It’s a lot of work to write a book. So, when you’re through with it, you really (really!) hope people will read it. And so you try to think of ways to get attention for it. To promote it. To market it. So you ask other authors what they would do in your situation. When I sat down with Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg a few months ago, they said, “Make a game out of it.” So I did.
They suggested that I create a game that posed Internet marketing dilemmas and offered a few possible answers. So, with the help of my publisher, we built that game and launched it a few weeks ago, and Bryan and Jeffery wrote about it on their blog.
But I wasn’t entirely happy with the game. I wanted to explain the answers, because I didn’t think people would always immediately understand (or agree) with what I claimed was the right answer. But I couldn’t get all the Web pages created in time for the launch of the game, so we went without them. (Yes, we did it wrong quickly—we launched the game before it was perfect because we needed to launch at the same time the book was coming out.)
By now, I’ve gotten many great responses to the game. People have told me that it is fun and challenging and that they’ve learned a lot just from playing, which I love to hear. I also have received feedback that some of my answers don’t make sense or are just plain wrong and exactly what were you thinking?
So now you can find out what I was thinking. We’ve relaunched the game, this time with explanataions of each answer. You play the game the same way as before, answering questions rapid-fire while the clock runs, but now at the end you can click on any of the questions you are curious about and see my explanation for why that’s the right answer.
And that’s the way you should always do marketing. If we’d launched the game to a rousing yawn and everyone told me it was pointless and stupid, I probably wouldn’t have bothered enhancing the game with explanations. But because people like it, it makes sense to improve it.
So, give it a spin. See if you’re up to the Do It Wrong Quickly Challenge.
