Category archive: Promotion

Priest: Not Like My Vampire Novel

The biggest similarity between my vampire novel and the vampire movie Priest is the concept of a religious order that has trained specifically to fight vampires.

The use of monks to fight enemies of a religion is not new, of course, as anyone who has read The Monks of War could tell you.  In fact, my sister gave me that book after I had first described my novel to her, and its one of the reasons my protagonist is referred to as a crusader.

Other than the religious order, Priest is very different from my novel.  The vampires are another species and would fit into the movie Alien easily, but not so much into Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The whole setting is also very different from our Earth.  It’s meant to be either an alternate history or another planet–take your pick, and the Catholic Church is Big Brother.

In fact, the whole society is an Orwellian dystopia set after environmental degradation and nuclear war, very different from the leafy green of my post-industrial, post-apocalyptic world.

I’d still like to capitalize on the movie’s marketing campaign, but I’m reluctant now to tell people that my novel is just like Priest. Firstly because it’s not accurate, and secondly because now that I’ve seen the movie, I’m not sure that will send people flocking out to buy similar stories.

The movie is more like an expensive TV pilot, with a lot of Matrix-like big freeze shots and the anti-gravity stunts that have become the norm of Hollywood sci-fi action.

I’ve finished going through Fogel’s edit of my novel (it was brutal) and my proof-reader and I are making a last pass.  With luck I’ll launch Monday, over a week late, but Priest isn’t going to make or break this novel.

Off Topic: Not My Good Side

Totally off topic but amusing nonetheless: The Globe and Mail posted a photo of me as one of eighteen “Faces of the Toronto Marathon.”  I’m photo number twelve.  What happened to all the photos he took of me smiling?  He shot at least a dozen.  Now if I had only thought of a way get that photojournalist to mention my writing, that would have been great self-promotion.

I placed 29th out of 1300 runners, 24th for men, and 3rd for my age group.  3hrs and 3 minutes to go 42.2 kilometers. Maybe that’s why I look so tired.

Climbing the Social Networking Ladder

Unless you’re one of the big names, like John Grisham, don’t expect your publisher to lift a pinkie finger to market your novel.  Authors sell novels, not publishers.   So how do you get the word out from your basement?

Social networking.  Sounds easy, right?  It’s a bloody nuisance, but like all things that take patience, the rewards are great.  John Locke has 20,000 twitter followers who will leap at the chance to buy his next novel the minute he tweets that it’s up for sale on Amazon.  That’s fantastic marketing.  He’s built this following from the ground up over two years.  He’s got a website, high-quality book trailers, the whole deal.  He’s a self-e-pubbed author, so he did it without any publishing company help.

But I’m down here at the bottom of social networking, late to facebook and late to Twitter.  My facebook fan page has 6 “likes.”  My tweets come straight from this blog, so there aren’t many, but I already have two followers, both apparently young hot women, which means they’re probably spam.  Rather funny, actually.

But this is where we separate the wheat from the chaff.  A lot of self-pubbed authors are going to give up when they don’t get immediate gratification, expecting their sales to just magically take off by themselves.  They’ll breathlessly check their sales figures two or three times a day until they get bored because they haven’t sold anything in a week.

So here I go, stepping up on the first rung of the social networking ladder.  It’s going to take a while, but I’m patient and determined.  Besides, maybe I’ll make some new friends.