Pools of Readers

I'm running an FB ad right now that I theoretically paid $5.00 for but I wonder if I didn't buy more ad space than I originally intended since FB makes it confusing, and might end up spending $30.00, or so. Thankfully, this wouldn't bankrupt me, but it was making me angry today, and probably why I'm writing this blog, but my goals were pure. I thought I could get people to my page and show them what I'd done so maybe they'd buy the book, but buying a book is a spiritual act like voting, and few people will do it on a whim, even if it's practically free. Part of the problem is there are so many awful books/bands out there that people have become suspect that what they are buying is going to be worth their time, which is the ultimate investment, and impossible to recover. Years of seeing movies taught me in the end that it wasn't wasting my money that was the most troubling thing about sitting through a boring shitty movie, but the time wasted, since that could never be made up.

My Dad, whose probably surreptitiously reading this was an ad man, and all I got from that was to hate advertising. The whole process is going to take a lot of money, and I'm cheap. I've only spent about $20.00 so far, and I'm going for small little purchases, like a guy buying lottery tickets, so I'm trying to look at it as fun, like low level gambling in Vegas, and that is what it is so far, except I'm gambling on myself, and this feels better than throwing chips into a well of my own gluttony. I'm getting word of my book out there, but I'm not receiving much feedback yet. I've got some reviews and sales, but most of those haven't been through paid advertisements, and those feel like real victories. If the ads were turning people onto my book who were looking for it in a mysterious almost religious way this would feel good but I don't know how to simulate a religious feeling through advertising.

My friend Josh Mills wrote me recently that marketing is all trial and error, and I'm trying to remember that with my little throws of the dice. I'm like Sisyphus rolling the boulder slowly up the hill only to have it crash down on him, but I won't stop rolling it. I didn't start advertising until June, and at first I expected way too much, but I'm not doing that so much anymore, unless I was spending hundreds of dollars, but I'm not sure what that would get you (I'm really not). I get that the essence of the new media world has to do with independent contractors having email lists that they claim reach "readers" and those are where the sales start. The FB ads aren't so much about "readers" as just reaching people in general though even then I'd imagine they try to target "groups" where "readers" reside, but the whole process is done in the dark, and there's no way for the purchaser of the ads (me), to know exactly what these anonymous forces of the digital age are up to, and this is frustrating. The days of one to one contact are over unless you have a lot of money, but even then I'm not sure about the internet magic.

The Hollywood Blockbuster era has taught me that if you throw enough money behind a project it will make money for the first weekend of its premiere, because the excitement, buzz, and sheer availability of the product (the number of screens the picture is on) will overwhelm all common sense and make the picture money. How much, of course, is a question, but the picture gets a push, that it wouldn't otherwise, but I'm talking about millions of dollars here and I'm loathe to go to three digits! But the model is the same: I'm getting at least the title and the blurb of my book out there to people that would have never seen it and this is "buzz," or "internet presence," or any kind of word that symbolizes existence.