THE SOMERS empire continues to spread, much like my waistline, which just makes me busier - mainly with the sad, hollow dance of selling my various and sundry written assets to highest bidders. I've never worried overmuch about the morality or rightness of selling my work - I live to write, to create. Once it's been created, I don't care what happens to it. Getting it published is not only the only reasonable direction for a story, it also can lead to some money, so its usually what I do with them. Unfortunately, this means I spend a lot of my time doing the small, boring tasks necessary to sell a piece of writing. Maybe if they weren't so small and boring I'd be more excited about it.

At least I have things to sell, so I shouldn't whine about it. I will whine about the godawful amount of time involved in it, though. Whining is what I do best, and since you all keep coming back here I'll keep whining. The amount of things which cause me to whine is large and varied, providing lots of grist for this column. Today we will be discussing advertising.

We all know the theory on advertising: you pay or barter for space somewhere, on which you print something attractive and informative about your commodity. The idea is that people see your ad and either keep your commodity in mind, or rush out to buy one immediately based solely on your amazing presentation. I've always assumed the scale was weighed more towards the former than the latter, that the main benefit of advertising was putting your title, your name, in people's minds so that when they're shopping they'll remember it. I doubt many people rush out to buy anything based on an ad.

Then again, I could be wrong. I once said "No one's gonna buy this Eminem album, that first single is crap." So what do I know.

For my Zine, I don't do much by way of advertising. There's the web site, which I guess should be considered my major advertising effort. I've also got a bunch of free trade ads with various other publications. A trade ad is where you send them an ad, they send you an ad, and you both run the ads, no money involved. Trade ads are easy and free, but of course generally don't result in many eyeballs looking at your ad. What people pay for when they buy advertising, after all, is eyeballs - people looking at their ad. If you're getting/giving it away for free, there probably aren't many of them. I always send issues to the various review-zines, which sometimes results in a review, which is really a form of free advertising. Even bad reviews. I also once had stickers printed up with our address and web site on ‘em and gave those away, and I'll probably do that again soon. But that's about it for the Zine.

I'd never buy an ad for the Zine, because the Zine just lumbers on no matter what. Sales mean nothing. I put it out for my own reasons. That I move almost 700 copies of each issue is great, but if I moved 70 or 7000 it wouldn't change anything. I'd still put it out. Advertising it wouldn't make sense. Plus, I'm not sure I can handle to increase my print run by much at the moment, so advertising might even be counter-productive.

For my book "Lifers", though, advertising seemed like a good idea, so I've been experimenting with ways to advertise it, since the publishers patently refuse to. Hey, I can't blame ‘em. Even if I sell 5,000 copies they're not exactly getting rich off it, so why blow the slim margin they have on ads that'll have a 1% return rate at best? So, it's up to me, and I've tried various ways to advertise the book, all of which have proven to me that advertising a book is just the hardest goddamn thing to do in the world. Here are the main attempts at advertising "Lifers" I've tried, and my very subjective assessments of their success or failure.

FLYERS and DIRECT MAIL. When the book first came out back in March, I was at a loss as to what to do. It's not like I took a college course in Small-Press Book Promotion 101; I had no clue how to proceed. The publisher basically printed a few thousand copies, sent me 10, and then slapped me on the back and gave me a hearty kick in the ass. So, I concentrated on something cheap, easy, and within my sadly withered powers: I put flyers up all over my hometown of Hoboken, and I sent something best described as a press release to about 80 local bookstores, begging them to stock my book.

HOW IT WORKED: 50%, I'd say. I got no response at all from the letters and no indication that anyone did bother to stock me. But I have gotten a lot of evidence that people noticed the flyers and at least knew about the book - which is all I wanted. If they walked into Barnes & Noble with my title somewhere in their subconscious, the flyers did their jobs.

PRINT ADS. Don't ask me why I bothered to buy two print ads for the book. I was feeling lazy and needed to do something to make myself feel like I was doing my part to promote the damn thing. So I picked out two zine-related publications, Zine Guide and Angry Thoreauan, and bought an ad in the next issue of each. The two ads cost me $105 total. Each of the publications claimed 10,000+ circulation, and while every magazine exaggerates its list, I figured I'd get some bang for my buck. Here's one of the ads I used:
 
 

The Zine Guide one appeared in Zine Guide #5 a few weeks ago. Angry Thoreauan however has been on hiatus for a while and I have yet to see my ad appear.

HOW IT WORKED: Can't say for sure, of course, but I'm assuming 0%. Who would buy a book because it was advertised in some magazine? I dunno. Like I said, I did it out of a burning need to do something, but I doubt now that it'll work. Live and learn.

GOOGLE ADS. Google really has an interesting program going on. For roughly $15 per 1,000 impressions, you can have a small text ad appear when certain key words are searched on in Google. The text ad isn't anything overbearing, but on the plus side its simple to create, easily tweaked, and isn't too annoying. Add to that the fact that you can really specifically target the ad by tweaking the keywords, and that you can adjust the ad ‘on the fly' pretty easily, and it really is a great program. $15 ain't much money, and you can make sure that only people who are searching on something you think relates to your ad will see it. Nothing wasted. And even if you burn through 1000 impressions of the ad without a single click, you've only lost $15.

Here's the ad I eventually left up:
 
 

Gen X - Love - Nothing "Lifers" by Jeff Somers: a tale of ennui, larceny, and alcohol. www.innerswine.com/lifers Interest:

HOW IT WORKED: I spent $15 playing with others, trying to get a feel for what keywords were going to work, and learned a big lesson: general keywords will get you a lot of impressions. I went through 1000 impressions of 4 versions of this ad in about two days, largely because the keywords zine, zines, gen-x and genx were way too general. My current crop of keywords is generating about 20 impressions a day. That ain't much, but at least the people looking at the ad can be assumed to have some interest that might lead them to find my ad intriguing. Like I said, though, if not no big deal - $15 is about four beers.

I'm exhausted. And I doubt I've sold one more book despite all these efforts. Maybe I need those four beers after all. Until then, email me if you want.