Today you're about to see something Chancery Stone doesn't often do. I'm going to apologise, in public. Are you ready for this?
Do you remember me saying that I had only four and a half fans as one didn't really count, having the attention span of a gnat?
Well it isn't true. I'm sorry. I don't know what made me do it. Maybe I was premenstrual. Personally, I think it was just sour grapes.
In marketing there is a recognised curve of how a trend works. This would be easier if I could draw it, but I can't, so you'll just have to stick with me. On the left hand side you have the innovators, then there is a steep hillock in the middle, the mass, Joe Soaps, then you have the laggards in the dip at the other side, on the right. I hope you can see that.
Now the innovators are the important people when you're trying to get any project off the ground, whether it's a new hot chilli sauce or a hot new novel like DANNY. The innovators are the people who like new stuff, they actually actively seek it out. They are the trendsetters. They start the bandwagon that the rest of us, the Joe Soaps, cheerfully jump onto when enough innovators have tried it out and taken the risk out of it. By the time it goes through the mass curve (bestsellerdom), and drops again at the other side, the laggards are finally saying, "Well, I suppose I better buy it, everyone else has." This is your Uncle Joe who finally buys a CD player at a boot sale for a quid because everyone else is changing to MP3.
So, my four and a half fans are my innovators. They are the cool people who are going to set the trend for whether people will buy DANNY or not. Of course, they won't always be the innovators, because if a better crowd of innovators comes along, doing a better job of selling DANNY, then they will steal their thunder. But for now, rather like a marriage, for better or worse, they are DANNY's innovators.
Now innovators are only as good as their sneezers. A sneezer is an active innovator. That is, one who doesn't just buy the book, read it, then sit on their butt and tell no-one. A sneezer tells people, spreads the word. A sneezer is the evangelist of innovation. There are good sneezers, people with lots of connections and, more importantly, good credentials. People trust them and what they have to say (their sneezing).
It's the difference between, say, a recommendation from Christopher Walken and William Shatner. Walken is more respected and doesn't put his face to anything that will make money. If Walken says a movie is good you'd probably believe him.
Now my sneezers are very haphazard at best. This is no reflection on them. It's recognised that sneezers, no matter how good, are actually essentially bad at selling your product. Of course they are, they don't tout your party line. After all, unless you're paying them, they say what they believe about your product, not what you tell them to.
I really only have two sneezers out of my five innovators (not coincidentally they were my first two). Another two actively don't want to tell people about the book because they are unsure of its reception, or the association with me. This is the downside of your readers being closeted about their tastes, or of having friends that don't know they have what amounts to a secret life. Of my two sneezers only one is dedicated, but even she has severe reservations about the book which she always passes on, thus diluting its effectiveness.
Which brings me to the half. Now this poor woman actually is a flibbertigibbet (I think that's the first time I've ever had the opportunity to use that wonderful word), but that, truthfully, wasn't the reason why she got called a gnat. Nope. It was sour grapes. I know it and I'm apologising.
The fact is, if Brokeback Mountain had done no, I mean zero , advertising, then this woman would have guaranteed it would have been a success. She is a one-man industry of Brokeback promotion. Ang Lee and Annie Proulx should have insisted on an award for her at the Oscars. Never has a woman been so selfless in promoting a work that gains to profit her nothing. And that is the source of my sour grapes.
God, I should be so lucky to get a sneezer like that. She's got logos and icons and tags and quotes and pictures. She's linked to everything and anything that features Brokeback. Everybody she knows is into Brokeback. They talk about Brokeback all day, every day. She's seen the film Christ knows how many times. She could bore for Britain on Brokeback, but she's a sneezer to die for, and the sad fact is she doesn't feel a hundredth part as enthusiastic about DANNY, because she isn't really a true DANNY fan.
She only got the book by accident. Then it took her a fucking lifetime to actually get round to reading the thing (Brokeback is a short story), she had to be pushed and pushed. When she did read it she really liked it, and said so, but she's primarily a visuals woman (putting paid to the horseshit that men like visuals and women words), she just loves her (sadly vanilla, fag hag) porn. And even that is a clue. While she loves the supposed 'tortured' romance at the heart of DANNY it just isn't vanilla enough for her. And there are no pictures.
And herein lies the, so far insoluble, problem of marketing DANNY. Most of my first fans, maybe all of them, are not really true fans. They don't love it unreservedly, in the sense that 'faults' can be overlooked because their reward is so great. Too many things make them uncomfortable about it. There's too much they'd like changed. It's not that they don't want to rave about it to their friends. After all, do you really think for one instant that Brokeback Mountain, story or film, has no flaws? They can't rave about DANNY because they don't really own it. It hasn't delivered the ultimate romance, or the ultimate porn romp, or the ultimate escapist fantasy, or, or or...
DANNY simply hasn't found its true audience yet. They're out there; lurking masochists, bondage freaks, tattooed weirdoes, Goths, the disaffected and disassociated, women who have realised they are not gay men, gay men who realise they're not women, straight men who realise they're just men, hurt and angry people, people like me, maybe even people like you.
Because I really needs me a Brokeback Mountain sneezer.
