Send Us Your Marketing Plan

I've been doing food recipes on Wednesdays, which has been a lot of fun, especially watching my wife roll her eyes at the dinner table because I have to stop and take pictures.

Pictures are important for good marketing.

People like to buy things that have, or are in, pretty pictures.

The reason I'm not doing a bit on food today is that I don't have any pictures.

I sorta forgot.

That, and the pictures I have taken all look a little weird, and sorta gross. The reason for that is I'm not a photographer.

I get lucky sometimes. I've studied it a little bit. I'm pretty good with angles and focus, though my supporters have mentioned that I tilt things too much. But, on the whole, I'm not a photographer.

Especially not a food photographer.

That's like a really really special skill.

You need good lighting, and good plating, and your hand needs to not shake because you're so effing hungry.

That happens to me a lot by dinner time. I'm hungry and my hands shake.

So without a clear topic for today, I decided to skip the blogging portion of my day and go right to the 'work' part. The 'work' part consists of answering emails, checking stats, and scouring the world wide web for writing and music opportunities. It doesn't sound like work, but it's the part of the day that I hate the most, so I call it 'work.'

For an hour or so I sifted through pages and pages of small publishers and literary agents looking for the kind of people that might find me amusing, and I noticed a general theme.

Of course all submissions require a bio, a synopsis, and the understanding that I probably won't ever hear back from them, and if I do, it won't be until 2017, but then there's always that final box in the submission guidelines:

"Send Us your Marketing Plan"

Which . . . and I know this sounds naive . . . seems a little weird to me.

Cause I don't have a marketing plan.

Cause . . . and get this . . . I am neither a publisher . . . nor a literary agent.

You know . . . the kind of people who have marketing plans.

Same goes for music too.

Except instead of a marketing plan, they say "What's Your Draw?"

It's not limited to the arts either. As the retail manager for a mid-sized company I used to get asked about my marketing plan a lot.

Like a lot a lot.

This was a company with an entire marketing department . . . and still they came to me for my input.

At first I was flattered. Of course they want my marketing plan! I am the master of the universe, an all knowing all powerful being. And then twice a month, the other masters of the universe and I would gather together to share our insights and successes and challenge each other to do better next time. Everyone came with new ideas and all their new ideas were great!

And when they weren't great, we cheated the statistics to make our great ideas look at least palatable.

And the new ideas got old.

So we added new masters of the universe to come with their new marketing plans. Except it didn't take long for us to all realize that the new marketing plans, were in fact, just the old marketing plans with renewed enthusiasm.

Renewed enthusiasm is the name of the game. It's like Monopoly or the novels of Tolstoy. You'd like to think there is a grand plan, but it will never really end and it's past your bedtime. Pick it up again tomorrow.

So maybe I'm not the Master of the Universe. I could swing a sword like Heman, but I'll never get away with a pageboy hair cut.

If I have a dream, it's not to become rich, or famous, or even critically acclaimed.

(None of that would hurt, of course)

But to get to a point in my life where no one is going to ask for my marketing plans, would be awful peachy.

Not sure if it's possible, not in this line of work anyway, but it's a good dream.