Market Realism

How do so many Hollywood movies become financially successful? Because they’re great movies, and the cream always rises to the top, as they always tell us in the low-barrier-to-entry, self-crafted art of the digital world?

Rubbish.

We’ve all seen how many crap movies clean up at the box office. It might be that the best among them go on to make more money through positive word of mouth and achieve longevity after the kind of critical and fan adoration that gives them a place in the film firmament years later, but plenty of movies return the investment of a studio or production company purely through the brute force of excessive marketing.

The strategy is to make a movie so visible and make so many of us believe it’s something we simply have to see that come opening day, we’ve all lined up to buy tickets and it’s made its money back before anyone realises how bad it is.

That’s the key to attention, if not long term success. Maybe at some point your book/movie/performance art has to rise and fall on its creative merit and artistic quality and will go on to longer term financial returns based on that*, but the trough of dross is just too wide and too deep nowadays for your unknown property to reach that point by chance or talent alone.

You can look up the statistics about how many people self publish books online nowadays if you want, but trust me – it’s a lot. I remember when news broke that more books were self published on Amazon in a month than the entire traditional publishing industry had churned out in the previous decade, and that news was at least 10 years ago. Today, wannabe writers probably self publish more books every five minutes than have ever been released throughout human history in its entirety until the digital age.

And here are the hurdles you face if you do so. First, you’re betting that readers will actually find your product amid all that. Then you’re betting they find it over the top of the marketing the traditional publishing industry does for its own products (not a lot nowadays, but still a king’s ransom compared to the marketing support the average self published book receives). And after all that, you’re then betting people will put down Playstation controllers and TikTok videos long enough to care.

It’s a lot of sour, bitter coffee for the cream to rise through, and the cup is almost bottomless.

The above is all a way of saying that I’ve been thinking like a marketer lately, and if those who market creative products know anything, they know you have to spend money to make money.

So it’s time to start advertising Falling, and I have a popular podcast and a reading magazine in my sights.

I looked at the inside back cover of a popular film magazine but a full page ad was UK£10,000. Though I quickly drew in a hissing breath between my teeth and closed the browser tab, that’s not as ridiculous as I first thought.

This is a business. If I spend US$1,000 on this podcast ad (that’s what it costs) and I make a few sales back, I’ll build on that – saving a little extra and spending the return on that ad on a bigger, better ad. In fact I’ve already heard back from the reading magazine and the editor there said that because I’ve supported them for so long (I’ve been writing reviews for about a year now, and that sort of stuff is never paid these days) she’s giving me a third page ad for nothing.

If I do this right and fortune indeed favours the brave, that ten thousand quid magazine ad will be only a hop, step and jump away, a 30 second Superbowl ad only a hop step and jump away from that.

The whole ‘if you build it they will come’ ethos that drove the DIY filmmaking and book publishing movement was a nice thought, but the statistics are little better than negligible thanks to the sheer volume of stuff around – let alone the bad stuff.

Some of that stuff will be better than your project and some will be worse, but you’ve got less chance of readers ‘finding’ you and the cream rising to the top as you have of being struck by lightning, flying to another planet or being eaten by a wild bear†.

It’s time to do something about the odds.

* Falling might, indeed, be crap.

† With apologies to anyone who’s ever been eaten by a wild bear.