Putting My Worst Foot Forward

A Literal Literary Loser Tries Counterintuitive Marketing

What do I know about marketing?

If you go by my book sales - including after I broke down and decided to pay for it - the answer would be… not much.

Are my Figure Skating Mysteries selling during this once-every-four-years Olympic tie-in opportunity?

Yes.

Are they selling well enough to cover the cost of advertising them?

No?

So what am I going to do about it?

Remember on Seinfeld, how when George Constanza decided to go against his every instinct to get girls… and it got him girls?

I am going to try some Goerge Constanza inspired marketing.

Instead of touting my Figure Skating Mystery series’ good reviews, I am going to focus on the bad ones. In the hope that viewers might be intrigued to see for themselves whether my books are actually as bad as all that.

Here are some of my favorites from Goodreads and Amazon:

I hated the name of the main character (Bex - who has a name like that?) and in my mind renamed her "Beth" (lol).

The main character Bex annoyed me and there were details that seemed unnecessary. Bex came across as someone who needed to desperately cut back on the caffeinated beverages. I got into it enough to want to know who did it, but not sure if I really liked it.

As a charecter I love Bex, and the fact that she's a researcher for a ice-skating federation). I did not love her stream of conciousness commentary that runs on and on without stoping for a period (meaning punctuation). I've never read a book where two sentences were a whole paragraph, but filled up half a page (of a regular sized book, not a paperback).

Although I liked the writing style I felt that the main character bumbled around trying to solve the mystery with absolutely no idea what she was doing.

This was not a very good book and I couldn't bother to finish reading it. The story was slow and boring and had uninteresting characters.

This book was at times boring, at times silly, and often not very credible, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The author may know skating, but not much else.

And the one that summarized not just Bex, not just the book, but my own personality down to a T:

Bex is just so clever that she becomes totally obnoxious. Adams overwhelms the reader with one-liners and puns, usually several in the same sentence, so the whole book feels hyperactive. It was exhausting.

As always, I’ll let you know how this counterintuitive marketing effort worked out!