Marketing Your Writing: good example from J.K. Rowling, bad example from President Obama

Writing in the New Yorker, Juno Diaz points out that President Obama is not doing a very good job of story telling:

"Tolkien could have been talking about the power of stories when he described his One Ring: stories rule us, they find us, they bring us together, they bind us, and, yes, they can pull us apart as well. If a President is to have any success, if his policies are going to gain any kind of traction among the electorate, he first has to tell us a story."

Diaz says so far Obama has not told a bad story, he's told no story: "I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing."

Of course as writers we are aware that we need to tell a good story in our scripts or novels or non-fiction books, or whatever we write. What we are only starting to recognize more now is that OUR story is as important at least in terms of marketing. For instance, although "Harry Potter" took off without this, it sure didn't hurt that J. K. Rowling was a single mother who wrote the book while huddling in a coffee shop with her baby's pram nearby because her unheated flat was too cold.

Later it came out that the coffee shop was owned by her brother-in-law and she wasn't actually in great danger of hypothermia, but the semi-mythical story was established by then.

Publishers love it when the writer has his or her own story, as well as the story they've written. If you don't have one, it might be time to find one!

(My book, Your Writing Coach (Nicholas Brealey Publishing), has two chapters on marketing your writing; another one, Marketing for Entrepreneurs (Pearson) goes into much more detail, including how to come up with a marketing plan in sixty minutes.)