So, as you may know, I’ve been working on a book series for a while.
If you didn’t know, you sort of do now, unless that previous sentence has redefined itself when I wasn’t looking.
But writing a book, or a series, is only the first part —if you’re planning to self publish.
The other parts come later.
They are much more in the shape of marketing and publicity.
Which is a very weird world. As we all know.
It has taken me some time to work out how best to approach it.
That is, despite me having worked in advertising for a number of years earlier on in my career. Okay, it was direct marketing, and I may have even been guilty of building some advertising banners in my time —I apologise— but all of that experience definitely helped me to plan ahead and experiment.
XP—eriment
So, just like Distance and Ms. Elodie Hark, I started experimenting with a number of ideas. True, most were terrible, and they won’t be mentioned ever again. Not unless flashbacks at the point of anyone’s demise are a real thing.
I definitely learned from my try-fail cycle, however.
Some ideas required a heck of a lot of upfront effort, involving lots of drawing and digital painting. So, after trying a few of those I quickly abandoned them, because I wouldn’t ever have had enough time.
Other ideas still involved ingenuity, and skill, yet required less effort, but it was clear that using certain technologies was going to impact other people’s jobs. So, I decided to steer clear. In full disclosure, I have still used AI in some places on my marketing shorts, but only where I know it isn’t ripping anyone off, and there’s no way it can harm someone else’s career or profession.
Whilst there will always be those who will be completely anti-AI, and they will cite various different reasons —some sensible, some not so. Personally, I see it as a tool. But it is one that needs to be used carefully and sensibly. A bit like a sword or a sandwich toaster. And just like those items, I fully believe AI will not replace us, but, it will definitely change the way we work quite a bit. I mean, life was very different before the invention of the sword, and kitchens have been much more cluttered since the advent of the other.
So… realising that I couldn’t go deeply painstaking (for marketing), nor should I go for lazy shortcuts, I needed to find a happy medium. And hopefully I’ve done that.
Day One
But this only came after I had played around with a few different approaches.
The part I found the strangest was how social media seemed averse to professional and well-designed content —at least in short form. There are probably many books written on this subject, and the psychology of it, but I was definitely too busy on being creative to notice.
That’s how I can get, though.
Far too zoomed in on a problem to see the trees, instead, I’m wondering about why bark is the way it is. Especially when it’s on a tree that fell —wherever I am— when no-one was beholding it.
So, I needed an idea that would take all this into account.
That’s why I just started going with what felt naturally correct. Which is to film me getting distracted by random world elements or geeky things… but without me actually appearing in the shot.
Day one
The campaign needed to reflect a number of things, some overt, some (what’s the opposite of overt?)… certain words always decide to play a hiding game when I’m trying to be interesting. Oh well, you know what I mean.
The campaign needed to emphasise:
The repetitive nature of writing, publicising or perfecting a book.
How writing is a great experience for learning.
How it can be both surprising and frustrating.
How things can often seem simple, but have hidden complexity.
And with all that ‘Arty-ness’ out of the way, it also had to have something people might engage with.
That’s why I settled on ‘Day One’.
And yes, I know I have probably put way too much thought into what will constitute as something someone else will watch and swipe away in less time than it takes for a secret message to self destruct. I can’t help it. I’ve tried.
Day one
Anyone who has spent any time on any kind of social media will have seen a post that starts “Day X of doing Y”. And I thought that exactly captured what I was doing. I was starting from scratch, learning, getting better and better. The fact that I’d been doing it for years before I needed the shorts made no difference.
The problem is that —thanks to the algorithms— I probably only ever saw ‘Day 59 of something’ from other creators, and that was it. I never saw a progression. Perhaps they were doing something odd, and making out they’d be working for longer by only doing random numbers. I don’t know, I will never know, that’s kind of the point.
And that thinking led me towards the spin I decided I should add, one which also covered a number of the facets I wanted to show.
The count would never progress.
Day one
This concept was quite freeing. Because despite my love of coding, I’ve never been very good with numbers. So, I didn’t relish the idea of trying to keep track of an endless count of videos and making sure they were sequential. Because my brain definitely would NOT let them be unordered.
The concept (of starting from the beginning, for a book that was ‘The End’) was also pleasing to my sensibilities. And it meant I could start out with ideas that I wasn’t really certain on, based on the fact “I’m learning, people should give me a break.” Which meant I found some interesting approaches.
The fact the ‘One’ just reinforced the ‘One’ in ‘Episode One’ was a happy accident. But it does suggest that when I do the release of EP2 I’m going to have a lot of videos starting at ‘Day Two’ —which might just be more confusing. 😅
There is also a secret reinforcement, which I won’t talk about now.
Over all, however, it meant I could quickly bring in my technical skills, which I’m proud to say I have a number of.
Day Tw… One
So began many days of me finding interesting things to film, or thinking about interesting things to film, or accidentally finding interesting things to film. And I will caveat this heavily by saying the word ‘interesting’ is subjective.
It led to waiting for ‘good light’ (or passers-by, rain, snow, fires and even ice).
It led to learning how to place a book in a scene to get the right kind of composition and not have the book itself completely destroyed (sadly I learned this too late for one of my test prints).
It led to carrying a book around with me wherever I went, like it was some kind of protective talisman.
It also led to me dusting off my video editing (and graphics & effects) skills and re-learning how much I disliked the industry tools for such things —or at least what I knew as the industry tools. Which then led me on another journey of testing out ‘new software’. Eventually settling on a video editing app that can handle professional features without needing to retrain my understanding of what good UX is. It’s not brilliant, but it gets the job done.
Day …?
I realise this is turning more into a diary than a substack post, but that’s exactly what writing a book is like —especially one you first drummed up back in 2005. Some days you inch forward. Sometimes you leap, and it very much depends on what is going on in your mind as to whether that’s forward or backwards. Some days nothing happens at all. Other days you decide you need to rewrite the entire thing.
I had the same with creating my marketing shorts.
Some worked very well ‘as if by magic’.
Others didn’t see the light of Day One… and so won’t.
Day O.n.e.
For an example of what I mean, you can find a number of ‘testing shorts’ I created just to help warm my YouTube account (whatever that means) and help me make sure the release process and audio normalisation were all working as expected.
Once each of the real (non testing) shorts have been released I’ll create another page that houses them all together, as the plan is they’d be seen in order (my brain would prefer that). Whether YouTube will actually deliver them to the audience in this way, will be another thing entirely. But they aren’t so dependent on each other that it matters.
It just matters to me.
Day One
Now, jsyk, I’m writing this before I’ve even attempted to run this as a ‘campaign’ (he says with a shudder). If I put the video clips live and receive a measly response, I’ll probably write another ramble, this time about what I think went wrong and how algorithms are out to steal your lunch money.
I may find out that people have seen so many “Day One of X” campaigns that they’ll just scroll on, before they’ve even seen an element of anything arty or interesting.
If so, I’ll then probably be actively engaged in paying for advertising, something I had hoped to avoid, but it may be a necessary evil.
At the end of the day, this is just an idea; a hope on how I might get the book noticed.
If it all collapses inwards, it will be disappointing, but I’ll still keep trying and will carry on writing. If I’ve learned anything from this project it is that time and patience bring big rewards.
Even if you have to repeat yourself.
