Welcome to Guerilla Marketing 101! Consider this column to be a series of notes from the trenches. And don't kid yourself: Marketing is a war waged against the seemingly insurmountable odds of a book-clogged marketplace. What is a guerilla technique? It's cheap, preferably free. It can be labor intensive, but is something you can do without the help of a publicist. Most importantly, it's supremely effective. In this first entry, former Paper Tiger Editor Paul Barnett (better known under his writing name John Grant) shares his experience with using a blog to general publicity. If you have used a guerilla marketing technique to increase your sales or name recognition, we want to hear from you. Please send your suggestions to sell@broaduniverse.org.

15 February 2005

Guerilla Marketing 101: The Snarl that Fits the Bill
by John Grant
www.hometown.aol.com/thogatthog/

John Grant (Paul Barnett) is an award-winning editor and writer, who has published over 60 books, including 25 novels. He has collected two Hugos, the World Fantasy Award, and several other major awards for his work in nonfiction. Until 2003, he was Commissioning Editor of Paper Tiger, the world's leading publisher of fantasy art books. Currently, he is US Reviews Editor for Infinity Plus and Consultant Editor to Artists' & Photographers' Press Ltd. His new column in Interzone, "The Painted Snarl," covers news of the fantasy/sf art world. His most recent book is the story collection Take No Prisoners.

I've recently been reading Dan Gillmor's excellent book We the Media (O'Reilly, 2004), which concerns itself with the argument that, because of the Internet, the media of the future—indeed, not so much of the future but of now—will be qualitatively different from the media we've been accustomed to. Whereas up 'til now the media have basically had the model of a single person, or relatively small group of persons, lecturing to a large audience, in the imminent future, Gillmor argues, there will be a transformation such that the model will become more of a conversation, a dialogue. The audience will become part-time lecturers and the lecturer will become one of the audience. Gillmor points to interactive blogs as one of several examples of how this transformation has already come about.

I was particularly struck by his chapter on the use of new-style media for publicity purposes. He points out quite forcefully that the blogs which most successfully promote a company's products are those in which the conversation ranges all over the map, touching frequently, though not necessarily, upon the subject area relevant to the company. The conversation is primarily guided by the interests and whims of the blog's readership—or, more accurately, its participants. Blogs which are dictated from the top down are almost inevitably disastrous in promoting the company's products, he writes.

The reason the chapter resonated with me is that it was strongly reminiscent of my own experience running an ezine called The Paper Snarl.

At the time I was the commissioning editor of a book imprint called Paper Tiger. Paper Tiger was and arguably still is the world's leading publisher of books in the field of fantasy art. If you like the covers on fantasy and science-fiction books, then you're probably liking artists whom Paper Tiger has published. Paper Tiger publishes a few art books that have little or no connection with book covers, such as the collection Perceptualistics, containing near-abstract works by the artist Jael, and historically focused books like Ron Miller's and Frederick C. Durant III's The Art of Chesley Bonestell, but basically it's the modern illustrative stuff that forms the imprint's backbone.

The publisher Cameron Brown, who now runs the excellent Artists' & Photographers' Press Ltd (AAPPL), was at the time the boss of the company that owned Paper Tiger It was he who first enunciated the notion that it'd be a good wheeze to start an e-mail fanzine devoted to the imprint. (In those days, blogs hadn't yet been invented; or, if they had, no one had ever heard of them except a few computer geeks somewhere.) I was all for the notion, but was terrified that the publicists initially expected to run the zine would fill it with nothing but promotional puffs and make it certain to be zapped on sight when it arrived in the In-Box of those few souls foolish enough to subscribe to it. What was needed instead, I said forcefully, was a fanzine that served a function as a fanzine, and which had the ancillary role of talking quite a lot about Paper Tiger's books.

Personally, this was foolish of me. The next thing that happened, as I should have realized, was that I was told I was to take on the editorship of the fanzine in addition to all the other things I was doing.

For Paper Tiger, though, it proved to be an excellent move. It took me a few months to get my act together, but in due course I nervously produced the first issue of The Paper Snarl.

Note that the zine's name was The Paper Snarl, not just the Paper Snarl. It's a convention in the UK that the only newspapers entitled to the capitalization of that initial "The" are journals of record, as The Times used to be. This grandiloquence in the titling reflected the ethos—if I might use such a high-falutin' term—of the zine. Reports of activities of interest, such as science fiction conventions, were credited not to their writer (at the outset, exclusively me) but to "the Snarl's intrepid Investigative Journalism Department", or some such. The headquarters of the zine was supposedly the busy hi-tech office block called Snarl Towers. A section called "Other News"—there being no section called "News"—was filled with snippets that had simply caught my fancy, whatever their degree of relevance (usually zero). And so on.

Mixed in with all this was a fair amount of stuff that did have a bearing on Paper Tiger's books. I did interviews with fantasy artists, about 50 percent of the time artists who had books forthcoming from Paper Tiger. (These eventually formed the basis for an illustrated book which should have been called The Paper Snarl Interviews but which the bozoes in the Marketing Department, who never understood what the strategy of the zine was, insisted be called Paper Tiger Fantasy Art Gallery.) Any public appearances by "our" artists were given enormous coverage, and so on.

And very soon, by design, the zine became interactive. Part of the motive for this was, of course, that the more of it that was written by other people, the less of it I had to do myself; but mainly the intention was to make readers feel it was their zine, not mine, and certainly not the Paper Tiger management's house journal. To my constantly stifled amazement, after a few issues I had people clamoring to contribute material—convention reports, book reviews, essays on fantasy art, all sorts of stuff. The letters section I introduced in issue #2, "You Snarl", soon became a lengthy and very active forum—and often a very funny one. Regular contributors such as Jean Marie Ward, Jane Frank, and Randy M. Dannenfelser would take on the role of the Snarl's fabled Investigative Journalism Department, and would swear blind they came equipped with the standard journalistic prerequisites prescribed in the zine: the stogie, the homburg, the seedy raincoat, the rolled-up copy of Hustler and the hip flask.

All the contributors were, of course, "distinguished"—that had to be true, because it said so in the zine—unless I felt in the mood for insulting them. Some of the occasional contributors were distinguished by any definition of the term. Aside from a very high percentage of today's leading fantasy artists, from all over the world, writers like Brian Aldiss, John Clute, and Michael Moorcock took the time to contribute to the Snarl.

The zine itself grew. In terms of circulation we edged into four figures, with an estimated readership perhaps twice that due to forwardings; astonishing for a fantasy-art fanzine. Most of the later issues topped 20,000 words, and one behemoth came in at something like 35,000. Initially desperate for any contributions at all, I eventually found that, for reasons of space, I was actually having to reject a few. Even despite the length, I had several reports from readers that they habitually printed out the whole of each issue for circulation among their friends.

The net effect of the interactiveness was that the zine became more than a zine: it was in effect a club. Friendships that sprang up through the "pages" of the Snarl were continued online and, very frequently, in person when people introduced themselves to each other at conventions. And, as a club, the Snarl generated certain unwritten loyalties from its members . . . one of which was, at least from time to time, the purchase of a Paper Tiger book.

Which was, of course, the whole purpose of the exercise, even if by then I'd forgotten that.

For obvious reasons, it was impossible to quantify the effect The Paper Snarl had on the sales of Paper Tiger books. Further, the sales of books in such a specialist field are never going to be such as to blast them to the top of the New York Times bestseller lists. In our field, a few hundred extra copies sold is big news. In fact, the Snarl seemed to do quite a lot better than that. It could be coincidence, but is probably not, that, during the three years or so before the uncomprehending bean-counters at Head Office cut the Snarl's financial strings, U.S. sales of Paper Tiger books ran on average about twice what they'd been before and that since the demise of the Snarl they seem slowly to have settled down toward their previous levels.

At the same time, Paper Tiger books began being nominated for and picking up Hugo Awards. In one year, two of the shortlist of six in the nonfiction Hugo category, including the winner, were Paper Tiger's. Again, Paper Tiger's prevalence on the Hugo nominations list has diminished drastically since the disappearance of the Snarl.

I confess I'm glad that the editorship of The Paper Snarl is something I can now look back on, rather than any longer a monthly responsibility. It involved a major amount of work. However, the lesson stays with me that, should I ever again want to give the most effective possible sales boost to a book (or, preferably, range of books), the institution of a Snarl equivalent is the first way I should go. I guess that nowadays, with the rapid advance of web usership and familiarity, it should probably be a blog rather than an ezine. (Probably it should be published as both, if that can be made workable, because some people, myself included, haven't really taken to the blog ethos.) Certainly, whichever form it takes, it should stress the interactivity Gillmor emphasizes in We the Media: If it can transcend the old-media, centrally focused structure to become, in effect, a club, then it ought to give the kind of sales boost I'm hankering for . . . at the same time as being a lot more fun than the concoction of endless—and endlessly unread—formal press releases.