perfect show for working on other stuff too like folding laundry, job-hunting on craigslist, eating a midnight snack. Blogging. Sometimes I don't drive back to my own apartment until...well, late.
So what am I learning while I watch?
1. Take what life throws. Nobody knows what's coming, but I believe that those who find success are the ones who figure out a way to roll with the punches. Rejections will come, publishing will change, someone might screw you over. Take what happens and find a way to use it to your advantage. Get a rejection? Use it to make your writing better. Write a useful and relatable blog post about it and promote it to new readers. Seeing some publishing industry changes? Experiment, use it to reach new readers. Get screwed over? Find new people and write a book about it.
2. Don't Be Cocky. This ones kinda simple. The cocky people are annoying and the ones we as an audience want voted off. Don't be that person. We need the support of not only readers but all the people involved in our publishing journey. Writing may seem like a solitary endeavor, but none of us is doing this alone.
3. Be Yourself, Be Original. Take the ingredients you've got and do something new and fresh. Find an original way to promote your book. Find an original media outlet or tie-in. Go for that weird story idea. I think we gotta at least recognize and be aware of the rules and the normal way of doing things, but then take it and use it as the base for something uniquely your own. 
Of course, if you look like Scott Conant that doesn't hurt either.
Anyway, there you have it. Anybody else a fan of Chopped?
Sarah Allen

3 Ways to Publish Your Work

From what I've seen, it seems like the battle between Big Publishing and Indie Publishing is waning. Most of us are realizing that it is a false dichotomy. There are multiple ways to go about putting your work out there, and perhaps the best route is a combination of all three.

1. Traditional Big Publishing. Getting a publishing contract with one of the big New York publishers is still the dream scenario, at least for some of us. This route involves finding an agent, who then finds a publisher, and then there's even more waiting while your book goes through the very long process. The waiting and potential frustration is definitely a downside, but the prestige and backing of a big publishing house and its resources might be worth it. Check out AgentQuery.com for agents working in your genre.

2. Small Publishers. Many small publishers accept direct submissions, and you are not required to have an agent. Many writers like this route, particularly if your work is suited for more of a niche market catered to by the small publisher. Personally, I think this might be a cool route to try for short story collections. Check out Poets and Writers list of small publishers for ones that might be a good fit for your work.

3. Self Publishing. Whatever bad rap self publishing has gotten, perhaps for some good reasons, I still think there are some advantages. Maybe you have a backlist you want to get back out on the market. Maybe you're flipping into a completely different genre that your agent and publisher don't work with. Maybe you think that the market for a certain book is one you can reach better on your own. I definitely want to try this one out in the future.

Do you agree that the best route is a combination? Or could that do some professional damage?

Sarah Allen