With your movie finished, you’re faced with the hard, final, stage of the process – turning your epic into money. However good your movie is, it’ll only provide an income, and something for you and the other monks to do between services, if you can get it noticed. I suggest:

• Give it away. Getting people to pay for things is harder than getting people to talk about them. Your first objective should be to get your movie into the hands of people who like the sort of thing you’ve made – bloggers, reviewers, store owners, or anyone else with an audience. Everyone likes to break a story, if you send a professional package, with a compelling explanation of who you are and what you’re trying to do, it’s unlikely that you’ll be ignored.
• Build buzz. Even if your aim is to sell out to the first studio that offers you a directing gig, understand that your power to negotiate is directly linked to your profile. The more work you do building an audience, the more you’ll be offered for your movie.
• Blog. This is really about building buzz. If I’d made a movie myself today I’d give it away free, in pieces, via a videopodcast. As far as I’m aware it’s not been done yet so, in addition to giving people a taste of your film, it’s also newsworthy. Making DVD’s available for sale to people who enjoy the film as clips is a great way to start selling units. There are a thousand similar and better ideas than that. Content is king, exploit it. When people are excited about your material you can find a way to sell it to them. Other bloggers always need stuff to talk about. Be that stuff.
• Hold an event. This needn’t be complex or expensive. If it was me, I’d do a deal with a stripclub to hold a launch event. I’d promise to publicize a slow night for them (Tuesday or Wednesday) and they’d get to sell dances to the people I brought in. Call it a Premiere and invite all the local bloggers down along with anyone else you’d like to know about your production and all the stars. It’s an easy way to look serious about what you do. Sell autographed copies of the movie at the event and you should recoup anything you spend on it.

Sam’s Swollen Tip: Packaging design is key to your success. People won’t think to watch your DVD/clip if the packaging doesn’t draw them in. Conversely you can sell almost anything if the box it comes in is nice enough. Spend time and money on making your website/blog/box look good. Don’t be forced to tell people ‘…it’s a lot better than it looks.’

Popularity: 63% [?]

Regular readers know I throw this shit together while I’m waiting for my parole officer to come check on me, but newcomers who still respect me (new fish is what we called them in the Pen), might like to revisit some of the posts I’ve worked hardest on.

Currently it’s difficult to find the older posts because my blogging system doesn’t have a built in search function (that’s FUCKING RIDICULOUS TYPEPAD!) but I’m cool about it, and moving this blog to another system which offers better functionality soon (yeah Typepad THAT’S HOW I ROLL BITCH).

Until then – if you’re interested in seeing some of the better stuff that’s been posted as series so far, start here:

Series: Podcast like a Pro
WTF?: Improve the sound quality of your podcasts with proper recording technique.
Parts:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Series: The DVD Market is Dead
WTF?: Why and how the DVD market is getting less important.
Parts:1, 2, 3.

Series: Building Buzz
WTF?: How to get publicity without spending money. From zero to being booked on Howard Stern.
Parts:1, 2, 3, 4.

Series: Adult Website Billing
WTF?: How to choose and structure billing for an adult website.
Parts:1, 2, 3.

Popularity: 30% [?]

This is the final installment in a short series of pieces designed to answer Jack’s question “How do I get noticed.” It’s become a short primer on media and publicity, and today I’ll wrap it up with what I’m sure many people wanted me to post first.

If you’ve seen the other installments and chose to ignore them and go straight to this, good luck, you’ll need it.

If you get to this point when you have a great buzz and need to tell the world about it, this’ll be a lot easier than you expected. If it doesn’t work, build better buzz and work on your story.

Before I get into specifics, it’s worth explaining why I’m using Howard Stern (Stern) as an example. If you’re not in the US and only have a vague memory of the movie ‘Private Parts’ you may be wondering why a New York DJ’s worth talking about.

Stern’s the most important broadcaster in America if you’re in the Jizz Bizz. He’s the only major public figure who is honest about using and enjoying pornography and, perhaps because of that, has a huge audience of 18-35 year old males who trust his opinions about what’s good and bad.

Being on Stern’s radio show can help make a career, Jenna Jameson’s the prime example, and it can also bring down a website if you’re not prepared for a tsunami of extra visitors.

Dealing with Stern is essentially no different to dealing with any major media outlet. The image of the show might be ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, but behind the scenes things are run along the same lines that govern everything from ‘The View’ to ‘Jerry Springer’.

So how do you pitch your story to Stern and what do you do when you’re invited on?

Here are ten tips for getting onto the Howard Stern Show:

1. Pitch the right person

Nothing will get you ignored more quickly than showing that you haven’t bothered to find out who to talk to.

Most shows have a guest booker/coordinator and that person has a name. Find out what it is and ask to speak to that person. If you appear to be trying to go around them you’ve made an immediate enemy for no reason at all.

2. Don’t pitch on Monday’s and Fridays

Monday’s are busy. After the weekend there are piles on unopened mail and usually a lot of stuff left over from Friday. Anything arriving on Monday, when people are busiest, will get less time than things arriving later in the week.

Friday’s no good either. Even if your pitch is great it’ll be mostly forgotten by Monday and if it’s remembered, there’ll be a pile of newer stuff on Monday which make your story look like a missed opportunity.

Timeliness is important. Shows prioritize stories that have to be told ‘now’. If yours can wait – it will.

3. Don’t pitch by post

The mail, and email to a lesser extent, is a great way to get people documents and materials, but you won’t ever get booked on a show by sending letters.

Most guest bookers have a preferred method of communication and for 99% of them it’s the phone. None of them have the time to respond to letters. If you use the mail to introduce yourself to a show, follow-up by phone.

4. Learn their schedule

Shows normally have a ‘pitch meeting’ once or twice a week. That’s when the team plans their next few shows and who the guests will be. You stand a far better chance of being chosen as a guest if you know when those meetings are, and make your pitch a few hours before they happen. Your story will be fresh in someone’s mind and your story will appear to be ‘hot’.

5. Get to the point and go away

On the phone you should be polite but not verbose. Guest bookers and producers are busy people. Introduce yourself, make your pitch in three sentences or less (work it out before hand!) and then listen.

If you’re asked a lot of questions you might be taking part in a pre-interview. Most big shows like to provide their presenter(s) with the ‘juicy’ parts of your story so they don’t miss anything good. The pre-interview is where they find out what those juicy parts are. Be prepared to answer detailed questions – a pre-interview is a definite sign of interest.

Listen to what you’re told. If you get a straight ‘we’re not interested right now’ leave it. Don’t complain, implore or try to pitch the same idea again (never pitch the same idea twice, you’ll get written off as an idiot).

If you’re told to follow up do it exactly how, and when, you’re asked to. You want your contact to see you as part of their team. Make it clear that you’ll work with them however they’d like you to.

If you’re asked for an exclusive say yes, but use it to get a firm confirmation on your appearance. You want your story to seem ‘hot’, and you want them to know you’ll take it somewhere else if they don’t want it.

Congratulations – in a week you’re going to be on the Stern Show. Here’s how not to blow it.

1. Arrive on time

Obvious but worth saying. If you arrive late you’ll never get booked again. They’ll hate you and probably ‘bump’ (bump is industry slang for reschedule) your appearance to ‘when hell freezes over’.

If you’re on Stern you might need to be at the studio as early as 6:00 a.m. Go to bed early and arrive fresh. His show goes out on TV – it’s not like most radio which you can do in your Pajama’s.

2. Bring swag

A lot of the people you deal with at the studio will know little about you. Many of them will be making no money at all in return for the ‘glamour’ of being shouted at and making coffee. Bring swag (books, DVD’s whatever you’re selling) and give it to anyone who’s interested. They’ll thank you for it and might remember you next time you need a call put through.

3. Don’t lie

When you’re being interviewed assume the person you’re talking to has done their homework. If you lie, and are caught out, you’ll bring everything else you say into question. Interviews are like dates, you want to leave an impression that makes another one a possibility.

4. Don’t advertise

After all your hard work has paid off don’t ruin things, and guarantee you’ll never be asked back, by trying to use your time to sell products. You’ll look like an amateur and turn off anyone listening to you. If your website isn’t mentioned in your introduction, and it can’t be found by Googling your name, make it the last thing you say (and ask Howard if you can mention it before you do).

5. Tell stories (don’t do shtick)

Your story was interesting enough to get you onto the show, attempting to perform a comedy routine will look, and sound, bad. Trust the interviewer to lead things and make your answers as punchy as possible.

If you’re not a good speaker, or very nervous, work out answers to common questions ahead of time. Limit your answers to two minutes and never respond with just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Working out your answers isn’t cheating – most celebrities roll out the same twelve anecdotes for an entire career.

Now thank everyone you met and go work on your next story.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Publicity or advertising?

To start this post on the right note I need to make two things clear.

• I said publicize, not advertise
• Publicity is mostly bullshit and the professional publicists are mostly bullshit too

I feel better already. You can publicize yourself, I’ll tell you how.

Publicity is informing the public about your product (whatever it happens to be – including you). Advertising is convincing the public to buy your product. This important distinction should not be overlooked.

In all my experience as a publicist (and that goes back to when ‘blogging’ was just stopping people on the street and telling them whatever random shit defined your madness) the majority of clients have wanted publicity to do the job of advertising. They’ve mistakenly thought that the money they spend on publicity can somehow magically turn into sales. It can’t.

Publicity is what gets people to notice your advertising. If the publicity’s good they will be excited about your product and understand it well enough that your advertising can be simple. Advertising is what sells products.

An example (and a drink? Anyone? A sidecar please, rocks, no-sugar) is in order.

A Baker, let’s call him Tom Baker, goes on a TV show. He’s being interviewed because he’s baked a cookie that can bend physics, allowing him to access any time, or relative dimensions in space, on a whim. Eat this cookie and you can take see the universe and world history in an afternoon.

You learn about Tom, his shop and his eccentric baking experiments. Live on-air Tom bite’s the cookie, disappears and then re-materializes with Joan of Arc, Socrates and Beethoven. It’s amazing. You can’t believe a humble baker came up with such a fucking impressive macaroon.

A fat weather guy makes a joke and the show moves on to the next item.

That’s publicity. Tom did not sell a thing.

The next day you’re walking down the street and you notice a window with a sign in it that say’s ‘Tom Baker’s Trippy Macaroon’s Here Now!’ Recognizing the name and remembering the TV show you walk in and buy one.

That’s advertising. Tom sold a cookie.

The media deals in stories and isn’t interested in running infomercials for products. The harder you try to get publicity to do the job of advertising the less successful it will be because the media will reject anything that whiffs of advertising.

To try and merge publicity and advertising is like telling an auto-salesman he has to start each sentence he says to a potential customer with the price of the vehicle they’re looking at. It is, literally, a buzz-kill.

So, Jack, you know that for the purposes of publicity you should forget about trying to sell anything and focus on telling a good story. Who do you tell?

Most people and companies want the broadest exposure possible. That’s smart. What they then want to do is approach the biggest media directly. That’s dumb. I’ll show you why:

You can split the media into a food chain. Starting at the top:

• International media (e.g. CNN, BBC, Movies)
• National radio, TV (e.g. NBC, HBO, NPR, Howard Stern etc.)
• National print (e.g. The New York Times, Time, People, The Los Angeles Times etc.)
• Local radio, TV (e.g. KCAL-9, KROQ, NPR etc.)
• Local print (e.g. The Beach Reporter, The Seattle Weekly etc.)
• Professional web (e.g. C-Net, Wired, Fleshbot etc.)
• Amateur web (e.g. Blogs like this)

Journalists are lazy and under enormous pressure. Very few of them ‘find’ stories. Most of what they do is follow-up on news fed to them from other sources. To stay ahead of their competitors journalists look down the food chain.

Unless you have an enormous story (like a Macaroon capable of transporting the person who eats it through time) you’ll find it easiest to get coverage at the bottom of the food chain. If you know this, and you’re smart about how you approach the media, you can get almost anything you want to publicize covered somewhere.

Then, thanks to journalists from bigger media looking down the chain, you’ll find stories with ‘legs’ get picked up in bigger media and move onto a national stage.

(You’ll also find the people you build relationships with at the bottom of the media food-chain have a tendency to move up it, becoming friends in high-places over time.)

The media food chain sounds perfect right? Unfortunately there are at least two flaws to this approach.

1. Stories cool off. Unless you can move up the chain fast it’s likely you’ll be ‘yesterday’s story’ before you get to the top (assuming your story ever had that potential)
2. Competition means you can discover you’ve closed certain doors for yourself as you move up the chain. Everyone wants an exclusive – e.g. Tom Leykis (a popular, syndicated American radio host based in LA) won’t touch stories Howard Stern covers and vice-versa. If you’re in LA and can get onto Leykis, but want the greater exposure of Stern’s show, how do you get to Stern directly?

More on getting to the top tomorrow.

Popularity: 20% [?]

I risk my life researching this blog…

We know that websites, like many young women, need a little buzz to push them over the edge. That brings us to the question, if buzz is the public discussing things that excite them, what excites the public? (aside from a nice juicy celebrity beheading)

People talk about what’s exceptional (ask any of my exes), and there are two ways to become exceptional.

1. Do something new
2. Do something so well it’s worth talking about

(Ladies, in the bedroom – I try to do a little of both.)

Doing something new, not particularly brilliantly (sometimes that happens in the bedroom – can’t be helped), is the easiest and most commonly taken route to buzz. In the adult world it’s where stunts like 620 man gang-bangs and 164 chopsticks in the bottom come from (whoops – turns out that the chopsticks were wrangled by a guy convicted of ‘Rape by force of a foreign object on a minor under the age of 17‘ Who’d have guessed, I mean we all like a few chopsticks in the ass right? Turns out this guy was nuts. You can just never tell…)

Doing something new is a great way to create buzz, but only if you’re doing it so well it’s worth talking about. Stunts get less effective over time and have an immediate branding effect. Houston (of the Houston 620 gang-bang, whose title is a total lie because some of those guys hardly knew each other) is now ‘only’ known to many people as ‘that gangbang woman’. The same branding effect applies to websites and other businesses.

(Of course, if you have a story you want to associate yourself with permanently you can use stunts to your advantage. Danni Ashe has worked hard to win the ‘Most Downloaded Woman on the Internet’ title and to associate herself with it, starting with a stunt on the Howard Stern Show. The effort to do so has left a permanent, positive, mark.)

Ironically, in 2005, the most surefire way to instant buzz, is for someone mainstream to get involved in porn. It’s the choice made by Pamela Anderson and, more recently, Paris Hilton. In both cases the resulting buzz moved them from the B-list (or in Paris’s case, the Z-list) to the A-list.

(If anyone still believes those DVD’s were sold without their permission remember that it’s illegal to sell pornographic material without signed model releases and ID’s. Anyone in a legally available sex tape has consented to distribution and is almost certainly getting paid (of course – the complete burial of those documents will be part of the deal too.))

Doing things well is harder than doing something new (another bedroom problem) but the buzz lasts longer. It doesn’t matter what you do well, as long as it’s being talked about by your customers. In the adult-space you can focus your efforts on your content or your business practices with equal success.

Doing things well creatively means focusing on the way things are done, not what’s being done. Does your offering drop people’s jaws (or better yet, immediately cause them to remove their underwear)? .

Business buzz normally comes down to service and value. Can you, like Netflix or Tivo, create a business model that people can’t shut up about? Or, like Apple with the iPod, package something so slickly that people who previously ignored your market are drawn into it?

Maybe – it’s where my attentions are focused. If in a year I ask you for change when you go to use the ATM you’ll realize I underestimated how difficult it is.

Buzz requires a sustained effort to build and cultivate. If whatever’s causing your buzz doesn’t persist, the buzz will die and, most likely, you’ll have negative buzz (or ‘bitching’ as it’s known in the trade) to counter. The effort is worth it. Once you have buzz, even if it’s small, you can use that to lure the media. Buzz is the public’s way of telling you you’re doing a few things right.

The beauty of buzz is that building your business becomes a simple numbers game. The more people who know about what you’re doing, the more buzz you’ll have, and the more people will discover what you’re doing by word of mouth (or ‘word of mouse’ if you’re an MBA who thinks they should make ‘Who Moved my Cheese’ into a movie).

So tomorrow, Jack, I’ll talk about how to take buzz to the media and kick off that gloriously profitable buzz-media-more buzz-more media feedback loop which makes all the buzz-building worthwhile.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Little things can make a lot of noise.

Yesterday I was soliciting feedback, and Jack asked me how to get noticed. This post is the first of… well at least a couple, designed to answer that question.

Since the dawn of time (or the time of Dawn, a woman I’ll never forget) webmasters have been looking for easy ways to get noticed. The wealthier ones have hired guys like me to help. Sometimes we have.

There are two audiences who you can try and interest in your website, product or disturbing-to-look-at testicular growth – the public and the media. The public are the ones who spend money and contribute to the bottom line, the media (can sometimes) draw the attention of the public.

Normally when I’ve been asked to help ‘fix’ someone’s marketing, all attention is focused on the media and almost none on the public. It’s a mistake.

The media deals in stories and buzz. A good story for the media has a beginning (a hook) a middle and a conclusion. Buzz is simply the media reporting on things that already interest the public.

If the media is covering buzz, customers have already found you, all you need to do is keep doing what you’re doing and watch your business grow.

If the media’s writing a story on you, you need something which will turn curious visitors who hear the story, into happy customers who’ll create buzz. Stories stop working if they don’t lead to buzz. The media won’t cover stories that no-one cares about, which means that stories which don’t create buzz die.

That’s why everyone prefers buzz to stories.

What’s a story?

• A press release regarding some new feature or add-on
• An announcement regarding a redesign or change
• Details of an event, competition or gathering

Story’s are dull.

What’s Buzz?

• A press release regarding how many million people signed onto your site on day one
• An announcement regarding the purchase of your website by a major corporation
• News of how the line for your event shut down the center of town

Buzz is exciting.

The only way to get attention that turns into money (aside from prostitution obviously) is to excite customers (I guess that’s still like prostitution). If you have a product or concept that’s worth talking about, you’ll only need to tell a couple of people about it, word-of-mouth will do the rest.

E.g., I’ve done work for two very large (7-9 figure) adult websites. Both were privately held, and both launched in beta – i.e. they put a test page up, a couple of people found out about it and, that led to so much business they never had to spend any money on advertising. That’s the power of buzz.

If you’d hired me to consult on your website, I’d first suggest we start by trying to work out why your site doesn’t have any buzz (then I’d suggest we continue the discussion over lunch somewhere nice.)

• If you once had buzz, we’d look to re-ignite customer attention (as Amazon did with their flat-fee shipping deal).
• If you had never had buzz, our job is to make your site buzz-worthy, and then find an audience to try your product. (Which I guess leads me to a post on ‘How to Make A Site Buzz-Worthy’.)
• If you had buzz, but the media wasn’t aware of you yet (and these are the jobs I love) I’d plan to inform the press of your story and why it’s worth covering. I’d also say ‘Why bother with the media at all?’ When you already have a customer base who are talking about you, focus all your energy on making them happy (love them long-time) and watch the buzz grow. The only way media coverage can help a site with buzz is to accelerate the transmission of your story. This can be a good thing but often, with products people love, buzz leads to problems as you rush to meet demand.

So getting attention is about creating and managing buzz. Over the course of the next few days, Jack, I’ll talk about way’s of creating it, how to talk to the media about it, and how to reignite it.

Popularity: 20% [?]