Kelley pointed me to this post on Nikki’s Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily.
It’s about how the stubborness of an arrogant and unimaginative marketer killed a good (excellent, if you believe the reviews) film, Bandslam. Bandslam is, apparently, an indie piece, ‘Cameron Crowe meets John Hughes’, which the Chief Marketing Git at Summit decided to position as High School Musical: But Better. He (oh, yes, the post names names) aimed at absolutely the wrong crowd–despite the pleading of everyone involved with the film. Oh, the CMG said, High School Musical was a hit, this will be too! That’s like saying, Let’s position this souvlaki as a burger, because burgers sell! It doesn’t work. This weekend the film came out and, of course, just shrivelled at the box office.
When I read the article, my blood pressure fell. I swayed. The world turned grey: I empathised with the filmmaker. I know how it feels.
The Aud books were badly damaged by marketing.
Oooh, let’s call it noir! the marketers said. Noir sells! The thing is, the Aud books aren’t noir. The content and the marketing clashed. The sales evaporated.
The problem is, I can’t honestly point to anyone and say: your fault. We all tried hard but no one–including me–knew how to describe them. (My helpful contribution: Well, if I could describe Aud in a couple of sentences, I wouldn’t have had to write a whole fucking novel.) I’m biased, of course, an unreliable narrator, but in my opinion the Aud books are rich, literary novels about a woman who changes and grows. Novels with sex. Novels in which shit blows up. Novels about a woman who always wins.
How do you boil that down to a simple phrase? I don’t know.
I think it would have been a lot easier if I could have published all three books with one imprint, with clearly related covers. But I couldn’t because HarperCollins didn’t want the second–because The Blue Place didn’t sell as many as they’d hoped in hardcover. Hey, it sold more than 8,000 hardcovers, which doesn’t suck; and the trade paper is in its 8th or 9th printing–but they were unhappy. So I sold the next, Stay, to Nan A. Talese–whose marketers, despite my protests, positioned it as noir. They seemed puzzled by the subsequent sales figures. Even so, Talese would have bought Always, the next one, but I decided to follow my Stay editor to Riverhead, in the hope that his Aud experience would help him help the marketers figure out how to sell it. I wish. The book got positioned as noir.
Ten years of Aud meant ten years of marketing nightmares. I wish I could blame someone, kick them to death and then set them on fire and call it good, but I can’t. This is just how the world is: books and films need clear, unambiguous marketing hooks. Boy wizard fights evil and grows up! High school girl in soggy landscape must struggle with supernatural abstinence issues! Harvard symbologist with bad hair runs around missing all the clues!
So is this my fault? Maybe–I don’t write simple unambiguous books. Is it the world’s fault? Maybe–it could be a snobbery issue (suspense fiction can’t be literary), it could be homophobia (eew, straight people don’t want to read about dykes), it could just be that I’m not as good as I think I am. I just don’t know.
Meanwhile, I’m determined that this will never, ever happen to me again. But my selling sentence for Hild definitely needs work: Life of a 7th-C woman, birth to death, doesn’t exactly sparkle. But it’s a novel, it’s huge, it won’t pour itself tidily into a bottle to be distilled.
I’m open to suggestions…
Nicola Griffith 
Ah the so-called elevator pitch! As a creature interested in a lot of stuff that gets shoved into genres & forgotten, I get your trouble. I'm…gosh, I wonder. Aud. I want to say, throw in some subtle “magical realism” to make them market it as “literary” but then, didn't Stay have a “ghost” in it?
Heck, I want to say: market YOU as some kind of Lethem (who I'm not the biggest fan of these days) who got out of “genre” & into “lit”…put him down as a comp? Though I don't know what his Bookscan numbers are. I'm in NYC, maybe he isn't big anywhere else?
I'm determined to start each novel and each short story with the one liner elevator pitch, to the point of where it's what I write first. Then I write a working query, synopsis, and so on from there. Of course that one liner gets lost somewhere but I tend to try to refer back to it when I'm stuck in the book, have those “what the fuck am I doing here anyway?” moments.
What's the one cool thing about Hild, the one thing SHE has that no one else in the world, ever, does? The one main reason that drew you to her? Does she live cool? Does she kick someone's ass? Overcome 7C mores? Save the family, village, country, world? Die cool? That's your pitch. Knowing you, you'll come up with something awesome.
I think it's the mudmind all cross-genre/mixed-genre books have to struggle through. Some make it, most don't. Consumers rely on filing methods to tell them what to read.
I think the Aud marketing problems just boil down to a lack of marketing expertise. They needed someone with better-than-average marketing skills who actually read the books. Someone with vision.
And I agree with SSAS about the most cool thing. Wildly successful marketing starts with USP – what's unique about Hild's story (I know – a lot)? What is the thing that really drew/draws you to her? We don't know enough about Hild yet to help much I think. Maybe it's something to do with those mysterious beads…
But I am certain the right pitch can/will be found. Whether that is you first identifying the key elements or some bright marketing person reading it and seeing the appeal (I suspect both), it's in there. Part of it is feeling the pulse of the public at the time it's ready to publish.
And I'm excited to see it happen.
Ok, well, we probably can't pretend there wasn't some part of the homophobia thing with Aud factoring in, but times have changed.
Let's see, you got them published so that was a major win…I didn't think the Aud books were that difficult to classify — I found them in the mystery section of my library easily enough — but I wasn't trying to sell or protect them.
Bandslam was better than I expected but at the same time disappointing, although I will see it again (I hope) because I want to listen to the music more closely. My pros + cons are in my Ratslam blog entry if anyone's interested.
How did Michner market his novels — they were huge, historical + successful. Historical fiction seems to do really well, but then again I live near Gettysburg so that might be a skewed perception.
But you didn't mention royalty in your pitch and isn't she a royal so doesn't that make it easy: See what celebrity was like in the 7th century. Replace paparazzi w/ assassins and limos w/ horses – could you survive? Which would be worse, the slings and arrows or the smell..And if you can't get a buzz out of sainthood…
Sorry, that's probably not actually helpful…I make a habit of being able to pitch any thing any way…it aggravates play reading committees trying to come up w/ slates too.
Good luck + I'm sure something will come to you : )
I found Aud only because I was working at a bookstore, weeding the books for turnouver (“kills” we called 'em) & next to The Blue Place was “KUNG-FU LESBIAN– DO NOT KILL!” so I uh, had to pick it up.
mordicai, yep, I favour branding me, as opposed to individual books. 'Homicidal English dyke cripple'. That should work…
ssas, when it comes time to write the screenplay I've been pondering, I'll start with the logline, then write a title, then fill in the story beats. Then write the script. But that's because movies are fun, commercial things. Novels are the stuff of species survival; they *matter*. To me, anyway.
evecho, jennifer d, it's finding the clear line that's difficult. That's why I have to find that line before I even sell Hild–so this time everyone is on the same page.
lonelypond, something will come to me–probably when I've finished the first draft and actually know what the book's about :)
Nicola, maybe that IS the deceptively simple solution. Big names who cross genres don't get billed as genre, they get billed as “So-&-so's….”
I feel your pain. I've finished 11 screenplays and don't have a single decent log line between 'em.
When you finish Hild, use all these wonderful internet tools and contacts to market the book for you. Twitter, facebook, Ask Nicola. If you write it, we will come…