It may sound strange to say that a pizza company has a useful lesson for writers who want to do better at their craft or at marketing their books, but here's the deal:
Recently Domino’s Pizza did something extraordinary in the ad world: they made a series of ads basically confessing that their pizza wasn’t very good and that they’re now improving the taste, the delivery system, pretty much everything.
Initially the USP for Domino’s was that you’d get your pizza within 30 minutes of ordering or it would be free. They got started around college campuses where students who’d been partaking of dope would get urgent munchies. The fast delivery and the chance it might even be free was a big draw. Taste wasn’t that important.
Times changed and Dominos lost market share. Lots of products try to tell you that they have a “new, improved” version but few admit that their product was kind of crappy and it’s time for a big change.
What can writers (and others) learn from this?
I think if there’s something you have been doing poorly, instead of beating yourself up over it, or trying to sweep it under the carpet it’s best to come clean to yourself and decide what you’re going to do differently from now on. You have three choices:
“I haven’t done this well, I don’t want to do it, I’m not going to do it, and I can live with the consequences.”
Or
“I haven’t done this well, I don’t want to do it, and I’m going to start clean now and figure out how to have somebody else do it for me.”
Or
“I haven’t done this well, I’m going to start clean now, learn how to do it , and do it!”
For example, let’s say you have an ebook out there but you’ve only made a few desultory attempts to market it: a Tweet here, a Facebook note there, and one guest post on a blog.
You could decide you hate Twitter and Facebook and all that social media stuff. You’re not going to do it. Instead, you’ll use old-school methods and if that costs you some potential sales, so be it.
Or you could decide to hire somebody to do the online marketing work for you, for instance a bright college student who is savvy about social media. You could even approach the marketing professors at your local university and offer your product as the subject to be used in a case study—you might just get results for free.
Or you could decide to go deeper into it, learn what works, figure out how to make it something you don’t mind doing, and then do it consistently.(By the way, if marketing your work is a challenge for you, see this post about the ways a few authors are doing it differently.)
I guarantee that you’ll feel better no matter which of these options you choose, because you’ll be letting go of any guilt and the constant nagging feeling that there’s something you really should be doing but aren’t.
Then you can order a pizza to reward yourself (Sorry, Domino’s, I still prefer Pizza Hut).
There are a lot of strategies for working smart in my book, “Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done.” You can buy it now from Amazon or your other favorite online or offline bookseller.
