Too Much Content, Not Enough marketing

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I’ve been looking forward to writing this one all week.

The last six days have been like a sudden storm, swirling in from nowhere, moving things about and leaving our world just a little greener than it was before.

Some of our projects inched forward, a couple took a giant leap, and a slice of our business shifted, then quickly settled into place.

The most interesting thing that happened with our content was the launch of my first children’s book, Penny to a Million.

We launched the book on Wednesday and the release was noteworthy for a couple of reasons.

The book was originally scheduled for print, but David and I decided to try something different.

Though we do love the idea of a book in print, and have every intention of seeing Available Darkness to ink, we thought it would be a wasted opportunity if we didn’t experiment at least a little with Penny. Truth is, we’re juggling an awful lot. Business is brisk and we have a several projects starting to sprout.

Getting a book to market with the promotion needed to make it HUGE could be done, but it would take a lot out of our collective schedule.

So we offered the book for free instead.

We would only stand to make a dollar or two per printed copy sold, while also placing a limit on how many people could read it. By offering the book as a free download in exchange for an email address, however, we are not only able to get the book in front of more eyes than might be otherwise possible, we are also developing a deeper relationship with every reader.

It might be romantic to have my name decorating an end cap at Barnes & Noble, but a relationship started in a bookstore would more than likely end at the final page. With a free download I continue that relationship for as long as I make it enjoyable for the reader. That relationship is surely worth more than the dollar I would’ve made.

We now have awesome plans for Penny, partially born from our new and novel approach. Our strategy has been a big success so far. We had publisher interest in the book and more than double the downloads we expected.

One of the things we did differently was allowing “Kelly” the main character of Penny to a Million to do some of the marketing. He’s a fifth grade kid and budding entrepreneur. The marketing is consistent with his character and a lot of fun to write. It could end up being one of the keys to making it all work, though only time will tell.

“Kelly” did have a couple of invitations for guest posts and interviews based on his appearances at both the Inkwell and Writer Dad. I was both surprised and delighted.

Writer Dad started the week with “Are You a Writer,” which was a repurposed Inkwell post from when the site first launched early last year. I restructured it to fit both on Writer Dad and as a part of another project that currently in development. Friday we ran another installment of Syllable Soup about a dog who could use the computer. The post didn’t go anywhere though I did think it would based on the headline alone.

I was basically MIA on Twitter for the second half of the week and was thus unable to properly promote it. As my days get busier I’m finding myself more willing to finally surrender to using TweetLater. Twitter traffic is simply too consistent to ignore, yet when I hop on Twitter I often find that I just want to be social. If I put my links into TweetLater ahead of time, then perhaps I can get on, be social, then disappear.

I’ll be trying it out this week.

David and I are creating too much content to glide through the promotion. This week it wasn’t just Writer Dad that got ignored. Two terrific posts for the Inkwell got very little attention as well. Both the post about SEO for authors and the one about punishing your characters got a single tweet from me before they fell from my radar completely.

This week caught us by surprise. Business was booming, and though we were able to keep up with our content and production, we were unable to maintain the marketing side of things, at least when it came to our own projects. Both Creative Copy Challenge #15 and Creative Copy Challenge #16 received an entry from me, but I gave no play down in the comments.

Children Write the Future (in full confessional) fell short of its production quota for the first time in a month. Potty Training Power didn’t get an update, nor did ThingsMyChildSays. Blogger Dad got a bit of copy and paste Twitter love on Monday, but that was it. David’s post on Monday did manage to kick off the launch of Penny, and though it might have seemed strategized, it actually wasn’t. It was just one of those happy accidents that taught me a thing or two. Available Darkness missed it’s Friday Chapter.

I took David’s redesign to SeanMPlatt and asked the Remarkables in the Remarkable Marketing Blueprint what they thought of it. I received some immediate, helpful feedback and am looking forward to the time to implement the few subtle changes that could highlight the best of my portfolio/projects site.

We finished the week on Friday with #’s 6-10 from the 14 secrets from one of the world’s highest paid copywriters, part two of my Dan Kennedy Series at Copyblogger. It was a great week behind the scenes and David and I are eager to share some wonderful stuff in the near future.

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