by Steven Pressfield
Ready for the cameras to roll. Director Nick Vitale tells author Steven Pressfield, "Chill, Big Guy!"
It's a crisis. If your name isn't Grisham or King and you have a new book coming out, you're in trouble. My last three novels got four reviews among them. They came and went without anyone even knowing they were there.
How did 300 do it?
My newest book is a WWII story, Killing Rommel. It's too good to sink into the cruel sea unknown and unremarked. My publisher can help but only so much. It's up to me. What can I do to get Rommel noticed?
How about a video? Something to post on YouTube, get some viral action, sneak past the gatekeepers the way 300 and Blair Witch Project did. Costs be damned, I'm going for it!
Two months and many thousands of dollars after making this mad decision, I find myself on-camera in the California desert, with no fewer than twenty-two crew and cast people in the b.g. (that's filmspeak for background), all of them making a mini-movie with me about Killing Rommel. I'm paying for it. And I'm happy.
"Are you in or out?"
Here's how I got to this place. I have an old friend named Nick Vitale, who's a top director of TV commercials in New York I call him up (I'm in L.A.) and tell him the predicament. Would he be interested in making a little war movie with me? "I'm in," Nick says.
Killing Rommel is set in the North Africa campaign of WWII. It's about two British special forces units, the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group, that fought behind the lines against the German Afrika Korps. In researching the book, I had met a wild and crazy bunch of guys called the LRDG Preservation Society; they had rebuilt two authentic re-enactor vehicles, a truck and a jeep, complete with machine guns and tins of bully beef. I call up their main man, Jack Valenti. How does he feel about taking his vehicles out for a little spin in the California desert? "I'm in," Jack says.
Where "Do me a solid" comes from
On location at Dumont Dunes, California. Jack Valenti and the Long Range Desert Group Preservation Society pilot their re-enactor vehicles, a '42 Chevy 30-hundredweight truck and a WWII Willys jeep.
Production and post-production of video: $35K from me, $15 from my publisher, Doubleday Broadway.
Licensing of stock footage and music: $5K from me.
Re-design of website: $3.5K (me.)
Internet marketing campaign: $2.5K (the same.)
Research, graphics, art direction: $3.5K (again.)
Broadcast ad budget (from Doubleday): $25K -- for @ 64 30-second spots on the Military Channel.
This doesn't count hotels, meals, airfare -- not to mention months of full-time work. Am I crazy? Probably. But here's my plan:
I'll make three videos -- a 30-second, a three-minute and a ten-minute. The :30 we'll use as a TV commercial. We'll post all three on YouTube and on my brand-new all-Rommel website. I'll e-mail links to every book site and blog, every WWII fan site, every history, truck, weapon, dune buggy and hardware place on the web that I can find. I'll use MySpace, I'll use Facebook. Doubleday will post the videos on their own site; they use them with their sales force, with the chain bookstores. We'll send them overseas. We'll hope the pieces are fun enough or interesting enough that people will click the Send to a Friend button.
By the way, here's a tidbit I learned from appearing on-camera. To soften harsh sunlight, the lighting guys will use a dark-colored shade panel called a "solid." When the director wants one put up, he tells the crew, "Do me a solid."
Will all this work?
Two tremendous things have happened already, a month before Rommel's publication. One, we're in the works with the biggest military site to post the ten-minute video along with a splash including an interview, excerpts and other stuff. That's worth thousands in free publicity. Two, I've been asked by a History Channel producer to host an hour-long documentary about Rommel. That's worth tens of thousands. It's a start.
Will this campaign work? Who knows? But of one thing I'm certain (just for my own state of mind): to act is better than not to act. If I'm going down, I'd rather do it with all guns blazing.
Are you a writer? Does this fix sound familiar to you? Feel free to use me as the parakeet in the coal mine. Do it better and smarter than I did. Say you've got a cookbook coming out. Why not rent a stage-set like Emeril's or Rachael Ray's and shoot a three-minute video for YouTube, with you whipping up your trademark dish? Got a celebrity friend? Rope her or him into appearing with you. That's entertainment!
If your book is non-fiction, even better. Say you've got a story about the C.I.A. in Iraq or some grisly homicide from 1930s Chicago. Get a journalist to interview you on video. It'll play like a segment on Sixty Minutes -- and much cheaper than my Cecil B. Demille spectacular.
It's the future, baby!
The truck is a duplicate of the kind used by the British Special Forces to raid Afrika Korps airfields and convoy routes.
I used to slate my working time at 95% writing, 5% (grudgingly) promotion. I hate to say it, but the new balance is looking more like 60/40. Can we count on our publishers or our agents? A little, maybe. But publicity really isn't their job. They don't have the time or the monetary or creative incentive.
It's gotta be us. We writers. We have to do it. The days of the passive author, the garret-dwelling scribbler are over. If we want to give our babies a chance to shine, we have to get out in the real world and hustle.
I'm sure there are many cleverer means than the one I chose. But one way or another, much as our reclusive, introverted natures may resist it, we gotta get out there. Nobody else will do it for us. As Chrissy Hynde once sang, "Gonna use my arms ... my legs ... my imagination."
It's the future. We're all going to have to get used to it.
[As the results on this campaign come in, Mr. P. will report back on this site.]
