For those on the UK writing scene Adrian Mead probably needs not much of an introduction. He is a film-maker, yes, but he is mostly known (by word of mouth) for his no-nonsense workshops on how to break into the business. I haven’t done one, but they are well rated by those who wish to break into the UK industry and more specifically get an agent.
However what I am looking at here is not the content of his courses but how he has managed to get this name for being the ‘go to’ guy on breaking in. After all he has had ‘only’ one film produced and some good TV credits (see IMDB) but he is not a massive writing star, so how did he do it?
I’m not going to tell you, that’s part two. Part one is to set the scene for what Adrian is doing and is about someone else entirely, Seth Godin.
Seth is an American cyber-marketing wunderkind and author who has written a lot of influential books about marketing in the online age. Now I would have wanted to bite off my tongue rather than talk about marketing even five years ago, but now it kinda fascinates me. Bad marketing of the hype-type still makes me angry, edgy and dismissive. But after reading one of Seth’s books I realised that most people feel this way, most people see through the bullshit, most people see that there is a phalanx of ‘creatives’ behind the seemingly casual campaign, the fake corporate birth story and all that tosh. And it makes us turn off. We hate it. Universally. This stuff might have worked in the age where we couldn’t just look up online reviews about anything we wanted to buy, but it just doesn’t now. We are too smart. We have google.
Seth was onto this a long long time ago and has been playing it out for about 10 years with ‘Permission Marketing’, ‘Purple Cow’ and other books. All of them are readable, some a little ‘American techno capitalist libertarian’ for my taste, but always with a couple of good and simple ideas behind them. These ideas boil down to simple things like being who you are, believing in what you do, backing up your publicity, alternative channels to have conversations with your customers, not having ‘customers’ having friends and all that kinda stiff. I read these and enjoyed them but it wasn’t until ‘The Dip’ that I began to think the guy had a wider future as a writer of the zeitgeist.
I have written about the dip here before so I won’t go back over them, but they sure as hell snapped me into focus. Being one of those ‘four brilliant ideas before breakfast but still underachieving’ guy (clever but slightly useless) this book took hold of me by the nostril hairs and laid down a big challenge. What will you do? What will you give up to do it? How will you know when you should quit?
BIG questions for sure. But the main thing about The Dip in the context of this discussion was it got me reading his blog, which is usually very incisive and a great read. And then one day on his blog Seth put into action the most remarkable pre-sales ‘campaign’ for his next book, called ‘Tribes’.
In one blog post he announced his new book and said that if you pre-ordered it on Amazon and could email them your ‘receipt’ the next day you would gain entry to an exclusive membership site called ‘Triiibes’. I knew would buy the book anyway, and I was curious, and his form of permission marketing had clearly worked on me, so I popped over to Amazon.co.uk and bought it, then sent off my receipt.
The next day I am a member of the ‘Seth’s Tribe’. I log onto the site, takea look around, read about some interesting people and then never go back. I guess this makes me not inner tribe, perhaps I am ‘outer tribe’. Never-the-less plenty of people got very involved in the Tribe and some of them even wrote a supporting eBook - yes, he even got his tribe to provide content! And to thanks them he’s printed photos of as many as he could inside the dust jacket. Now the good thing about Seth Godin is that he is not a bullshit artist, he has good ideas and he does as well as talks.
Here’s a good example. Not long after I ordered the book on Amazon they cancelled my order because it was too long on pre-order or something or other. That’s fine I thought, I’ll just buy it in the shops when it comes out.
Fast forward to today. A book turns up in the mail, it’s my Steh Godin book. Oh, I think, Amazon must have got their shit together. No, they didn’t, this was a complementary free copy from Seth (or one of his minions). It had a nice letter in it saying thanks for having faith in the book and him from the offset and that this copy is so that you can keep the one you bought and hand this one onto your friends.
How clever is that? You’ve paid for the book and you get another copy that you weren’t expecting. He’s even smart enough to trust people like me, people who actually haven’t paid for the book and now have a free copy. He’s figured out that it’s worth taking a risk on me as I will probably feel bad about it and buy another one. And look, I’ve just written a whole blog post about it. He’s winning all round and I caught myself thinking that this is the best online campaign/customer service/’branding’ I have ever seen.
So what has this got to do with a writer from Scotland, or indeed, you?
Seth now has me. In his parlance I am in his ‘Tribe’. For him as an author this means that I am going to keep buying his books and writing about him. From reading one post to becoming a member of his online site to ‘buying’ his book I feel like he has been upfront all the way.
So in the next post we’ll take a look at how Adrian is creating his tribe of writers trying to break into the UK film and TV industry. And why should you pay attention? Because you are a writer, you have an audience and you need to think about them and the ways in which you engage them.
