Purple Cow – Allie Potts Writes

I am what some may call vertically challenged. For this reason standing out in a crowd has always been somewhat difficult for me.

My husband towers over a foot above me, which has proven helpful time and time again. He might have difficulty finding me, but at least I can see him. During the past few times we ventured out for New Years citywide celebrations, I’ve chosen to wear distinctive hats to help him better identify me in the masses. It is a strategy that may have helped us reduce the number of times we have to text our locations, if separated, like a grown up version of the Marco Polo, but I am still working on finding my ‘distinctive hat’ for the book crowd.

There is a fairly well known book on marketing called The Purple Cow which deals with the importance of finding some way to separate your product from the dozens others like it in a way that is unexpected or otherwise remarkable. By its logic, I might be able to bring attention to my book in the brick and mortar store if I had the pages printed in orange or had the book printed and bound in the shape of a triangle. Better yet, I could replace the cover altogether with an OLED and animate the thing! Can you even imagine how awful the bookstore experience would be if the shelves were turned into a tiny climate controlled version of Times Square? It is going to happen. Start shopping for sunglasses now.

Unfortunately the same tactics won’t work for the e-book – unless retail websites and eReaders start allowing animated gifs as cover art. But until then, what can be done to better distinguish an e-book from the thousands of others when they all will be displayed on nearly the same medium? Yes, I could manipulate the price as an attention – for example drop it from $3.99 to something oddly specific like $3.76, but that might impact long term brand value.

One I saw is to bundle your e-book. As I only have a single published novel to my name, that would be some feat to pull off. I guess I could do that by forming some partnership with another equally new author in a symbiotic alliance. Debut Authors Assemble!

Until then, I’ll keep working on trying to find the neglected market and growing my reviews.