Thoughts on authenticity and marketing
Once a woman told me a terrible story about how she lost everything. I was transfixed, and my heart hammered as she told me how she had to rebuild her life, get special medical care for her daughter, had to rebuild her precious vinyl record collections. I was hooked.
Then she tried to sell me insurance.
A good story can sell something, catch someone’s attention, by making it personal and real. Why do we need to do that?
Well, everything nowadays can be faked easily. Chatbots can churn out novels easily—even this year’s Nanowrimo, something which evokes long hours in cafes after work in me—has allowed writers to use them. So this pushes a load on authors to be more ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, which means being able to tell you stories that a chatbot wouldn’t. A lot of marketing and social media advice is ‘be yourself’. Be real, be authentic!
A new publishing article told me about story-based marketing. It goes: here’s my tragic or meaningful story told entertainingly + buy my thing! Is this the new hotness? Well, salespeople have been around for ages. When I thought back to when I was house hunting, I can’t remember individual realtors, but I remember their stories! See, one house was owned by an old man, who passed away and left to his heirs, who fought in courts for their father’s legacy but they went broke, and now it’s owned by a collection agency who just want to get rid of the thing which is why the price is so good!
How can you tell a story about you to sell your book?
Do you need to?
Kell
I’m Kell. I write urban fantasy in an interconnected universe. I’ve published one novel so far, and I’m working on the sequel. The premise of the universe is: Did you ever wonder what happened after the Dark Lord was defeated, and when the magic left the world? It’s been two thousand years since the forces of Darkness were defeated. Now, there’s a modern world of cars, skyscrapers and officers. Elves run fashion magazines. Orcs go to office jobs, and everyone thinks that the age of wizards and dragons is folklore. It’s a perfectly ordinary world…on the surface. But magic hasn’t gone away—it’s merely hiding in the cracks of the world. My current series, the Revenant Records, is an urban fantasy series focusing on ghost stories, mysteries and dark adventure. It’s the story of an undead teenager, trying to balance her responsibilities to help lost ghosts, while maintaining a semblance of a normal life. I love roleplaying games and I’m writing a system for my story world/universe. My mega-fandoms are Doctor Who, Final Fantasy VII, and Transformers.
