How Process and Marketing Affect Each Other

(image courtesy of Photo Mix via pixabay.com)

Isn’t that a scary thought? We like to think that we create whatever we want, and someone else has to figure out how to market it. Sadly, as working artists, we have to function as businesspeople as well as artists in order to survive.

I try not to worry about marketing until I’m well into revisions, almost at the submission stage. By then, I know the story I want to tell, I understand the themes and the hook, and I’ve placed it in the genre that best suits it, even if I’ve integrated other genre elements into it.

The hook is always tricky, because embedding the right hook in the right place can often make or break whether it succeeds, and you have to use your marketing brain to place it within the creative context so that it works.

Again, in my work as a script analyst and a contest judge, when the hook is 50 pages in, you likely lost the reader 40-47 pages ago. With a script, the first page has to be gripping and have a hook, or it will be rejected. That comes up over and over and over again in conversations with showrunners, directors, and producers: Every script they’ve loved had a great first page, and they knew from that page that they’d love the script.

I served as a reader for an agent panel at a writers’ conference several years ago, where only the first page was read (out loud) and agents rose their hands when that page lost them. It was often after the first paragraph, and usually because that paragraph was passive and derivative.

If I’ve done all those things properly, my process has now defined how I’m going to market it, whether that means pointing it to a submission to an agent, a publisher, a publication, or, as I do with the Delectable Digital Delights and the Topic Workbooks, put them out myself.

If I don’t know what they are, I won’t know where to point them or how to place them.

That’s a reasonably organic progression: working the manuscript until it’s submittable, pointing/placing it, and then letting people know about it, so that they can find it, (hopefully) enjoy it, and support it.

But how does marketing affect process?

Let’s make something clear: That does not mean you’re “selling out.” It means you’re a professional who takes your career seriously and understands how to balance the artistic and business elements in order to build that career.

“Selling out” is a term meant to punish and shame working artists. It is usually thrown at us by those who don’t have the guts to build the artistic career they fantasize about themselves or who resent the fact that we love what we do while getting paid for it, instead of being ground down to nothing by our job.

Same with romanticizing the “starving artist.” It’s a tool to exploit artists.

Marketing affects process in that you see what your audience responds to, and then decide how to incorporate it into your next piece. It’s a case of figuring out how to satisfy what drew them to you in the first place while continuing to challenge and open up their perspectives, while you grow and evolve in your art.

It’s not about sticking to a tried-and-true formula at the cost of everything else. It’s about weaving in the elements of the formula that touch the audience, while still keeping the core integrity of your own work.

That in itself is a process. Not everything you create is going to speak to a wide audience. Not everything you create is even going to make it out of the house with the possibility of an audience. That’s fine, as long as you learn something from every piece you create, even if it didn’t work.

Sometimes you learn more from what didn’t work than from what did. Once you get over the emotional pain of it not working.

In the serials, I find that the process and the marketing affect each other more than in novels or short stories or scripts.

LEGERDEMAIN is an open-ended serial, running in large arcs as long as it makes sense to run it. It mixes fantasy, mystery, and often dark humor. There’s a lot of world building, and twists on tropes, and all kinds of other fun elements, and then it sometimes takes a more serious turn. One of those turns is when the parents of two murder victims come to find out what happened, and my protagonist, Shelley, has to tell them that one of the victims murdered the other, before he was murdered himself. In another arc, there’s political unrest and a possible illegitimate son who believes he’s heir to the kingdom, with some of the themes echoing some of the current unrests. In my fantasy world, too, books are alive, and book burning is punishable by death. Trees are sentient, and a homeowner cannot cut down a healthy tree without being charged with murder. Mixed in with that are lighter subplots about quarreling neighbors who want to be on the Garden Tour, a pet lizard turned into a Godzilla-like creature in the middle of town square, and the running joke of a Questor in every episode.

There’s a lot of juggling going on.

Because I do unique promotion graphics for each episode, along with an episode logline, the marketing and process are closely entwined. There needs to be a good balance of the various elements in every section, even if specific episodes slant one way or the other. They have to be arranged for flow, not just of the main narrative drive and the subplots, but tone. The graphics are all done to be a little askew, to fit the overall tone of the serial. The episode log lines give a short teaser about the specific episode; however, reading all the loglines in order won’t replace reading the actual episodes, and that is intentional. I also have more general serial graphics, built around amusing elements in the series.

I’m getting more skilled at the graphics and the loglines, so it’s not taking as long as it did at the beginning, but I still spend at least as much time on that as I do on the actual episodes.

ANGEL HUNT is a little different, in that most of it was complete before it started running, although I’m still adapting novel chapters (which were adapted from the original serial episodes) into serial episodes (which are shorter and tighter and more active than the original episodes). I have to write the climactic sequence and the resolution, although I’ve sketched it out. And ANGEL HUNT is finite (although I don’t know how long it will run yet, but I should know, by the end of this summer).

ANGEL HUNT uses a single consistent graphic, instead of episode-specific graphics. I create episode log lines for the promotion, but use the logo graphic.

In a novel or a script, the marketing would be built around the finished product, whereas for the serials, it’s built around a product that evolves over the course of its release. It makes it easier to adjust flow, when one looks at the metrics of how the visuals and loglines translate into reads, which then informs the future visuals and loglines.

Some fellow serial writers create their serials in a way that audience response shapes how the serial grows, in a much more interactive way than I do. We’ll talk more about that in a future post.

In a marketing campaign for a finished product, if the approach isn’t getting results, the campaign has to be scrapped and rebuilt. Which is expensive, on an emotional level as much as it is on a practical level. The serial marketing can respond more quickly and efficiently to gathered data, such as from polls, reads, reviews, etc., and the author can decide how responses affect future episodes.

One of the most positive discoveries I found is that, as I hone marketing materials, getting more succinct and specific about the piece, I gain a deeper understanding of the piece. This helps me, in a serial or series, moving forward in that fictional world. It also helps in other work, because I can take what I learn and apply it in other situations. It means my work grows more nuanced and layered, which makes it more interesting, rather than flattening out and getting repetitive, which I’ve seen happen when an author is too far removed from the marketing elements in their work, and too caught up in a specific formula.

I’m not a big fan of having to shoulder as much of the marketing aspects as most of us now have to do. At the same time, I’ve learned a lot that then feeds back into the work and improves it.

How have you experienced marketing and process affecting each other? Either in your work, or in work you’ve read/seen? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.