Good Reviews...

... and other kinds of reviews.

I had a friend tell me today that Alorya is a bit confusing after the first few chapters.  I thanked him for it.

Give it to me straight!  I can take it!  I'll only use it to get better at my craft.  :-)

Marketing - What makes sense to me?

I definitely can't be confused with a marketing expert, but recently when two friends released their first album I thought they might not be reaching their entire audience.  I wrote to them a facebook message from my iPhone and I thought my fingers were going to fall off.  The following day, I had some things come to mind that I forgot to mention.  Keeping in mind that I am a writer and they are musicians, we naturally have different methods for marketing, but I came up with a few ideas which can be useful for most of us.

• Know your audience - What do they want to hear, read or watch?
• Know your competition - What are they doing to reach their fans?
• Know your material - Is there some facet of your work that differs from or is similar to anything?

Whether you're in the stone age or the information age, you need to address these points.  The following part has to do with timing, location and current trends.

• Don't wait until your book is published, album is released, openning night at your play (whatever) to begin marketing.  You want to think about these things at most a year before publication.

I finished the first few edits of my book in 2008 and felt that it was ready for an agent.  Before I did that however, I registered the domain Alorya.com.  I joined MySpace to get into the social media movement. I even did the unthinkable and became sociable around the office.  I expect to be published in the next few months.  Get something... anything... on every form of social media and interface you can (afford) and begin talking to people about your work.  If you're not proud enough to talk about it, who will be?

• Your competion should be the established greats of the current era in your genre.  If you're a musician, Mozart is not your competition.  If you're a writer, Frank Herbert is not your comptetion.  Find out how your competition is reaching their audience and then adopt/improve on it.  Do they use the web?  Do they use PodCast? 

I looked at Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and Troy Denning to see how they reached their audience.  I obviously don't have the budget to compete with them from a marketing stand-point, but it was a great place to find some ideas.  (Hint:  Follow them on Twitter).

• Try to set yourself apart from everyone else.  Find something unique about your work and put a neon sign around it.

"Buy my book", "Check out my book" can really be annoying.  Don't turn yourself into a salesman, just try to spread the word that you are a member of the industry and you can contribute. (Kind of like this article, right?).  The unique part of my book is that I took real life events and exaggerated the hell out of them.  What's unique about that?  Well, they're MY life events.  That's pretty unique.  I never expected to write the first or best of anything.  I'm just trying to tell the story I started writing when I borrowed a few sheets of paper from a nurse, when my son was still in the hospital after he was born.

Special Thanks to Matthew Ashdown for helping clear these points up for me.

Book Review - by Jon Teetsell

The Silmarillion: The Epic History of the Elves in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The first thing I want to get across is that my rating of 4-Stars is subject to the fact that I love the genre and in particular, I love the Lord of the Rings. When I read the back cover, I saw that the Silmarillion is Tolkien's book of short stories summarizing the first and second age. I had just finished Lord of the Rings and had a thirst for all things Middle Earth. This is where I would expect some of you to say "thank you, but no thank you."

The Silmarillion is for Middle-Earth lovers. Throughout the book, you'll see similarities between it and the Lord of the Rings. The thing worth pointing out though is that Lord of the Rings is done on a much smaller scale than Silmarillion. For example, the Sauron character is comparable to Morgoth. The Shelob character is comparable with Ungoliant. The stories focus on the elves, whereas Lord of the Rings focus on man.

The story of the Noldor and the men of Numenor were particularly enthralling as both Elrond and Aragorn can trace their lineage there. Galadriel is alive and well and as beautiful on paper as she is in the movies.

The truly fascinating part of the Silmarillion is that it seems like a sounding board for all that happened in the Lord of the Rings. Reading it felt as though I was perusing through the notes of a giant in my field which were left on a coffee table in his den. When I watch the Lord of the Rings with my friends, who are not nearly of the same fanaticism with the books as I am, I can play the role of "Know it All" thanks to this book. It's those little moments that make it all worth it.





View all my reviews